Pacific Standard. Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. |
- A Buyer’s Guide to Safer Communication
- Worried About Mass Surveillance? Here’s How to Practice Safer Communication
- Why Do Men Wear Shorts?
- The Consequential Academic: Alan Rosenthal’s Influence on State Legislatures
- The Missing Link Between Pedophiles and the Rest of Us
- What Happens if (or When) Edward Snowden Faces a Jury?
- How NASA Hopes to Better Monitor and Control Our Water Supply in the West
- Children’s Picture Books Retain Stubborn Stereotypes
| A Buyer’s Guide to Safer Communication Posted: 16 Jul 2013 02:00 PM PDT  “Encryption works.” —Edward Snowden What makes choosing good security tools hard is that despite the news, we don’t know what government agencies like the NSA are really doing on their wiretaps and with their court orders. People in the security community call the NSA the “ultimate adversary,” and point to a huge array of ways they could be analyzing and attacking every part of the Net and telephony system. They could be able to decrypt everything, and even without breaking encryption, they could be able to look at enough of the Internet to determine who is talking to whom just by looking at the timing of conversation. But on the other hand, they might not be able to do any of that, and are trying to project the image of data omniscience to discourage people from even trying to protect their privacy. Parts of the NSA could be pretending to be able to do things it can’t while other parts are doing things more invasive than anyone knows, hidden from oversight. In the end, our questions still exceed our answers, and even the parts we think we know keep changing. The NSA’s data collection is a story that will only make sense in hindsight, and we don’t know how far from now that perspective is. While Americans get to have a conversation with their government about whether this is right or wrong, the 95 percent of the planet the NSA is allowed to surveil without further scrutiny doesn’t get to weigh in at all, nor do the people living in countries whose governments practice widespread Internet surveillance and censorship. That’s billions of people for whom choosing tools for protecting their privacy on the Net is simply a question about the technology, not about the law. The good news is that as we understand more about how surveillance works, it helps the people who create and use secure tools to make better and more informed choices—even if that choice is simply not minding having their data collected. There are a lot of ways to talk to people securely on the Internet, some are purpose-built to enhance your privacy and security. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a place to start. CRYPTOCAT Cryptocat heads up this list of tools because it stands out for good interface and good policies. It’s the easiest tool on this list to use, and Cryptocat’s creator is transparent about how the software handles your data: It goes through a server run by Cryptocat’s creator, Nadim Kobeissi. Kobeissi wrote a blog post with a table explaining who can see your metadata and messages when you use the service. To get it, go to crypto.cat, and download the browser plugin. Mac users can also find it as a standalone program in Apple’s App Store. After that, you pick a name for the chatroom and for yourself. Share the chatroom name with whoever you want to talk to, and start chatting. It is hands-down the easiest way to get started with end-to-end encryption, where only you and the person you’re talking to can see the message. What Does It Replace? Cryptocat, like all the tools on this list, go through a third party server. This means the communication is more like making a phone call, (which goes through the phone company) than talking on walkie talkies (which go directly to the other party). All of Cryptocat is Open Source, so if you are up for more of a challenge, you can run a server inside your own network, and your Cryptocat chats, in addition to being end-to-end encrypted, never traverse the open Internet.
This chart covers the kind of information we should all have access to about the software we use. It would be fantastic to see more projects and companies follow Cryptocat’s lead, and tell their users who can see their data. JABBER WITH OTR OTR (“Off the Record”) is a plug-in that encrypts text chat content so that only you and the person you’re corresponding with can read it. “Only the actual content of your messages is encrypted with OTR, but usually the XMPP channel is secured with SSL as well,” says Chris Ballinger, creator of Chatsecure, a Jabber client for iOS devices. Ballinger listed some of the metadata that is visible if your service doesn’t use SSL, which is separate from OTR message encryption. Ballinger’s list included: • When you started or stopped typing What Does It Replace? The Jabber protocol isn’t itself secure or private, though most Jabber services will use SSL to encrypt your traffic. With OTR, which is built into some clients and is a separate add-on for others, you can encrypt your messages so that even the Jabber server can’t read them; only the person you’re talking to can. OTR is one of the easiest forms of encryption. All you need is an OTR-capable chat program. OTR-encrypted IM is reportedly the way Edward Snowden initially corresponded with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. JABBER CLIENTS Gibberbot for Android Devices Pidgin for Windows/Linux; Adium for Max OS X While they’re easy to use and also interoperate well with services like Facebook Chat and AIM as well as Jabber, these programs might not be secure by default, so you should check your settings. In both of them you have to hunt through menus to “edit” or “modify” your Jabber account. On Pidgin, SSL is under the “Advanced” menu as “Require encryption” inside the accounts screen and may already be enabled. On Adium, it’s under “Options” as “Require SSL/TLS.” You have to enable SSL to be sure you’re using it.
