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U.N. Climate Panel Issues Dire Warning of Threat to Global Food Supply, Calls for Action & Adaption
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued its most dire warning yet about how greenhouse gases have driven up global temperatures and extreme weather, while threatening sources of food and water. "Throughout the 21st century, climate-change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing and create new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hot spots of hunger," the report says. We are joined by two climate scientists who helped write the IPCC’s report: Princeton University Professor Michael Oppenheimer and Saleemul Huq, a climate scientist at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. We are also joined by Tim Gore, head of policy for Food and Climate Justice at Oxfam. "[Fossil fuel companies] are the drug suppliers to the rest of the world, who are junkies and hooked on fossil fuels," Huq says. "But we don’t have to remain hooked on fossil fuels. Indeed, we are going to have to cut ourselves off from them."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: The United Nations’ top climate body has warned that human-driven climate change has impacted every corner of the globe, with the poorest suffering the worst effects. In its latest report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says greenhouse gases have driven up global temperatures and extreme weather, while threatening sources of food and water.
And the worst is yet to come. The report declared, quote, "Throughout the 21st century, climate-change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing and create new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hot spots of hunger." Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, said nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change.
RAJENDRA PACHAURI: There is a reason for the world not really neglecting the findings of this report, because they are profound. And let me repeat once again, we have said very categorically in this report, the implications for human security. We have reasons to believe that if the world doesn’t do anything about mitigating the emissions of greenhouse gases and the extent of climate change continues to increase, then the very social stability of human systems could be at stake.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by three guests. Here in New York, Michael Oppenheimer is with us, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University. He’s one of the main authors of the 32-volume report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In London, Saleemul Huq joins us, a climate scientist at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, also the director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. He’s the lead author of one of the chapters in the just-released IPCC report.
And Tim Gore is head of policy for Food and Climate Justice at Oxfam. He was a civil society observer at the recent IPCC meeting in Yokohama, Japan, joining us by Democracy Now! video stream from Sweden.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Saleemul Huq in London. Can you talk about the significance of this report, how it differs from the previous report and the warning that it represents in the world?
SALEEMUL HUQ: Well, it’s made a significant new finding since the last report seven years ago, in that we now have very, very strong evidence of climate change actually happening all over the world on—both on land as well as in the oceans, which we didn’t have the last time around. So there’s no question that it’s already happening and we’re living in a climate-changed world already. It then goes on to make projections into the future and says that if we continue to warm at the rate that we are now, we’re heading for 4 degrees or above by the end of the century, and that is really a catastrophic scenario in terms of the potential impacts that are likely to happen. Even at a lower temperature of 2 degrees, we can still possibly manage, but there will be significant losses in certain parts of the world of ecosystems and, indeed, human lives, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: And that 2 percent, just explain for—we have a global audience, but, of course, we have a lot of Americans here, and the 2 percent is more—2 degrees, rather.
SALEEMUL HUQ: Sure. Well, it’s 2 degrees centigrade, which is over three-and-a-half degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s the temperature threshold at which the global leaders in countries around the world have agreed that we need to stay below that, under which we can probably manage to cope with the impacts in most parts of the world, although even that will be difficult in some parts of the world. But if we go well above that to 4 degrees, which is where we are headed at the moment, then we would not only double, but we increase by orders of magnitude the potential impacts, in some cases unpredictably. And that’s really what we want to avoid. And hence, what we need to be doing in the longer term is to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause the problem, so that we can bring the temperature down to 2 degrees or below and not to 4 degrees, where we are headed.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Michael Oppenheimer, could you comment on what Dr. Saleemul Huq said, especially the significance and likely impact of a possible 4-degree change in temperature, which is where we 'e headed if present emissions aren't reduced? And also speak specifically about what this report says about the issue of food production and security.
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: OK, let me comment specifically on a couple of aspects of the report, which are important from the point of view of what will affect human beings. And for the first time, we have evidence that the climate changes, which we knew were happening, are actually affecting the welfare of humans. And I’ll give you two examples.
Number one, crop yields, which for a long time had been growing at the rate of 10 or 15 percent per decade and managing, therefore, to keep up with population changes and also dietary changes—people eating up the food chain—those gains have slowed and, in many areas, have been reversed, with crop yields actually decreasing in some areas. In fact, many more decreasing—crop yields decreasing in many more areas than areas where they’re increasing. And that’s a worrisome trend. And unless there are major changes in technologies—for instance, introducing genetically modified organisms or improved crops—we’re just going to have a growing shortfall between the demand and the supply of food. That’s going to lead to increasing malnutrition and perhaps starvation in some areas as the decades progress in the century.
The other interesting area is that human health is being directly affected. There are more area—there are more cases now of people dying from heat-related death related to climate change than are being saved by the warmer winters. So we’re having more heat-related deaths tied to climate change than we are benefiting from the warmer winters. Together, that presents a very difficult picture, because we are sure—we are sure that heat waves, intense heat are going to increase as we go into the future.
Those are just two examples of how, as we move from a slightly warmer world of today to—as Saleem said, a 2-degree Celsius warmer world—to a 4-degree Celsius warmer world, eventually things spin out of our control. We had better reduce the emissions that are causing the problem, while at the same time getting better at adapting to climate change, because we’re stuck with some of it.
AMY GOODMAN: Tim Gore, you’re with a nongovernmental organization, with Oxfam. You’re head of the Food and Climate Justice division of Oxfam. Talk about what this means and where justice fits into the whole issue of climate change.
TIM GORE: Sure. Well, both Saleem and Michael have outlined some of the areas of the report that we are most concerned about, as well, particularly the impacts on food and the impacts on hunger. And Saleem is absolutely right. What’s really different about this report is that it’s saying this isn’t just an issue for the future. The future projections are worrying enough, but what’s really significant here is that the report is saying that this thing—these impacts are happening now. We can already see the impact on crop yields, as Michael was saying.
