Category Archives: Post Human

Promoting an economic summit in a nation jailing LGBT people is not living up to the self-stated ideals of the State Department.

On February 27, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry swore in the nations first special envoy for the human rights of LGBT persons, a new diplomatic post created to contend against homophobia worldwide. At a posh D.C. reception, Kerry made familiar promises. In country after country, LGBT communities face discriminatory laws and practices that attack their dignity, undermine their safety, and violate their human rights. Thats unacceptable. And we believe it has to change.

The night before, police arrested seven people in Cairo. The Egyptian governments pet press organs trumpeted that they were dangerous transsexuals (some may indeed be transgender, though their identities remain unclear). The vice squad seized them in a nightclub but proudly proclaimed it had monitored them through fake social media profiles, part of a police strategy to infiltrate LGBT communities and exploit peoples desperate isolation. The victims face charges of debauchery, the term in Egyptian law for sex between men. Theyve been jailed since then; were told the guards have mistreated them and denied them food. They are only the latest victims of a huge state crackdown on alleged trans and gay people that has imprisoned more than 150 since 2013.

John Kerry now heads to Egypt, to raise money for the government that jailed them, at an economic summit there this week.

The irony is blatant; the hypocrisy, shameful. In 2011, Hillary Clinton, Kerrys predecessor, declared that gay rights are human rights, and the Obama White House loudly moved those rights to the fore of its diplomacy. For Clintons presidential ambitions and for an administration that needs gay voters and donors the international initiative has been great domestic politics. Abroad, where it counts, it sometimes looks less impressive. Kerry is happy to throw LGBT peoples freedoms out the window while courting the Egyptian regime; his casual self-contradiction shows how little the promises matter. For Obamas foreign policy, LGBT rights like human rights in general are a talking point, not a priority.

The human rights situation in Egypt is appalling. Since now-President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took power in a 2013 military coup, jail cells have swelled with over 40,000 political prisoners. Courts hand down life sentences or death sentences for the simple act of holding a demonstration. The government threatens to shut down Egypts embattled civil society, including its few, brave human rights groups. A presidential decree means that activists who accept foreign funding could face life in prison. Since the coup, security forces have killed over 1,500 protesters, mostly Islamists mostly in cold blood.

The regime adeptly manipulates the language of the war on terror. It claims its brutal repression is needed to combat radicalism and protect security. A recent report in Mada Masr one of the few remaining independent press outlets in Egypt shows how, instead, the heavy-handed suppression of dissent feeds extremist movements by leaving citizens no political outlet for discontent. The ongoing arrests of alleged LGBT people, however, are the clearest if cruelest refutation of the antiterrorism claims. Accused trans women and alleged gay men are no terrorists. They pose no threat to the state. The public campaign to extirpate them is about power, not security. Its an attempt to revive the reach and reputation of the police, by publicizing their onslaught against an unpopular minority. Its part of resuscitating the old Mubarak dictatorships machineries of control.

The U.S. watches these brutalities with only perfunctory protest. America gives almost $1.5 billion in annual assistance to Egypt, almost all of it aid to the military that wields the levers of repression. Kerry has personally fought attempts to tie that military largesse to democratic reform.

This weeks trip to Egypt, however, is a particularly gross insult to human rights activists still carrying on the struggle there. The Sisi regime is holding a vast economic summit to draw foreign investment. The investment opportunities on offer skyscrapers, tourist resorts, new desert cities promise little help to most Egyptians. But Sisi needs the appearance of attracting international business to give a despairing populace hope he can revive a decayed economy. The summit is about legitimating the dictatorship, not uplifting Egypts millions of poor.

Kerry is coming to give his credibility to the show. Hes putting the full weight of the United States behind the fundraising efforts of a repressive military government.

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Op-ed: John Kerry Needs to Do the Right Thing in Egypt

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On 21 March 1960, the apartheid police opened fire on a crowd of protestors in Sharpeville, killing 69 people. Five decades on, post-apartheid South Africa remembers these events on Human Rights Day. The government has attempted to depoliticise the event, shifting the day from one that is associated with the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) to one that South Africans generally commemorate, irrespective of their political persuasions.

Yet the annual commemoration of this day did not stop a post-apartheid massacre from taking place in Marikana. It did not stop the ejection of the Economic Freedom Fighters from Parliament en masse even before they had become disruptive.