You’ll also want to make absolutely sure that logging is turned off, as logs are stored on your computer unencrypted. Also, in some cases, like Pidgin your Jabber password is stored in a plain text file on your computer. This is why if you’re a target, (which this tutorial assumes you are not) your computer is often your weakest point, not your communications. A NOTE ON JABBER SERVICES SILENT CIRCLE Silent Circle has the benefit of being purpose-built for security, and a lot of thought has gone into its design, making it easy to use. It’s got some drawbacks: It’s centralized, it’s closed-source, and it costs money, which means the people running it need to know your real identity for you to use it. At the cheapest level, Silent Circle can be had right now for $10 a month with an annual subscription. You can only use some features with other Silent Circle subscribers. What Does It Replace? Using a service like Silent Circle exposes one very important piece of data: That you are someone concerned enough about security to pay for it. That bit of consumer behavior sends a strong political message, but it may also give the impression to attackers, state or otherwise, that you feel you have something worth attacking—more so than the other services listed here. Silent Circle also has an email offering, but like all encrypted email, it leaks metadata. TOR Tor is completely separate from encryption. It doesn’t encrypt your metadata on the open Internet via SSL. It doesn’t know whether or not you’re encrypting your messages. But your IP address is one of the hardest to mask and most personally identifying pieces of metadata there is on the Net. As a result, Tor is used for anonymous speech and censorship evasion around the world. How Tor works. What Does It Replace? Tor is the hardest tool to use on this list, but what it does is very powerful. Be prepared to give this one a little time. There’s plenty of documentation to help you along. TOR CLIENTS Orbot and Orweb for Android The Onion Browser for iOS MESSAGE ENCRYPTION APPLICATIONS Like the rest of us, cryptographers are only human. For many years they worked hard to make ways to send encrypted messages that were (and are) essentially unbreakable. This continues through today, with software that uses newer and stronger math for encrypting message data. It’s interesting and admirable work—but for all that effort put into message data, many of these programs and methods do nothing to protect your metadata at all. It’s as plain as it is in an unencrypted message. The mass surveillance we’ve seen come out is confusing, but the lack of legal protections on metadata has been consistent. That means that for the purposes of mass surveillance via metadata, these applications give you no additional protection. While these applications still expose you to the some of the kinds of analysis the NSA and other agencies are doing, they are still very good if you’re worried about keeping your messages private. To learn more about these and others, have a look at Security in Box which is a much more comprehensive tutorial, focused on resisting targeted attacks. SO MANY TOOLS, SO LITTLE ROOM This can all seem overwhelming, but learning even one tool makes the next one much easier to understand conceptually. These tools will get easier for everyone with time and development. The Internet has, throughout its history, responded to threats by toughening up; threats change and the Internet evolves with it. It’s an ecology as much as a network, a wild place, sometimes a forest, sometimes a swamp. It’s early days, but the Internet is where we live more and more of our lives, and as we get a sense of it, living there safely will become a normal part of life. “The news … makes a lot of people feel helpless,” said Abel Luck, one of the Guardian Project developers. “There’s a war on privacy on, and every time you use a bit of cryptography, you’re winning.” This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Worried About Mass Surveillance? Here’s How to Practice Safer Communication Posted: 16 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT  With all the news about possible mass surveillance and the relationship between an alphabet soup of federal agencies and the companies that hold huge swaths of your electronic life, it’s easy to feel powerless. But you’re not. Technology taketh away your privacy, but technology can giveth quite a bit of it back too. Much of the news has been about government access to phone and Internet “metadata,” which is a part of communications that we almost never think about in the course of normal life. Here’s what you need to know to make your communications more private: In order to build out capacity and maintain service, the telcos need to keep track of how