But the report also is clear that we can already see the impacts of climate change on food prices. So in the years since the last IPCC report was released in 2007, we’ve seen several instances of extreme food price volatility. And each of those have been connected in some way to extreme weather events which are hitting harvests in big crop-producing areas, whether in the U.S., in Russia or in Australia and so on. And that’s a very different picture of how climate change is impacting on food than we’ve had in the past. We’ve long said that climate change is a problem for poor farmers in developing countries that don’t have the resources that they need to cope with changing seasons, changing rainfall patterns, increasing temperatures, but what we’re hearing now is that climate change is a problem for global agriculture. It’s having global implications, including on food prices. And for Oxfam, that’s a big problem, because we know that people that spend upwards of 50 percent of their incomes on food are the ones that get really badly affected when prices rise so rapidly. And that’s just a foretaste of what we can expect in the future if we don’t get a grip on climate change.
AMY GOODMAN: Tim Gore is—
TIM GORE: You asked about it being a justice problem, and I would just say that, for us, it’s intrinsically a question of justice, because not only is it the inequalities in wealth and power which are driving climate change, it’s the fossil fuel industry which is making absolutely no bones about the fact that it’s going to continue to burn fossil fuels at a rate of knots, driving greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and driving this problem. That’s a problem of inequality of wealth and power of those corporations. But it’s also—it’s the poorest, it’s the least vulnerable [sic] that are ill-prepared to cope and are going to—are already feeling those impacts first and worst. And so, if anything, climate change is set to increase the inequalities that we see on this planet, and that really is a worrying picture for us.
AMY GOODMAN: Tim Gore is with Oxfam. They just put out a report called "Hot and Hungry" on the first day of the IPCC meeting in Yokohama, Japan. We are also joined by Saleemul Huq and Michael Oppenheimer, both co-authors of the newly released [Intergovernmental] Panel on Climate Change report. We’ll come back to them in a moment.
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AMY GOODMAN: "The History of Climate Change Negotiations in 83 Seconds." And for our radio listeners, you can go to our website at democracynow.org to see the whole 83 seconds. Yes, this is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. As we talk about the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, let’s go back to the recent U.N. climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, in 2013. We spoke with Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, the former chair of the Africa Group at the U.N. climate change negotiations from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mpanu spoke about developed countries’ obligations to address the impacts of climate change.
TOSI MPANU-MPANU: Well, it’s certainly not charity. I think it’s rather something along the lines of compensation, because runaway climate change is putting one billion Africans in harm’s way. Today those Africans have to go through adverse effect of a global phenomenon that they didn’t create. It’s actually creating not only droughts, floods; it’s creating conflicts, because people have to go further and further to get some water, and other people are not just welcoming them. So, Mr. Jones can drive two SUVs in the U.S., while a poor African is fighting to get some water. So it’s about doing what’s right. And it has to be done in two ways: to reduce their lifestyles, the consumption of carbon, in the North, and to provide some resources so that we can deal with the climate change phenomenon which was imposed on us.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get the comments of our guests today, Saleemul Huq and Michael Oppenheimer. Michael Oppenheimer, professor at Princeton University, and Saleemul Huq, both are co-authors of the newly released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. We’re also joined in Sweden by Tim Gore of Oxfam. Saleemul Huq in London, if you can talk about the effect of climate change on the least-developed countries, sticking with this theme of how this increases disparity in the world?
SALEEMUL HUQ: That’s absolutely right. As you heard from Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, poor countries have been hit hardest by the impacts of climate change and are already seeing those impacts. And there’s a group of poorest countries in the world called the least-developed countries, which are 50 of the poorest countries in the world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, but also in Asia, including my country, Bangladesh, and these countries are recognized to be the most vulnerable. And there are obligations that the rich world have taken on to support them and help them. They have made pledges of funding, but they haven’t met those pledges fully yet, so that’s one aspect that they need to do.
On the other hand, one of the recent, if you like, new outcomes from the Fifth Assessment Report is that these countries aren’t sitting idle. They’re actually going ahead and trying to adapt to the potential impacts of climate change and the ones that they’re seeing. I’ll give you the example of my country, Bangladesh. Bangladesh has a very far-reaching climate change strategy and action plan. They’re putting in the order of a half-a-billion dollars of their own money into implementing it. At the same time, they’re asking for international donors to match that, and they’ve matched it to about half that level. But the country is not sitting idle; they’re going ahead at community level, at national level, at sector level. And so are a number of other least-developed countries. So, in many ways, the least-developed countries are actually leading the world in trying to find ways to tackle the impacts of climate change and adapt. But there is a limit to what they can do. As I said, perhaps up to 2 degrees, they can do it, but beyond that, it’s going to be much more difficult.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to go back to comments that our Oxfam guest, Tim Gore, made about fossil fuels. The largest oil and gas company in the world, ExxonMobil, just released a report after the IPCC report this week, saying that climate policies are, quote, "highly unlikely" to stop it from producing and selling fossil fuels in the near future. ExxonMobil’s report says, quote, "We believe producing these assets is essential to meeting growing energy demand worldwide, and in preventing consumers—especially those in the least developed and most vulnerable economies—from themselves becoming stranded in the global pursuit of higher living standards and greater economic opportunity." That’s a report from ExxonMobil released after the IPCC report came out this week. So, Michael Oppenheimer, could I get you to comment first on the impact of fossil fuels and what this means?