It did not stop the State Security Ministry from insulting the public's intelligence with a nonsense excuse for why cellphone signals were jammed in the National Assembly chamber. It has not stopped the State Security Agency (SSA) from announcing that it intends to investigate, on the smell of an oilrag, the claims that several public and political figures are Central Intelligence Agency spies.

It did not stop the indiscriminate arrests of women in Chaneng in the North-West on Human Rights Day in 2013. Predictably, charges against them of illegal gathering and public violence were withdrawn for lack of evidence over a year, and many court appearances, later. It has not stopped this all too familiar cycle from unfolding in Thembelihle in the past two weeks.

The security cluster's stunning disrespect for basic human rights gives credence to arguments made by the PAC and others that, in being depoliticised, the day has been rendered irrelevant and commemorated as a ritual with little meaningful content. So what should a more meaningful agenda for Human Rights Day look like? Based on the events of the last few weeks, here are four agenda points for the day:

Firstly, the political intelligence mandate of the SSA should be removed entirely during upcoming debates on a new intelligence policy and the SSA Bill. To its credit, Parliament did narrow this mandate somewhat during legislative amendments in 2011, but it clearly still remains overbroad in its everyday practice.

While it could be (and has been) argued that political contests could threaten national security if they turn ugly, it has become abundantly clear that the SSA will not interpret this expanded mandate impartially. It will inevitably lead to politically important but inconvenient figures such as Greenpeace leader Kumi Naidoo, Public Protector Thuli Madonsela and others being investigated, rather than those who really need investigating.

Secondly, the SSA and the National Prosecuting Authority should do something about the real threats to national security, such as the xenophobic attacks and the growing number of political and whistleblower assassinations in the country.

It is a national disgrace, but an unsurprising one, that while the security cluster has committed itself to fast-tracking the investigations and prosecutions of those engaged in disruptive protests, the investigation into the burning to death of Mozambican Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, and other victims of xenophobic attacks, have gone nowhere. This is in spite of the Sunday Times having claimed to have tracked down eyewitnesses to Nhamuave's gruesome murder. The security cluster's lack of seriousness in dealing with xenophobia conveys the message that human rights belong to South Africans and non-African foreigners only.

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South Africa: What Would a Meaningful Agenda for Human Rights Day Look Like?

A new set of search tools called Memex, developed by DARPA, peers into the deep Web to reveal illegal activity

Hidden in Plain Sight: Investigators are using DARPA's Memex technology pull information from the so-called "deep Web" that can be used to find and prosecute human traffickers. Courtesy of PhotoDisc/ Getty Image.