people move around. It’s all part of making their networks work.WHAT IS METADATA AND WHY DO YOU CARE? The message is the letter inside the envelope. It’s everything below the “to/from/subject” information in an email. Everything you say after you connect with someone, either by calling them or shouting at them, is the message. If the distinction between metadata and message seems a bit arbitrary, that’s because it is. In technology, what’s metadata and what’s message are designated by the programmer’s design, rather than some great dividing line. This is a problem in American law, because message is usually protected by strong laws, but metadata isn’t. Programmers, who are almost never also lawyers, put sensitive material in metadata all the time. And legislators, even fewer of whom are programmers, have never fixed the metadata loopholes in the law. Given a couple decades of communication technology, you get a situation like the one revealed by the Verizon court order. The mobile phone companies track all cell phone locations and call data, and can uniquely identify every phone, SIM, and user. This isn’t because the mobile phone companies are cackling evilly as they put trackers on nearly everyone in America, it’s because in order for cell phones to work, towers need to know where phones are. That’s not surveillance, it’s just how radio waves work. What’s more, in order to build out capacity and maintain service, the telcos need to keep track of how people move around. It’s all part of making their networks work. To the phone company, metadata about who you are and where you go is useful for running their network. Despite some of their ads, they aren’t particularly interested in your personal life. On the other hand, to you, where you go and who you talk to is sensitive information. Right now, you can’t do anything about keeping all of that a secret from your mobile phone company, except not having your phone with you. The messages that come to and from your phone are another matter. There’s a lot you can do about keeping those private and secure, and doing so helps you live in a safer world—not just from government surveillance, but from anyone who wants to snoop on you for any reason. On computers and smartphones (which are just smaller computers with hard-to-use keyboards) your main tool for protecting your information, both message and metadata, is cryptography. Cryptography (often also called “crypto”) is a way of using math to rewrite information in a secret code. Since metadata is needed to get information across the network, some level of it is always exposed. For you, the question is where does your metadata end, and the message begin? MAKING CRYPTO WORK FOR YOU Communication crypto works by exchanging “keys,” or long strings of numbers that each side of a conversation uses to encrypt and decrypt each other’s messages. The various schemes for coming up with these shared numbers include symmetric-key exchange, Diffie–Hellman key exchange, and public-key cryptography—but you definitely don’t need to understand the details in order to use keys. All you need to know is that they all involve performing math functions that are easy for a computer to do, but extremely hard to undo. These methods are strong. There’s evidence that even the NSA can have trouble circumventing well-done key exchange crypto, and cracking it en masse is probably still not practical. There are two basic ways to use crypto: TALKING TO BOB
Obviously, Google can see all of this. But if someone steps into the stream they can see everything, too. This was the case with the cable splices detailed in the 2006 stories of warrantless wiretapping, and in the recent story about the Verizon order.
In an attempt to be witty, cryptographers always call the party stepping into the stream Eve. Because Google is good at security, they use something called SSL to hide your traffic from Eve as it passes through the wires (or over the air). You can tell you’re using SSL, also called TLS for no good reason, when you visit a Web address that starts with https instead of http. (Gee, thanks for making that so clear, computer scientists.) SSL is effective in blocking Eve, which is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation developed a browser plug-in called HTTPS Everywhere, which helps you put the majority of your Web browsing inside SSL and out of view. You should use that. (Disclosure: I’m legally married to an EFF employee, and occasionally seek advice from their legal department.)
But if Eve has a special relationship with Google, you have another problem. With SSL, Google still has a copy of all your information, metadata, and message. You can’t avoid Google having your metadata—like cell phone towers, they need it to make the network work.