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: Well, first of all, the problem is caused, by and large, by burning coal, oil and, to a lesser extent, natural gas—the fossil fuels, which, by and large, power our society. It’s rather interesting that Exxon felt compelled to make any statement about it at all. What they’ve done in the past is fund groups to kick up a smokescreen of contrarian science—or contrarian non-science—to confuse the public. I think the company is slowly coming around to realizing that that won’t do much good over the long term. This is a problem that has to be grappled with. On the other hand, I don’t expect Exxon to say, "We’re going to give up the oil business." That is their business, after all. The question is: How are they going to position themselves with respect to particular U.S. political initiatives which will eventually happen again, like the bill in Congress in 2009 that was aimed at controlling emissions? Are they going to oppose President Obama’s efforts to use his regulatory authority to control emissions? Those are the key questions. The rest of it is rhetoric.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, talking about that politics, I mean, the House has approved a measure that would effectively force government agencies to stop studying climate change. The measure calls on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and related bodies to focus on forecasting severe weather, but not exploring one of its likely causes. I’m wondering if you could address this and the overall climate, if you will, in the United States—you’re a professor at Princeton University—around this pushback on whether humans are causing climate change?
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: Well, first of all, that’s clearly an ostrich-head-in-the-sand policy: If you pretend you can’t see it, then it’s not happening. And it doesn’t—isn’t going to do us any good, obviously. It isn’t going to stop climate change. And it’s symptomatic of, unfortunately, an attitude that we’ve seen in parts, particularly the House of Representatives, you know, where people just don’t believe in science. And that’s something that has to change, or else we can never effectively grapple not only with this problem, but a whole raft of issues in our very highly technological society. You know, what the future holds in that regard, it’s hard to tell. I’m not the first one to point out to you that this country is polarized terrifically politically. This is a problem which, if it’s going to be solved, goes to the root of our energy system. We need a bipartisan approach to solving it. And the political rhetoric and the political inaction, that is freezing everything these days, really gets in the way.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Tim Gore, before we continue, I’d like you to talk about some of the work that Oxfam has done and its experience with people on the ground dealing with the impact of climate change. You’ve spoken specifically about an irrigation project in Zimbabwe, for instance. Could you talk about the impact already being felt in many parts of the world as a consequence of climate change?
TIM GORE: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Oxfam is working in many countries right around the world already grappling with those impacts, with small-scale farmers across sub-Saharan Africa, working with them to understand how the seasons are changing, what that means for their cropping patterns, helping them to think about different seeds, different planting regimes, helping with small-scale irrigation schemes. Actually, in Bangladesh, in Saleem’s country, Oxfam is doing a lot of work on early warning systems to make sure that fisherfolk and other people living in highly vulnerable areas, essentially below sea level, get the information that they need about incoming storm surges or cyclones, so that they can get out of harm’s way in time. So, I think, as Saleem says, there’s a whole raft of action that is going on now in some of the poorest countries to try to adapt to climate change. And that’s very welcome, and we’re working on that in partnership with many other organizations.
But as Saleem has also said, there are real limits here to what the poorest countries can do on their own. You only have to look at the amount of money that rich countries are spending on adaptation. In the U.S., for example, I think the Congress approved something like $60 billion for the recovery efforts following Hurricane Sandy in New York. I mean, those are the orders of magnitude that we’re talking about in terms of dealing with this problem. Another example from the U.S. is the amount of money that—public money that’s currently being spent to support farmers in the U.S. to deal with climate impacts or to insure their crops, something on the order of a billion or so—for a billion dollars of public money going in to support the insurance schemes that protect farmers in the U.S. in the wake of losses like we’ve seen from the droughts in 2012 or currently ongoing in California. Now, that’s—those are huge sums of money, of public money, being invested by rich countries in their own protection, their own adaptation, their own preparedness for climate impacts. Poorest—the poorest countries on the planet simply don’t have those resources to draw upon. They are investing some of their money, but they need more support from the international community, from the rich countries that, in the end, have emitted most of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And it’s they that are responsible for providing some of that money to make sure that the poorest people, who are least responsible for this problem, get the kinds of resources that they need to adapt.
And the example that you gave from Zimbabwe is important, because it’s an example, actually, of the limits to adaptation. And although we can do a lot and we must do a lot to adapt to climate change, we’re also starting to see already in some instances that there are limits to adaptation. You can’t adapt to any types of climate impacts. And that particular example in Zimbabwe is of an irrigation scheme where it helps the local community to deal with more erratic rainfall, but when you get very extreme droughts, the water table drops so low that there is not enough water pressure to get water into the system. And it just goes to highlight that in the end, although we must increase our efforts to adapt very rapidly, unless we also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, the levels of global warming we’re going to see will also surpass our adaptive capacities within the next two, three, four decades. And so, it’s absolutely critical that we scale up adaptation, but at the same time we drive down greenhouse gas emissions. That’s the only way to protect the poorest people on the planet from going hungry because of climate change.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a report released the same day as the IPCC report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, or NIPCC. The study was funded completely by the Heartland Institute, a think tank that’s systematically questioned climate change. This is what the report had to say about global warming: quote, "A modest warming of the planet will result in a net reduction of human mortality from temperature-related events. More lives are saved by global warming via the amelioration of cold-related deaths than those lost under excessive heat. Global warming will have a negligible influence on human morbidity and the spread of infectious diseases, a phenomenon observed in virtually all parts of the world," they said. Tim Gore, can you comment on this pushback, but also talk about the kind of momentum, if there is momentum, leading not just to Peru next year, but the binding summit that will take place in Paris in 2015? The Heartland Institute may not be significant in the world, but in the United States it’s part of that force that’s trying to prevent any kind of binding action on climate change.