In November 2012 a 28-year-old woman plunged 15 meters from a bedroom window to the pavement in New York City, a devastating fall that left her body broken but alive. The accident was an act of both desperation and hopethe woman had climbed out of the sixth-floor window to escape a group of men who had been sexually abusing her and holding her captive for two days. Four months ago the New York County District Attorneys Office sent Benjamin Gaston, one of the men responsible for the womans ordeal, to prison for 50-years-to-life. A key weapon in the prosecutors arsenal, according to the NYDAs Office: an experimental set of Internet search tools the U.S. Department of Defense is developing to help catch and lock up human traffickers. Although the Defense Department and the prosecutors office had not publicly acknowledged using the new tools, they confirmed to Scientific American that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agencys (DARPA) Memex program provided advanced Internet search capabilities that helped secure the conviction. DARPA is creating Memex to scour the Internet in search of information about human trafficking, in particular advertisements used to lure victims into servitude and to promote their sexual exploitation. Much of this information is publically available, but it exists in the 90 percent of the so-called deep Web that Google, Yahoo and other popular search engines do not index. That leaves untouched a multitude of information that may not be valuable to the average Web surfer but could provide crucial information to investigators. Google would not confirm that it indexes no more than 10 percent of the Internet, a statistic that has been widely reported, but a spokesperson pointed out that the companys focus is on whether its search results are relevant and useful in answering users' queries, not whether it has indexed 100 percent of the data on the Internet. Much of this deep Web information is unstructured data gathered from sensors and other devices that may not reside in a database that can be scanned or crawled by search engines. Other deep Web data comes from temporary pages (such as advertisements for illegal sexual and similarly illicit services) that are removed before search engines can crawl them. Some areas of the deep Web are accessible using only special software such as the Tor Onion Router, which allows people to secretly share information anonymously via peer-to-peer connections rather than going through a centralized computer server. DARPA is working with 17 different teams of researchersfrom both companies and universitiesto craft Internet search tools as part of the Memex program that give government, military and businesses new ways to analyze, organize and interact with data pulled from this larger pool of sources. Law and order DARPA has said very little about Memex and its use by law enforcement and prosecutors to investigate suspected criminals. According to published reports, including one from Carnegie Mellon University, the NYDAs Office is one of several law enforcement agencies that have used early versions of Memex software over the past year to find and prosecute human traffickers, who coerce or abduct peopletypically women and childrenfor the purposes of exploitation, sexual or otherwise. Memexa combination of the words memory and index first coined in a 1945 article for The Atlanticcurrently includes eight open-source, browser-based search, analysis and data-visualization programs as well as back-end server software that perform complex computations and data analysis. Such capabilities could become a crucial component of fighting human trafficking, a crime with low conviction rates, primarily because of strategies that traffickers use to disguise their victims identities (pdf). The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates there are about 2.5 million human trafficking victims worldwide at any given time, yet putting the criminals who press them into service behind bars is difficult. In its 2014 study on human trafficking (pdf) the U.N. agency found that 40 percent of countries surveyed reported less than 10 convictions per year between 2010 and 2012. About 15 percent of the 128 countries covered in the report did not record any convictions. Evidence of criminals peddling such services online is hard to pinpoint because of the use of temporary ads and peer-to-peer connections within the deep Web. Over a two-year time frame traffickers spent about $250 million to post more than 60 million advertisements, according to DARPA-funded research. Such a large volume of Web pages, many of which are not posted long enough to be crawled by search engines, makes it difficult for investigators to connect the dots. This is, in part, because investigators typically search for evidence of human trafficking using the same search engines that most people use to find restaurant reviews and gift ideas. Hence the Memex project. Inside Memex At DARPAs Arlington, Va., headquarters Memex program manager Christopher White provided Scientific American with a demonstration of some of the tools he and his colleagues are developing. Criminal investigations often begin with little more than a single piece of information, such as an e-mail address. White plugged a demo address into Google to show how investigators currently work. As expected, he received a page of links from the portion of the Internet that Google crawlsalso referred to as the surface Webprioritized by a Google algorithm attempting to deliver the most relevant information at the top. After clicking through several of these links, an investigator might find a phone number associated with the e-mail address. Thus far, White had pulled the same information from the Internet that most people would see. But he then faced a next step all Web users confront: sifting through pages of hyperlinks with very little analytical information available to tie together different search results. Just as important as Memexs ability to pull information from a broader swath of the Internet are its tools that can identify relationships among different pieces of data. This helps investigators create data maps used to detect spatial and temporal patterns. One example could be a hub-and-spoke visualization depicting hundreds of Web sites connected to a single sex services e-mail, phone number or worker. > > Scientific American exclusive: A sneak peek at Memex data maps

White also showed how MEMEX can generate color-coded heat maps of different countries that locate where the most sex advertisements are being posted online at any given time. These patterns and others could help reveal associations that investigators might otherwise miss, says White, who began working with DARPA in 2010 as a consultant developing data-science tools to support the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Search results The technology has already delivered results since DARPA began introducing Memex to select law enforcement agencies about a year ago. The NYDA says that its new Human Trafficking Response Unit now uses DARPAs Memex search tool in every human trafficking case it pursues. Memex has played a role in generating at least 20 active sex trafficking investigations and has been applied to eight open indictments in addition to the Gaston conviction, according to the NYDAs Office. Memex helps us build evidence-based prosecutions, which are essential to fighting human trafficking, says Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. In these complex cases prosecutors cannot rely on traumatized victims alone to testify. We need evidence to corroborate or, in some cases, replace the need for the victim to testify. Different components of Memex are helping law enforcement crack down on trafficking elsewhere in the country as well. A detective in Modesto, Calif., used a specific piece of software called Traffic Jam to follow up on a tip about one particular victim from Nebraska and ended up identifying a sex trafficker who was traveling with prostitutes across the Midwest and West. The investigation culminated in his arrest. Traffic Jam, developed independently of DARPA in 2011 by Carnegie Mellon University researchers and later spun off into a company called Marinus Analytics, enabled investigators to gather evidence by quickly reviewing ads the trafficker posted for several locales. DARPA has since awarded Carnegie Mellon a three-year, $3.6-million contract to enhance Traffic Jams basic search capabilities as part of Memex, with machine-learning algorithms that can analyze results in depth, according to the university. Carnegie Mellon researchers are also studying ways to apply computer vision to searches in a way that helps investigators identify images with similar elementssuch as furniture from the same hotel room that appears in multiple imageseven if the images themselves are not identical, says Jeff Schneider. Schneider is the project's principal investigator and a research professor in the Auton Lab at the universitys School of Computer Science, which studies statistical data mining. Furniture in a hotel room, for example, could help law enforcement identify the location of trafficking operations. Vance and other law enforcement officials welcome such advances. Technology alone wont solve cases, but it certainly helps, he says. Weve had the most success with this effort when we married traditional field intelligence with the information this tool provides. White agrees that DARPAs technology is a supplement to other investigative methods, including interviews with victims. In addition to targeting human trafficking, law enforcement officials are finding that they can tap Memex to crack down on other, related crimes, including trafficking in guns and drugs