ENCRYPTING MESSAGE DATA Even with end-to-end encryption, you have the same problem with metadata being visible to Google that you had before you encrypted anything. You’ve just made Eve go through one extra step—talking to Google—to get it. That might be all the protection you need, depending on your service provider legally resisting blanket requests from the government. If you don’t trust them to do that, then you should use a different service. But here is where most people, even cryptographers, make their big mistake. We encrypt our messages and feel safe. But without using SSL, even when using a provider that won’t give information to Eve, the metadata is being transmitted unencrypted. You’re not even making Eve take the extra step of asking your provider. Eve can just step into the stream and capture a copy of your metadata as it passes by.
So let’s say you’ve moved to a new chat service. You trust it. It’s run entirely by Swedish hacker teenagers on offshore servers who respond to legal queries with pictures of sarcastic lolcats, not to cooperate with Eve. This new service requires you to encrypt your messages.
But being teenagers, they’ve overlooked a few details, and are accidentally leaking your metadata back to Eve, which is just fine with Eve, since your message data was legally protected anyhow, and when Eve is the NSA, she’s not supposed to keep it. Oops. You were probably better off staying with your last service.
You abandon the Swedish teenagers then and turn to their somewhat more learned cousins, who have set up independent services around the world with an eye toward security being able to resist intrusion from outside actors. With services like Dukgo.com, and Riseup.net, you can have the best of both worlds: SSL and encrypted messages inside it.
Now you’ve got some privacy back. CAVEAT: WHO’S OUT TO GET YOU? This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Posted: 16 Jul 2013 11:39 AM PDT  Around this same time during each of the past few summers, the Internet has hit a breaking point over a seemingly innocuous sartorial conundrum: Should men wear shorts? Of course, men can wear shorts. They can zip the bottoms off of their polyester cargo pants, they can snip off their jeans at knee-height, or they can buy a pair of ready-made “shorts.” But the thinking on one side goes, “A man is an adult and therefore a man should not be wearing shorts because, again, he is not a child.” While the thinking on the other side is “Yes, I am an adult and therefore I can choose what I put on my legs, especially when it’s so goddamn hot out.” (Another take is: Your knees and shins look weird! But you can still wear shorts—though only if you absolutely have to.) As I sit here in Southern California, wearing pants, while also surrounded by the throngs of men wandering the streets and wearing shorts (and also wearing mid-calf socks, which … is confusing?), the distinction is no less clear. Pants? Shorts? Man, I just don’t know. So, I exchanged emails with Professor Susan Kaiser of the University of California-Davis, who is an expert in the psychology of clothing. To get a hold on Arguably the Most Important Question Facing the Modern American Male, Kaiser suggested we look at the Western history of shorts:
At one point, yes, being an adult male was essentially defined as “someone who wears pants.” While that cultural guideline is no longer so strict (see: evidence), has it totally disappeared? “I suspect that the residues of these historical meanings with respect to age (early boyhood) and gender (effeminate) sort of linger as connotations,” Kaiser wrote , “even though there are competing connotations (sports attire, hip hop, etc.).” Sports and progressive gender-views on the same side! Yet shorts still manage to divide. Why can’t our leg-wear unite? “Maybe the contradictory meanings, overall, contribute to the debate and the strong feelings in both directions,” Kaiser wrote, “coupled, of course, with climate and other practical matters.” Climate change. We cannot escape. |
| The Consequential Academic: Alan Rosenthal’s Influence on State Legislatures Posted: 16 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT  Alan Rosenthal died last week. You may not have heard of him, but you were probably affected by his work. Rosenthal was a professor of public policy and political science at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, the place where he’d worked since 1966. He was shockingly prolific, having authored nearly 20 books, almost 40 articles, and roughly 50 book chapters, mostly on the subject of state legislatures. This productivity commanded the respect of his fellow scholars. But Rosenthal truly distinguished himself by reaching beyond the academy. He was someone who cared deeply about democratic governance in the American states, focusing on them at a time when most scholarship and journalistic coverage of American politics was fixated on Washington. When Rosenthal wrote or taught, he was drawing upon not only cutting-edge research, but also an expertise built upon hundreds of visits to state legislatures across the country.In