TIM GORE: Yeah, and this is—you know, goes back to the problem of corporations like Exxon, the powerful economic interests that are currently profiting from our high-carbon economic model and that stand to lose the most from a transition to a low-carbon, fair alternative. And, you know, we know that, when you can track the financing from those groups into groups like the Heartland Institute and others that are lobbying the U.S. government, lobbying interests also in Brussels, trying to prevent the European Union from taking more ambitious action on climate change, lobbying in the Australian context, as well, and are behind many of the more aggressive steps that the Australian government has taken on climate change in recent months, as well. So, this is an incestuous influence of the fossil fuel industry. We’re seeing it in our planet politics all around the world, and it’s working directly against the interests of the poorest and the most vulnerable people on the planet, who are already being impacted by climate change.
And we have to stand up to that. And I think that’s why you’re seeing an increasing movement starting to build, starting to swell, with strong roots there in the U.S. around divestment, around starting to say, actually, if we want to get serious about tackling this problem, there’s no question of a partnership with some of these energy companies. They simply don’t have any interest in seeing climate change tackled. What we have to do is we have to get the money, the investment, out of those companies and into cleaner, sustainable, renewable energy alternatives.
AMY GOODMAN: Saleemul Huq, we just—
TIM GORE: And that, I think—
AMY GOODMAN: We just have 15 seconds, if you could comment from London on that point of where you’re going from here? And, Michael Oppenheimer, 15 seconds, as well.
SALEEMUL HUQ: Well, I think, you know, to cite the example of the fossil fuel companies that you mentioned, it’s like they are the drug suppliers to the rest of the world who are junkies and are hooked on fossil fuels. But we don’t have to remain hooked on fossil fuels. Indeed, we are going to have to cut ourselves off from them if we want to see a real transition and prevent the kinds of temperature rises that I mentioned, up to 4 degrees. The only way is to wean ourselves off the fossil fuels that we use at the moment.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Oppenheimer?
MICHAEL OPPENHEIMER: I just want to point out it’s not just a problem for the rest of the world. Just think about Hurricane Sandy. Think about how hard it was to deal with that storm. That’s today’s storms. Think about what happens over the next 10, 20, 30 years, when sea level goes up and the storms, in all cases—in most cases, get worse.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us. Michael Oppenheimer and Saleemul Huq, both co-authors of the newly released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. And thank you so much to Tim Gore of Oxfam, speaking to us from Sweden.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, Dragnet Nation. Stay with us.
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Dragnet Nation: Do Google, Facebook Know More Private Info Than NSA and Soviet-Era Secret Police?
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin joins us to discuss her new book, "Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance." Currently at ProPublica and previously with The Wall Street Journal, Angwin details her complex and fraught path toward increasing her own online privacy. According to Angwin, the private data collected by East Germany’s Soviet-era Stasi secret police could pale in comparison to the information revealed today by an individual’s Facebook profile or Google search.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end today’s show with our interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin, author of the new book, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. Angwin is currently at ProPublica and was previously with The Wall Street Journal.
AMY GOODMAN: When we spoke with Julia Angwin, CIA analyst Ray McGovern and former FBI special agent Mike German were also in the studio, and you can watch that part of the interview on our website. Nermeen and I began by asking Julia Angwin how she tried to increase her own online privacy.
ANGWIN: Well, I basically conducted this exercise because I felt that, you know, we are always told that we have made the choice to give up our privacy, so I—and that we, as—
AMY GOODMAN: By what? Going online?
JULIA ANGWIN: Just by going online and choosing to use free services, and that we really have given it up, right, for security for free services. And so I decided, OK, I’m going to withdraw that choice and see if I can still live in the modern world, because theoretically I can opt out. And so, I was successful at some things I did. I stopped using Google Search, and I started using this—
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: What’s the problem with Google Search?
JULIA ANGWIN: So, what I didn’t like about Google Search was that they keep all of my search records, right? If you’re logged in, like I mostly was—my records were dating back to 2006, every search I had conducted, and it was all logged in there in my history. You can find it in yours also. And it’s really disturbing to look at, because you see that every single thought that goes through your head, you basically google it. So, in the morning, it was like I googled the weather, then I googled my breakfast. I mean, I didn’t—it seemed to me that I was—there was nothing in my head that didn’t come out into a Google search.
AMY GOODMAN: But what about when you write "clear history."
JULIA ANGWIN: You can clear your history, but Google also saves history on their end tied to your IP address. And so, the thing is, even when you log out, they are—their business is keeping records and analyzing data. That’s what they do. They offer that data to advertisers as a way to convince them to advertise on Google. And so, I decided that basically I just didn’t want that record. I was also mad Google wouldn’t let me download it myself, because I thought maybe I would learn something about myself by, like, watching my crazy mind jumping around, but I can’t get it, right? They have it, but I can’t download it. So I left and joined a DuckDuckGo, which is this—
AMY GOODMAN: Wait, did you ask Google? Did you say, "I want my history"?
JULIA ANGWIN: Well, I did, actually. They have a section of their website where you can take some of your data—it’s called the Data Liberation Project at Google—and so you can liberate some of your data, like your contacts and some of your—you can download some of your emails and several things. So they do have some of that, but the search, which is actually, I think, the bulk of their business, is not part of the Data Liberation Project. And I asked them; they said they didn’t know when they would ever add it. So, I don’t know.
So I went to DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t save any history. So they’re just a privacy-protecting search engine, and they don’t—
AMY GOODMAN: DuckDuckGo?
JULIA ANGWIN: Yeah, DuckDuckGo. They’re a small startup near Philadelphia. And, you know, at first it was hard to adjust to a new search engine, because they don’t fill out your sentence, right? Google knows what you’re thinking. I mean, that’s the whole point. They already watched my mind for all those years; they know. So, I had to work a little harder, right? I had to actually finish my sentences and actually tell them that I lived in New York, because otherwise they would give me results for London or something, because they actually didn’t know. But in the end, I started to feel that I was controlling my destiny more, because I knew exactly what I wanted, whereas Google was guessing for me, and I didn’t necessarily want them to guess all the time.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And can you talk about, Julia Angwin, the extent of the surveillance? You also spoke about a couple who met on an online chat forum, which was supposed to be private, and then it turned out, in fact, that it wasn’t.