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Human Traffickers Caught on Hidden Internet

Lost his notes: Attorney-General Department Secretary Chris Moraitis before a Senate committee last month. Photo: Andrew Meares

The humble Post-It note has emerged as a powerful weapon used by the Australian Public Service to avoid Parliamentary scrutiny and Freedom of Information laws.

The use of the ubiquitous yellow stationery has become widespread in Commonwealth workplaces as an aide memoir for bureaucrats which, unlike formal file notes, can "fall off" official records when the information threatens to embarrass their department.

Post-it notes can fall off files. Photo: iStock Photos

Record-keeping in government departments were thrown into the spotlight last week when one of the nations' most senior public servants told a Senate Committee that he had lost his notes of a highly politically sensitive meeting.

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Opposition and Greens senators seeking access to the file note kept by Attorney General's Department Secretary Chris Moraitis were disappointed when the Canberra veteran told them the document, notes of a meeting with Human Rights Commission Chief Gillian Triggs, had been in a briefcase he had lost.

But former APS insiders have told Fairfaxthe requirements for public servants to keep full notes are often "observed" by jotting relevant information on Post-It notes and sticking them to the file.

"The benefit of a Post-it note is that it can fall off a folio in a file whenever you want it to fall off," one veteran of several departments said.

"It's not FOI-able then, there's no form of record.

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How the Post-it note helps the public service evade scrutiny

Mary Ann Lim peels aways a widely believed myth shrouding prostitution in Malaysia and comes face-to-face with the grim reality of human trafficking.

The glamour, the attention, the praises, the popularity, and the ridiculously expensive items all the good things that come with money as a girl thinks about the benefits of her job while she strolls the streets of Kuala Lumpur with her brand spanking new Herms handbag.

Regardless of how much it cost her, it will be easy to earn it back. She sighs as she pulls out a Louis Vuitton purse to pay for her Starbucks Frappuccino; it will be another long night at work though.

Whats the catch? She sells sex in the back streets of Jalan Chow Kit for a living.

The scenario above is a huge misconception the common person has about prostitutes. For one, someone working in Chow Kit Road wont be able to afford a Hermes handbag.

This would be especially for a sex worker who works in Malaysia after having been cheated by an agent who promised her a good life here. A better life for a woman and the occasional man she may have here in our homeland when compared to the rural life they were plucked out from.

The subject of prostitution caught my interest when I read about high-class Japanese courtesans in the 17th Century who were sold to brothels when they were as young as five.

This then prompted me to look into what our country has to offer in the worlds oldest profession. I admit I was under the impression that prostitutes earned tremendous amounts of easy money, seeing as I lived quite a sheltered lifestyle for the past 21 years. That lifestyle didnt require me to venture out into dark alleys which housed dodgy hotels.

Imagine my utter shock and horror when I was walking with my mother to KFC one afternoon not long ago in my hometown. At the entrance of an old run-down hotel next to this popular fast food joint sat a couple of saggy old ladies.

Ma, whyre there aunties sitting there? Do people even book hotels like these anymore? I innocently asked as I whispered into my mothers ear.

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Misconception about the Worlds Oldest Profession

Mount Everest base camp. Photo by Flickr user Kyle Taylor.