the 1960s and ’70s, Rosenthal directed comprehensive studies of the legislatures in eight states—Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin—with the aim of improving their performance and their power. The resulting recommendations, including switching from biennial to annual sessions, increasing legislator salaries, and creating non-partisan legislative research offices, were adopted in many states, and it is fair to say that his advocacy helped produce a revolution in state legislative professionalism during this time period. He went on to consult with 35 different state legislatures about ways to improve their functioning. Rosenthal also developed a seminar series for promising politicians, inviting state legislators across the country to Rutgers to discuss governance, legislative procedure, lobbying, ethics, and the career of politics. Many graduates of this program went on to become legislative leaders in their states and nationally, and they stayed in touch with Rosenthal over the years. As his students and peers knew, when Rosenthal wrote or taught about state legislatures, he was drawing upon not only cutting-edge research, but also an expertise built upon hundreds of visits to state legislatures across the country and countless conversations with their members. He knew his subject in a way few of us ever will, approaching it simultaneously as a scholar, a reformer, and an advocate. It is fitting that one of his final honors came when he was named the tie-breaking member of the state’s redistricting commission in 2011. (The commission’s other members are even numbers of Republicans and Democrats, who typically vote in opposite ways.) To be entrusted with such a powerful position in such a consequential body speaks to the dedication and integrity for which Rosenthal was known. Rosenthal is remembered today by his students, colleagues, friends, and family, but chances are that you, too, live in a state that is governed differently—and better—thanks to his work. |
| The Missing Link Between Pedophiles and the Rest of Us Posted: 16 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT  Editor’s Note: This post was first published on July 16, 2010. It is republished here with the author’s permission. Like the dinner party guest who manages to put more feet in his mouth than he even has, the Vatican has equated pedophiles and those who seek the ordination of women, at least in terms of their place in Church doctrine. Yes, apparently priests who use their office to repeatedly sexually assault children are now officially akin to those who might dare to suggest women are capable of serving the Lord in the same manner as men. The mind reels. This whacked worldview is at least sort of cohesive. To do the Vatican Hustle, you just pair up any non-normative gender behavior with the devil (or his alleged earthly representatives), and dance! Damn to hell any women who might actively seek power, and tell the world that the root problem of the sexual abuse of young boys is gay men, not pedophilia. For those of you who haven’t been following the Vatican edition of Dancing With the Stars (Around Your Head), the issue of the ordination of women has arisen in this context because some have suggested that introducing women into the priesthood might help stem the problem of sexual abuse. And indeed, if the guys at the Vatican knew any sexology, they’d know there’s something to this idea. The fact is that adult women simply do not pursue sex with minors. Or at least such women are so very rare that you can fit them all easily on one website. For reasons we don’t yet understand, males are far, far more likely than females to have fetishes and sexual kinks.I realize that if the Vatican’s troupe suddenly had an interest in science, they probably would start with some nice, safe organic chemistry, or maybe a little astronomy (to avoid ever falling behind again), and not sexology. But seriously. The fact is that adult women simply do not pursue sex with minors. Or at least such women are so very rare that you can fit them all easily on one website (and their “victims” tend to be late teenagers who are physically mature and relatively capable of consent). For reasons we don’t yet understand, males are far, far more likely than females to have fetishes and paraphilias (sexual kinks). So, if you were nutty enough to want to wrangle up a group likely to manifest a lot of sexual problems, a good way to start would be to make it male-only and to take only those interested in (public) celibacy. Church leaders would also do well to get over the sexologically-naive idea that, because many of the abuse victims have been males in the 11-14 age range (i.e., they are pubescent boys, and not prepubescent little kids), their priest-abusers can’t be pedophiles, and so the priests must be gay men. Various Church leaders have implied that there is no transitional group between men who are into little boys (pedophiles) and men who are into men (gay men). In fact, there is now substantial evidence that men attracted to pubescent (as opposed to prepubescent) children form a