JULIA ANGWIN: Right. So this was a really sad story. These two people—it was one of the stories that is the promise of the Internet, right? Two people across the world, one in Australia, one in Arkansas, who never would have met, but shared a similar disease and met on a forum for patients, that was a password-protected forum for patients to talk about their diseases. And they were having a really kind of emotional conversation on this forum, when they got a notice from the forum operator that there had been a break-in. And so, this big media-monitoring company, Nielsen, which I think most people know, has a social-media-monitoring business where they try to monitor online buzz and sell—they sell that to big companies who want to know what their products are being talked about. And so, theoretically, we don’t know why Nielsen broke in, but probably they were trying to figure out what patients were talking about to sell that to somebody who is interested in what patients talk about. And so, these people were really horrified to find out that Nielsen was breaking in, but the notice also said, "Oh, by the way, in case you don’t know, this website is also selling your data."
NERMEEN SHAIKH: But isn’t that illegal, I mean, the fact that Nielsen, which is a giant company, that it intervened in a forum that’s supposed to be private? Isn’t there some protection for the people—
JULIA ANGWIN: There—so, if the website itself had decided to bring legal action against Nielsen, they may have had a case. But those cases are hard to bring. There’s a lot of grey area. And Nielsen immediately apologized, said, "We’re not going to break in again." And so, no legal action was brought.
AMY GOODMAN: They were talking about depression.
JULIA ANGWIN: They were talking about depression, yes. And what—I think the thing that was interesting, talking to them, they were more upset about the website selling their data than they were about Nielsen, because, OK, a break-in happens, but they were not aware that in the fine print of that site, they were being monetized, right? And I feel like that’s the issue of privacy these days, is so often we think of privacy as intrusion, but in fact it’s something we authorize in the fine print.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the moment you decided to buy a prepaid cellphone.
JULIA ANGWIN: Well, see, the problem with the cellphone was I was trying to figure out how can I protect my privacy with a cellphone, because you carry it with you everywhere. It’s the world’s best tracking device. I’m sure that when you were at the CIA, you would have loved to have your targets carry these things. So, I found that there really isn’t a way to—
AMY GOODMAN: And we actually pay to carry them.
JULIA ANGWIN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to buy these.
JULIA ANGWIN: Yes, exactly. It’s sort of like incredible. So, the thing is that they’re always transmitting stuff that you’re not aware of. They have to talk to the cell tower to give you a signal. They often are sort of talking to wi-fi connections nearby. The apps can be sending data. And so, I realized that I really didn’t have that much control over what it was transmitting, even when I wasn’t using it. So I realized the best protection I could have was to get a cellphone that wasn’t tied to my identity. So I basically went and bought something for cash, prepaid, with a fake name, and—which is legal—and carried that around. Now, the problem is, this is a thin veneer of privacy, because I go to all the same locations, I call all the same people, so somebody who looked at that data would be able to tell. But basically I thought, well, at least they should work a little harder to get me.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And how do you respond, Julia Angwin, to the people who say, "Well, we have nothing to hide, so who cares if the government knows where we’re going, either through our cellphone, or what we’re searching for on Google, or anything like that?"
JULIA ANGWIN: Right. Well, I think that—what I say to those people is: Information is power, right? So, the more information that you give to the government, the more power they have over you, right? And similarly commercially, the more power—information you give to the cellphone company or to Google, the more power they have over you. One thing that I had been investigating in my years at The Wall Street Journal was, there are a lot of companies that are trying to figure out ways to show different prices to people online based on the personal information they have about them. So, essentially, we’re going to get to a world where they’re going to know that I have five more dollars in my pocket than you, and my price is going to be $5 higher, because that’s the data that they have. And so you lose in a negotiation, generally, when you have less information than the other person.
AMY GOODMAN: Why is free wi-fi not really free?
JULIA ANGWIN: So, free wi-fi is something that I have actually turned off on my phone, because what is happening with free wi-fi is that people are using the wi-fi signal on your phone to sort of track you. So there’s shopping malls and retailers who actually ping the wi-fi on your phone to see you as you’re walking by, because they want to get into the tracking business. I mean, everybody wants to be in the surveillance business. We’re just lucky our neighbors are not yet doing this. But they will be. And so, the wi-fi signal is basically a—is a democratized tracking technique. Anyone could do it. I could drive around with a signal to pick up wi-fi. So I’ve essentially stopped using wi-fi altogether.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Julia, you went to Berlin to visit the archive of the East German secret police, the Stasi.
JULIA ANGWIN: Mm-hmm, yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you explain why you did that and what you found?
JULIA ANGWIN: Well, you know, some people accuse me of being too paranoid, possibly, and so I thought, "OK, fine. I’m going to look and see: What did the most repressive surveillance regime that we know of in the modern world have on their citizens, and how does that compare? Am I overdramatizing this situation?" So I went to the Stasi archive, and I obtained, through their equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act request, a few files, which I got translated. And I looked at them, and, you know, there were handwritten dozens of pages. But in totality, they were not really as robust as like an average Facebook profile, and certainly not anywhere near as revealing as my Google search results. And, by the way, it was interesting to learn that they only had files on one-quarter of the population, which took them a lot of work to surveil those one-quarter. Now we’re in a situation where, clearly, the government and institutions have files on everybody. So, really, the question is: How can we prevent our regime from using that in a way to repress us? And that is, I think, the question, is really one of oversight.
