5: Your Government Wants to Militarize Social Media to Influence Your Beliefs
A global conference of senior military and intelligence officials taking place in London this week reveals how governments increasingly view social media as “a new front in warfare” and a tool for the Armed Forces.
The overriding theme of the event is the need to exploit social media as a source of intelligence on civilian populations and enemies; as well as a propaganda medium to influence public opinion.
A report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last month revealed how a CIA-funded tool, Geofeedia, was already being used by police to conduct surveillance of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to monitor activists and protesters.
Although Facebook and Twitter both quickly revoked Geofeedia’s access to their social feeds, the conference proves that social media surveillance remains a rapidly growing industry with no regulatory oversight. And its biggest customers are our own governments.
The event, the Sixth Annual Conference on Social Media Within the Defence and Military Sector, is sponsored by the Thales Group, the tenth largest defense company in the world, which is partially owned by the French government.
Vice News
4: SLASHED BUDGETS AND TOXIC CHEMICALS: PLANNING FOR ENVIRONMENTAL CARNAGE UNDER DONALD TRUMP’S EPA
ENVIRONMENTALISTS WHO WERE hoping that somehow a Donald Trump presidency wouldn’t be as catastrophic as they feared had those hopes dashed on Friday, when the president-elect announced Myron Ebell as his choice to oversee the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency. Ebell, head of both the right wing think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Cooler Heads Coalition, has spent most of his career tossing out industry-funded nonsense bombs about climate change.
A non-scientist whose funders have included ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and coal giant Murray Energy Corporation, Ebell has been a consistent taunter of both scientists and environmentalists. As a talking head on TV news, he has for years offered false balance on climate change in the form of views so far outside of the mainstream as to be downright bizarre. For Ebell, Al Gore is “an extremist” who “lives in a fantasy world,” the Pope’s encyclical on climate change is “diatribe against modern industrial civilization,” and current climate patterns indicate an imminent ice age rather than a warming planet.
The Intercept
3: ISIL claims suicide attacks in Fallujah, near Karbala
ISIL fighters in Iraq launched a series of suicide bomb attacks in the city of Fallujah and an oasis town south of Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 14 people and wounding dozens.
The attacks came as Iraqi forces and their allies continue fighting ISIL in the northern city of Mosul, the armed group’s last major population centre in the country.
ISIL has carried out several attacks in other areas of Iraq since the operation to retake Mosul was launched a month ago, in an apparent bid to draw attention and possibly troops away from the battle for the city.
Aljazeera
2: 2016 will be the hottest year on record, UN says
2016 will very likely be the hottest year on record and a new high for the third year in a row, according to the UN. It means 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have been this century.
The scorching temperatures around the world, and the extreme weather they drive, mean the impacts of climate change on people are coming sooner and with more ferocity than expected, according to scientists.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, published on Monday at the global climate summit in Morocco, found the global temperature in 2016 is running 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. This is perilously close to to the 1.5C target included as an aim of the Paris climate agreement last December.
The El Niño weather phenomenon helped push temperatures even higher in early 2016 but the global warming caused by the greenhouse gas emissions from human activities remains the strongest factor.
The Guardian
1: A White Nationalist & Anti-Semite in the Oval Office: Trump Taps Breitbart’s Bannon as Top Aide
As the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center are slamming President-elect Donald Trump for naming Stephen Bannon to become his chief strategist, we speak with SPLC President Richard Cohen about Bannon’s role as former head of the right-wing news outlet Breitbart Media and as Trump’s campaign manager. “Two weeks after the Charleston massacre, [Breitbart News] ran an article talking about how people should proudly fly the Confederate flag,” Cohen says. He argues that the alt-right that Breitbart is associated with “is nothing more than the rebranding of white supremacy, white nationalism, for the digital age,” and calls on President-elect Trump to “speak out forcefully against all forms of bigotry, and then he has to follow talk with the walk.”
Democracy Now!