recognizable sexual orientation group, termed hebephiles. Hebephiles are not sexually typical men who just happen to go for easy-pickin’s because they can’t get a real man or woman. Don’t get me wrong: There are some otherwise-sexually typical men, primarily attracted to adults, who will sexually abuse pubescent children (including their own children and step-children) because they can’t get enough of what they really want. But hebephiles are different. They show offense histories and laboratory arousal patterns indicating that their peak sexual arousal is to pubescent body types. In this way, they are discernible, as a group, from men who show offense histories and laboratory arousal patterns indicating peak sexual arousal to prepubescent children or to adults. A good deal of this research has been conducted by my colleague (and friend) Ray Blanchard of Canada’s Center for Addiction and Mental Health and the University of Toronto. Using an extraordinary compilation of data from thousands of men, Blanchard has convincingly shown that hebephiles consist of a sort of “missing link” between pedophiles (those attracted to prepubescent children) and teleiophiles (those of us attracted to sexually mature people). Blanchard’s data clearly indicate that the sexual orientation of males (at least) isn’t just composed of the sex of their partners, it’s also composed of the age of their partners. Blanchard presented his massive data collection at the twice-a-decade sexual orientation conference I attended at the University of Lethbridge last month, and those of us in the audience were stunned to see how well his data fit a mathematical model he developed to describe these components of male orientation. From these data, it was clear why Blanchard and colleagues have recommended changing the DSM entry on pedophilia to also formally recognize hebephilia. A study of offending priests commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice bears out the notion that many of the culprits in collars are in fact hebephiles. The study showed that “the largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14.” (The quotation is from page nine of the Executive Summary. The age breakdowns of victims, available on page 70 of section 4.3, also show that clear clustering in ages 11-14.) Objections to the formal recognition of hebephilia as a sexual disorder come from the quarters you might guess: hebephile activists who want to convince us all that pubescent children are really “mature,” so that the hebephile is just a socially-oppressed niche teleiophile who has a greater respect for the decision-making capability of your average 12-year-old than the rest of us; and defense attorneys and their paid expert witnesses who hope to convince judges and juries that their clients, abusers of pubescent children, are actually social-misfit teleiophiles who just haven’t been able to get any satisfaction, perhaps because they have “repressed homosexual urges.” I think we can implicitly add to the objectors to “pedohebephilic disorder” the Vatican, which seems to want to equate a priest having sex with a boy of 12 with a priest having sex with a man of 42. Personally, I think those with any reasonable objectivity who look at the data and at the stimuli used for the laboratory analysis will agree that a sexual orientation directed at pubescents is simply not the same as a sexual orientation directed at post-pubescent individuals. But I expect that the Vatican will be as happy to ignore this science as they are to ignore the science that indicates men do not, in fact, have one fewer rib than women, and that the characteristic lump in a man’s neck is not, in fact, a piece of fruit. Oh well. We can’t ask law enforcement to make women priests, but it’s at least clear why we must rely on law enforcement, and not the Church, to deal with sexual abusers. And we must ask law enforcement to take seriously the science. |
| What Happens if (or When) Edward Snowden Faces a Jury? Posted: 16 Jul 2013 06:54 AM PDT  What happens if the U.S. manages to catch NSA leak fugitive Edward Snowden? At Lawfare, Columbia law professor David Pozen looks at just how surreal a Snowden trial would get:
A hypothetical Snowden trial could exclude jurors’ views about leaks? Why not: Compare this comment from Ohio State law professor Joshua Dressler on the seemingly distant George Zimmerman murder trial, in the Wall Street Journal:
Pozen argues that Snowden’s lawyers might push the opposite strategy, keeping national security out of the discussion, but playing with poll-tested public opinion on privacy—even though privacy law in theory wouldn’t be part of any of Snowden’s crimes. “Because it is so secretive, the N.S.A. must tend carefully to its legitimacy. Conspiracy theories and Big Brother fears always swirl at the margins of respectable opinion, threatening to go mainstream.” The good professor’s little thought exercise concludes that trying Snowden might well backfire on the White House by putting the NSA on trial outside the courthouse, to the point of obscuring whatever legal maneuvering might be underway inside.