AMY GOODMAN: Who is Daniel Jaye?
JULIA ANGWIN: So, Daniel Jaye is an interesting guy. He actually invented sort of the way that we’re tracked online by advertising technology. So if you’ve ever had an ad follow you around on the Internet—which most people have had that experience, right?—he’s the one who came up with that idea. And so, he came up with it back in—right around the dotcom boom. And then for—nobody was interested at that time, but then, around 2007, it really regained—it had a resurgence. What’s interesting about him is he thought it was going to be privacy protecting, because you are only identified by like a little number—123456, this person has gone to these websites. But what—he has actually kind of turned against it, because he finds that his innovation is now being used to connect people to their actual identities. People like Facebook and Google actually often, if you have an account with them, when they track you on other websites, know who you are. And so, he is concerned that his anonymous creation is actually becoming less anonymous.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what’s the relationship between corporate surveillance and government surveillance of users, of people online? Is it the same thing? Is it different? Do they have the same—
JULIA ANGWIN: Well, you know, corporate surveillance can seem more benign, and sometimes it is. But I think the one lesson I feel like I’ve taken, the biggest lesson, from the Snowden revelations has been how aggressive the government is about going to these private companies for data, because, to them, this is incredible. Google has so much more, right? They want it. So we have seen that the—
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Google has so much more than the government.
JULIA ANGWIN: Yes, right. I mean, the government actually does have limits on their collection. Now, they don’t always obey them, as we have seen from some of their violations mentioned in the FISC. The foreign intelligence court has dinged NSA. But, ultimately, they do have to obey some laws, and—whereas Google has everything. They have every map you’ve ever looked at. They have every, you know, search. They have your email content. So, we have seen that the government comes to them repeatedly with requests, secret court orders for the documents. And then we’ve also seen some occasions where they’ve hacked in to different parts of the Internet to try to get that data other ways.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And there are no restraints at all on companies keeping this information or even disseminating it to other companies?
JULIA ANGWIN: Right now, yeah, we’re one of the only Western nations without a baseline privacy law that basically puts some baseline limit on what commercial data gatherers can do. Most Western countries have—at least offer citizens the ability to see their files, correct them, and sometimes remove them.
AMY GOODMAN: You write about how an innocent citizen can be placed in a police lineup and suspected of a crime. Tell us more about that.
JULIA ANGWIN: Well, so, before ubiquitous surveillance, which, by the way, I would just point out, was only 10 years ago, none of us probably, I hope—I mean, I didn’t, at least—have a police file. Right? They didn’t have a reason to track me, so they didn’t have my information. And that was a situation I was really happy about. Now, of course, all sorts of governments, from state and local to the federal, can sweep up tons of information and then sort of trawl through it for people that might be doing suspicious things.
I tell the story in my book of one man who is a boiler repairman in—near Boston. And he basically showed up one day and found that his driver’s license had been revoked. He saw a notice. He went to a court hearing. They said, "Show up at this hearing. We’ll tell you why." And they—when he went there, they said, "Our facial recognition technology has identified you as looking too similar in your photo to another person, so we think you guys have done identity theft. Prove who you are." Right? So he had to prove that he was who he was. And so, this is sort of—the presumption of guilt is reversed, right? He has to prove his innocence to get out of the lineup.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the web camera. It’s just become the webcam—
JULIA ANGWIN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —that almost everyone has right now, because if you take pictures, you have it. GCHQ, it turns out, was using the images when you were in a Yahoo chat with someone. But talk about how often this is used. I remember, going back a year or two, that kid in—what state was it? Was it Pennsylvania? The school had given kids laptops.
JULIA ANGWIN: Yes, right.
AMY GOODMAN: And they were very excited, and they went home, and he’s home in his room. But the school—they said, to protect the students so that you wouldn’t think that they were stealing laptops—they would always turn the cameras on, if you took the laptop home, so that they could say, "Oh, he wasn’t really stealing the laptop; he was actually using it." But in fact what they were doing, well, he was eating—I think it was Mike and Ike jelly beans. They took that to mean that he was popping drugs. They called in his parents, and they said, "You know, he’s using drugs." They were frightened. They said, "What are you talking about? How do you know he’s using drugs?" He’s a kid. I think it was an elementary school. And they start to show photographs. But they recognize this is their boy’s room that he’s in. And they see he’s putting things in his mouth, which is his favorite candy. But these photographs—and this is a few years ago, and then all the kids realized they are being filmed in their bedrooms by the school.
JULIA ANGWIN: Yes, right. It was really—that was a horrifying story of, once again, where is the presumption of innocence, where you’re called in for taking drugs. So, the thing about the camera is that it can be remotely activated. That’s what happened to those kids. And unfortunately, there’s like criminal hacking gangs out there who want to trick us into downloading some—clicking on a link that installs some software that can remotely activate our camera. And what they’ve been doing is basically filming people in their rooms and then trying to blackmail them, saying, "I have naked pictures of you. Send me money." And so, basically, in the tech community, that I am—hang out with the hackers, they all have stickers over their camera, because they know how easy it is to download this free software that can remotely activate your camera. And then you take it off when you want to use the camera. But, essentially, everyone should have a sticker over their camera.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: But you’ve pointed out that this period of relentless surveillance is only a decade old. So, you know, for all of us at this table, that’s, you know, only a fraction of our lives. But you—in your book, you say that you even got your children—I mean, the next generation—
JULIA ANGWIN: Yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: —has grown up with this stuff.
JULIA ANGWIN: Yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: How did you get them to be interested in online privacy? And what steps can they take to protect themselves?
JULIA ANGWIN: Well, the thing about kids is there’s this myth that they don’t care about privacy. People tell me this all the time. "My kids don’t care about privacy." And what I say to them is: "You are their threat model. You are the NSA to them. They want privacy from you. What you don’t realize is they don’t care about the same issues you care about, but they do have a privacy issue, and it’s you." And so, the way I convinced my kids was essentially to show them that they could have secrets from me. This was the selling point. They actually mostly wanted secrets from each other, right? "Oh, little brother is going to find out my stuff." So they really enjoyed the fact that it also seemed like fun. I showed them this tool they could put on their web browser that shows how many tracking technologies were on a different—any given website. And to them, it was like a video game. "Oh, I got a website with 40 trackers!" You know? And then I taught my daughter to build strong passwords so that her brother couldn’t break into her account. She actually ended up starting a password business where she sells strong passwords for a dollar. She’ll make them for you.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you mean by strong passwords?
JULIA ANGWIN: So what a strong password these days is really long, for—and basically not already used on another site. So many sites have been hacked that the password hacking community have every password that’s already been used. So you basically need something new, which is, by the way, really hard to think of. So all our brains are overtaxed with this password question. So what my daughter does is she solves that problem—
AMY GOODMAN: How old is she?
JULIA ANGWIN: She’s nine. And she solves that problem by picking random words out of the dictionary. We have a dictionary where every word is numbered. It’s called diceware, this method. And she rolls dice. She picks the words randomly. So then I have five dictionary words that I string together, so my passwords are 30 characters long. And then I can remember them, though, because they’re dictionary words. They’re still not words I would ever choose, but they’re most likely not in any of those password files that have been hacked already.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you also put numbers in them?
JULIA ANGWIN: So what she does is she gives you the password "unsalted," and then you are supposed to "salt" it with numbers, exclamation points, capitalization, as you wish.
AMY GOODMAN: How will you ever remember these? That’s the problem.
JULIA ANGWIN: Then, here’s the other thing. You must write them down. You’re unlikely to have somebody break into your house, find the piece of paper with your password on it, and then figure out which account it goes to. So, the myth that we can’t write our passwords down is really unhelpful and is actually creating password insecurity.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So do you think attitudes about privacy are changing now? I mean, among youth and also—
JULIA ANGWIN: I do, actually. I find that young people, when I talk to them about privacy, are very interested. And the data also shows that young people are more willing to adjust their privacy settings. They are less likely to download an app if they’re concerned about the privacy of that app. And so, interestingly, the young people, I think, because they are very tech savvy and tech literate, understand they want to control their data. The rise of Snapchat is a very good example of that, right? They want their chats to sort of disappear into the ether.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Explain what Snapchat is.
JULIA ANGWIN: So, basically, it’s a way to sort of blow up your communications. After you send them, you can blow them up, and they sort of disintegrate after a certain amount of time.
AMY GOODMAN: Do they, really?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: In other words—
JULIA ANGWIN: Well, that’s a question. That’s a question. So, maybe they like the perception of privacy. The problem we have with a lot of these tools is we don’t have good standards of auditing, and so it’s hard to know whether companies that say they’re doing something to protect your privacy are actually doing it.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Julia Angwin, author of the new book, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. She was part of a team at The Wall Street Journal that won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on corporate corruption. You can go to our website for part one [and part two] of our discussion with Angwin that also included CIA analyst Ray McGovern and former FBI special agent Mike German. You can also read chapter one of Dragnet Nation at democracynow.org.
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Headlines:
GM CEO Apologizes to Victims, Fails to Explain Negligence
The head of General Motors appeared before Congress on Tuesday to answer for the auto giant’s safety defect linked to at least 13 and possibly hundreds of deaths. GM has recalled millions of cars after acknowledging faulty ignition switches shut down engines and disabled air bags. Speaking before a House panel, Mary Barra apologized to the victims’ families.
Mary Barra: "More than a decade ago, GM embarked on a small car program. Sitting here today, I cannot tell you why it took so long for a safety defect to be announced for this program, but I can tell you we will find out. Today’s GM will do the right thing. That begins with my sincere apologies to everyone who has been affected by this recall, especially the families and friends who lost their lives or were injured. I am deeply sorry."
It has recently emerged GM misled the victims’ families, despite knowing of the vehicles’ flaws. In her testimony, Barra said for the first time GM is ready to pay compensation and has hired an attorney to handle claims. The lawyer, Kenneth Feinberg, previously oversaw the compensation funds for 9/11 victims and for Gulf residents impacted by the BP oil spill. But despite admitting fault, Barra had almost no new information to explain how GM repeatedly failed to fix its cars despite knowing of the defective ignitions. Her testimony continues before the Senate today. Outside of the hearing, family members who lost loved ones to crashes in defective GM cars spoke out against the company’s actions.
Laura Christian: "We are the people left behind when a loved one got into what was supposed to be a safe car, a GM car, a car that GM knew for years was dangerous and defective. Our daughters, sons, sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, wives and husbands are gone because they were a cost of doing business GM’s style."
Ken Rimer: "Four years prior to producing the Cobalt, GM engineers were aware of a problem with that ignition switch design, which could cause it to turn into the accessory position with just the weight of a keychain or a road bump. Rather than fixing the problem, they chose to keep producing the Cobalt with the ill-fated ignition switch and selling it to an unsuspecting public. Would fixing the problem when it was discovered save these two girls’ lives and the lives of many others? Yes. Should GM be able to hide behind their bankruptcy and not accept the responsibility and liability of these young lives? No."
The scandal has also brought scrutiny on federal regulators, who took no action despite knowing of problems as early as 2007. Testifying on Tuesday, David Friedman, the nation’s auto safety official, told lawmakers he has ordered an internal review.