Though the two issues (let’s call them security, comma, personal and security, comma, national) are vastly different discussions, the emerging debate surrounding the Zimmerman case—the close-focus legal one around the limitations of the U.S. court system and the broader one about what was really at issue—squares pretty well with what Pozen imagines for Snowden’s day in court. Though catching Snowden would likely help the White House’s effort to discourage future leakers, it’s not at all clear that prosecuting him wouldn’t shine light on the environment in which the incident occurred, more than on the incident itself. According to this useful report from NPR, the Zimmerman case could result in a Constitutional challenge to Florida’s so-called “stand your ground” law, despite a jury’s belief that George Zimmerman didn’t murder Trayvon Martin. Similarly, Snowden could be found guilty of leaking classified information—which he’s already admitted publicly that he did. Letting him explain his reasons for doing so from a witness stand, however, might be worse for the NSA than the leaks themselves have been, Pozen suggests. |
| How NASA Hopes to Better Monitor and Control Our Water Supply in the West Posted: 16 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT  One brisk morning this April, Thomas Painter, a snow and water scientist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stood on the tarmac at Mammoth Yosemite Airport, in California's Sierra Nevada, watching as a Twin Otter taxied down the runway. The plane powered up and took off into a crisp headwind, beelining northwest toward a stretch of snowy peaks that glowed pink in the morning sun. Painter, who is 47, tan, and Coloradan, gazed at the aircraft a moment longer, then turned toward me and flashed a bright smile. "Now it's time to nerd out," he said. The plane carried a laser and a highly sensitive spectrometer, along with two of Painter's researchers. They would be running flights back and forth over the Tuolumne River basin all morning and, if the weather held, into the afternoon. At the end of the day, they'd have a ton of data to answer some basic questions about the snowpack in the basin, which feeds San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. Like, how much water is up there exactly? And when is it coming down? Without water, you'd have no Silicon Valley, no wine, no Tesla, no Vegas.This is good stuff to know if you want to water the cities, farms, and fields of the American West. And not just for gardens and golf courses. Without water, you'd have no Silicon Valley, no wine, no Tesla, no Vegas. The West gets most of its water from moisture captured as snow in its mountains, mainly the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and Wyoming, and the Sierra Nevada in California. Every year the snow melts and swells the rivers, which in turn refill reservoirs big and small that store and distribute water across a vast, overpopulated desert. Until now, snow has been measured by surveyors on skis and through a system of sensors called snow pillows—flat plates of steel in mountain meadows that weigh the snow as it comes down and send data via satellite to water managers. But these sparsely distributed snow pillows only exist at low elevations, around 7,000 to 8,000 feet, where they are easy to install and maintain. And they tell us little about higher-elevation snowpack, which melts latest in the spring. "When you think about the size of the Sierra, you're measuring a football field based on putting a pencil in one place and making a measurement," said Bruce McGurk, a former water manager for the Hetch Hetchy and a consultant on Painter's project. "That's scary. That's not good statistics." Every year there's a lot of head scratching by the folks who open and close the valves on the dams. The current snow-survey-and-forecast system, in place since the 1960s, is getting harder to rely on, McGurk said. "The temperature patterns are changing. Climate change is having quite an effect on the accuracy of those forecasts. We also see bigger droughts and bigger floods. The record-setting dry season this spring, since January, is an example of how this system keeps changing." Painter's plane, which he calls the "Airborne Snow Observatory," is equipped with a LIDAR, a thick-beamed laser that rapidly pulses over the snow, pinging back readings that, when compared against baseline data from the pre-snow autumn, give Painter the snow depth, within 10 centimeters of variance. The spectrometer gives him what is called snow albedo, a measure of how reflective the snow is. This will tell him how much of the sun's energy is absorbed by the snow. The whiter the snow is, the more it reflects that energy. The darker it is, the more it absorbs and the faster it melts. Combine this information with ground measurements of how dense the snow is—how much water it contains—and you can accurately predict what's in store for spring. Having that kind of information will help water managers, McGurk said. It will help them hold on to water in droughts and release water in wet periods to prevent floods. The April flight was an experiment. Painter hopes to start flights over the entire Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains soon—because Mother Nature is starting to act like a crazy aunt. While Painter's plane was in the air, McGurk was in the mountains, measuring the snow at a place called Gin Flat. What he saw up there was worrisome. "Snow is left in mounds here and there, [but] there's a lot of bare ground," he told me. "The birds were singing and the frogs were croaking. This April 1 snow survey is supposed to have a lot of snow, the maximum for the year, and instead it looks like it's May 1." |