Obama Celebrates Health Law Enrollment Numbers
President Obama is celebrating the milestone achievement of his signature healthcare law after enrollment in insurance plans beat expectations. Speaking at the White House, Obama said more than 7.1 million people signed up for insurance before this week’s deadline for open enrollment. And after years of Republican-led repeal efforts and a disastrous rollout last year, Obama said the law is here to stay.
President Obama: "Last night, the first open-enrollment period under this law came to an end. And despite several lost weeks out of the gate because of problems with the website, 7.1 million Americans have now signed up for private insurance plans through these marketplaces — 7.1. … I will always work with anyone who is willing to make this law work even better. But the debate over repealing this law is over. The Affordable Care Act is here to stay."
The Obamacare program marks the nation’s largest expansion of health coverage since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. But it still leaves millions uninsured while keeping the for-profit insurance industry intact. In his comments, Obama acknowledged the law has not fixed the nation’s healthcare woes, but criticized those trying to undermine its gains.
President Obama: "So, no, the Affordable Care Act hasn’t completely fixed our long-broken healthcare system, but this law has made our healthcare system a lot better. A lot better. ... I’ve got to admit, I don’t get it: Why are folks working so hard for people not to have health insurance? Why are they so mad about the idea of folks having health insurance? Many of the tall tales that have been told about this law have been debunked. There are still no death panels. Armageddon has not arrived. Instead, this law is helping millions of Americans."
Obama Admin Confirms Warrantless "Backdoor" Searches Target U.S. Citizens
The Obama administration has confirmed the National Security Agency has used a secret "backdoor" allowing it to search for the emails and phone calls of U.S. citizens without a warrant. Citing documents leaked by Edward Snowden, The Guardian revealed last year an undisclosed rule change that allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans’ communications using their names or other identifying information. In a new letter to Senator Ron Wyden obtained by The Guardian, the nation’s top intelligence official, James Clapper, confirms the "backdoor" loophole’s use. Clapper does not specify how many backdoor searches have been carried out. In a statement, Wyden called the warrantless searches "unacceptable" and "a real threat to the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans."
NATO Suspends Formal Cooperation with Russia
NATO has suspended all practical cooperation with Russia in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen announced the move at a meeting in Brussels.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen: "We are suspending all practical cooperation with Russia, military and civilian, in the NATO-Russia Council, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and the Partnership for Peace. At the same time, we keep our diplomatic lines of communication open, and we are ready for ambassadorial or ministerial meetings in the NATO-Russia Council."
Russia this week began withdrawing a small number of forces from its eastern border with Ukraine, a move Secretary of State John Kerry called a "welcome gesture."
Palestinian Authority Signs International Conventions After Israel Reneges on Prisoner Release
The Palestinian Authority has defied U.S. and Israeli demands by submitting declarations to join a number of international conventions. The United States and Israel have sought to thwart Palestinian membership in global bodies as part of a bid to undermine recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas acted after Israel broke its pledge to free the last group of Palestinian prisoners due for release under the agreement that established U.S.-brokered peace talks. On Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry cancelled a trip to Israel and the Occupied Territories in response to Abbas’ move. But Kerry said he believes the U.S.-backed negotiations can still be saved.
Secretary of State John Kerry: "As I said at the outset of my remarks, completely premature to draw any judgments about this at this point in time. And at this point in time, no agreement has been reached with respect to any prisoner, not even the ones that at this moment are at issue in terms of the transfer. Let me make it absolutely clear: None of the agencies that President Abbas signed tonight involve the U.N., none of them. And President Abbas has given his word to me that he will keep his agreement and that he intends to negotiate through the end of the month of April."
Obama Admin: No Decision on Release of Jailed Spy
In an effort to convince Israel to follow through on its pledge to free the Palestinian prisoners, the Obama administration is reportedly considering an early release for the jailed spy Jonathan Pollard. Pollard is a former U.S. intelligence officer convicted of passing U.S. secrets on to Israel. He is eligible for parole next year, but could be freed under a rumored agreement to salvage the peace talks. At the White House, Press Secretary Jay Carney said no decision has been reached.
Press Secretary Jay Carney: "First of all, the president has not made a decision to release Jonathan Pollard. Jonathan Pollard was convicted of espionage, and he is serving his sentence. As I said yesterday, I don’t have any other update to provide to you on Mr. Pollard’s status. There are obviously a lot of things happening in that arena, and, you know, I’m not going to get ahead of discussions that are underway."
Group: Syrian Death Toll Could Reach 220,000
A London-based Syrian group has upped its estimate for the death toll of Syria’s three-year civil war to at least 150,000. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says 150,000 is the minimum figure, with an actual toll likely approaching 220,000 deaths. The United Nations has stopped updating its most recent toll of 100,000 from July 2013, saying conditions on the ground are too violent to allow for an accurate count.
House Votes to Block Climate Research
The Republican-controlled House has approved a measure that would effectively force government agencies to stop studying climate change. The measure calls on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and related bodies to focus on forecasting severe weather — but not explore one of its likely causes. The vote comes as the U.N.'s top climate panel issued a report this week calling on governments to prepare for global warming's worsening impact and to cut emissions in order to prevent it from getting worse.
Koch-Backed Measure Bans Transit Funding in Tennessee
The Tennessee Senate has approved a measure that would ban new mass transit projects across the state. The bill was introduced to undermine a proposed rapid bus system in Nashville called the Amp, but would apply statewide. According to the website Think Progress, the measure received critical backing from the billionaire Republican donors Charles and David Koch. The Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity pushed lawmakers to vote for the bill and may have even sparked its introduction.Chile Declares State of Emergency After Earthquake Triggers Tsunami
Chile has declared a state of emergency after a powerful earthquake triggered a tsunami off its northern coast. The death toll stands at five so far. Thousands of people have been evacuated from coastal areas.
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