| Children’s Picture Books Retain Stubborn Stereotypes Posted: 16 Jul 2013 04:00 AM PDT  It is a fictional portrait of a world in which traditional family roles prevail. Mothers do the caring and nurturing, while fathers are the providers who work outside the home. The amusingly anachronistic Leave It to Beaver? Sure. But the description also fits some of today's most acclaimed picture books for children. That's the conclusion of a recently published study, which finds sex roles in these illustrated stories have been surprising stagnant over the decades. "Children's picture books embrace tradition," reports a research team led by Shepherd University sociologist Amy DeWitt. "Mothers are much more likely to be portrayed nurturing and caring for children, and men are more likely to work outside of the home. "These depictions have not significantly changed over time, so that these storybook characters often inhabit a bygone, male breadwinner-female homemaker era." "If children continue to be exposed to portrayals that suggest opportunities for women are limited to the home, and that men provide, their aspirations and independence will be muted."DeWitt and her colleagues analyzed a random sample of 300 "easy children's books" from the more than 1,400 listed in the Children's Catalog. That directory features volumes "selected by an advisory committee of distinguished librarians" and is "used to aid school and community libraries in selecting quality books," the researchers write in the journal Sex Roles. They divided the books by their date of publication, starting with a group of 50 published between 1900 and 1959. Additional groups of 50 were chosen from each of the final four decades of the 20th century. A final 50 were chosen from books published in the year 2000. The researchers looked for specific parental actions and noted whether they were taken by a mother or father. They were broken down into nurturing behaviors (such as expressing affection for or comforting the child), care-giving behaviors (such as preparing meals or cleaning the child), disciplining behaviors (such as spanking or scolding), companionship (such as playing with the child or taking him or her on a recreational outing), and working outside the home. Not surprisingly, they found a large amount of gender stereotyping. But contrary to their expectations, this tendency did not wane significantly over time. "Mothers in the books were more likely than fathers to perform almost every nurturing behavior, including verbal and physical expressions of love, encouraging, praising and listening," the researchers write. Similarly, mothers outperformed fathers on every care-giving behavior. Fathers, on the other hand, were "much more likely than mothers to participate in both physical and non-physical play." And they were much more likely to be portrayed as breadwinners: 26.6 percent of fathers worked outside the home, compared to 5.6 percent of mothers. The researchers report these stereotypes have softened over the decades, but only slightly and sporadically. "Fathers in books published in 2000 exhibited increased care-giving and nurturing from previous time periods, and mothers exhibited increased work outside of the home," DeWitt and her colleagues write. "But the latest trends lack statistical significance, because similar performance peaks occurred in the 1970s depictions, only to drop in subsequent periods." Specifically, in the '70s—the era when gender roles began to seriously be questioned by large chunks of society—fathers in these picture books were more likely to be portrayed as caring and nurturing. However, this trend "leveled off in later decades," they report. The researchers argue that the stubbornness of gender stereotypes matters because young children aren't simply being entertained by such books—they're being socialized. "Consistently seeing mothers in the nurturing and care-giving roles and fathers fulfilling the provider role may impress upon children what role performances are ultimately expected of them as men and women," they write. "If children, especially girls, continue to be exposed to portrayals that suggest opportunities for women are limited to the home, and that men provide, their aspirations and independence will be muted." See Jane. See Jane read her first book. See Jane’s ambitions recede. |
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