For every moneyed thrill-seeker who thinks climbing Mount Everest is a novel post-college adventure, there is a mound of human waste sitting on top of the mountain to account for their privilege. According to Reuters, the NepalMountaineering Association is apparently really concerned about the ever-growing volume of shit piling up on Mount Everest, caused by the more than 700 people a year who spend two months clamboring up its sides in search of a sense of purpose and a really sick Instagram photo.

There are four camps situated along the route to the top,and around each one there are heaps and heaps of poo hidden beneath the snow. Climbers usually dig holes to do their number twos. Over the years, this method of disposal has acumulated an unhealthy amount of poo, which now sits right under the surface, making the mountain a petri dish of fecally transmitted diseases.

It is a health hazard and the issue needs to be addressed, said one sherpa to Reuters.

This poo problem is part of a larger issue regarding trash on the mountain. The Nepalese governments mountaineering department already enforces rules that require each climber to come down with a bag of garbage weighing at least 18 pounds. It will be more difficult to convince people to carry around a bag of human shit for two months, although some more consious climbers already do so.

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Human Poop is Ruining Mount Everest

GOLDEN About 60 Jefferson County children most of them girls are either being sold for sex or at high risk of becoming sex-trafficking victims, the county district attorney's office says.

Those kids are being exploited not far from the public's view through Internet advertising sites and in motel rooms lining busy thoroughfares. Young girls living on the streets, many of whom are runaways from abusive homes and whose numbers are growing, have become "walking targets."

"That's unconscionable," said District Attorney Peter Weir. "We have an absolute responsibility to do what we can on behalf of those kids."

Weir's office last month created the first-of-its-kind unit for a Colorado district attorney's office aimed at helping at-risk children before they become victims. The office is partnering with police and representatives from the county's department of human services to battle child sex trafficking one case at a time.

Many law enforcement agencies in Colorado and across the country try to battle sex trafficking. What sets Jefferson County's unit apart from others is its progressive identification tool and a "team-based" approach of equal parts prevention and prosecution.

"We recognized that law enforcement, to a large extent, was not aware of the extent of the problem and did not have the resources to dedicate to addressing these issues," Weir said in an interview last week. "It does take some special expertise to investigate and some special expertise to prosecute."

Peter Weir says, "We have an absolute responsibility to do what we can on behalf of those kids." (RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post)

The unit wants to set an example in Colorado at a time when trafficking is becoming more recognized and after new statutes went into effect in July aligning state laws with federal ones. Weir's office played a prominent role in the writing of those new statutes.

Too often, those trying to stop human trafficking struggle with poor interagency communication.

"I think what's great about the entire effort is that it is meant to be comprehensive," said Amanda Finger, executive director of the Denver-based Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking. "Jefferson County is really piloting this to see how it will work, to see how it will support youth and to see if it is something that other counties throughout the state that can model."

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Jefferson County is battling sex trafficking, one child at a time

The United States has for the first time named an international envoy for gay rights to help fight violence and discrimination around the world.

The State Department named Randy Berry to the post. He is a longtime foreign service officer and currently the consul general to the Netherlands.

In a statement Monday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, "defending and promoting the human rights of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] persons is at the core of our commitment to advancing human rights globally - the heart and conscience of our diplomacy."

He said a specific priority for Berry will be to work to overturn laws that criminalize consensual same-sex conduct in more than 75 countries around the world.

"Too often, in too many countries, LGBT persons are threatened, jailed and prosecuted because of who they are or who they love. Too many governments have proposed or enacted laws that aim to curb freedom of expression, association, religion and peaceful protest," Kerry said.

He said Berry has served at U.S. posts across the world, including Nepal, New Zealand, Uganda, Bangladesh, Egypt and South Africa. He described him as a "motivator" and "leader," and said "most importantly for this effort, he's got vision."

The Obama administration has made the protection of gay rights part of its effort to promote human rights around the world.

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US Names First Envoy for Gay Rights

CRYSIS 3 part 1 Post Human
Video walkthroughs: http://www.gameanyone.com.

By: MGW channel

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CRYSIS 3 part 1 Post Human - Video

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) March 07, 2015

Id is Latin for it, opened Bryan W. Brickner, so Make It Happen, the theme for this years International Womens Day, can also mean Make Id Happen, a focus on making things like water, food and shelter (animal basics) international priorities for all of us.

In Make Id Happen: International Womens Day and Hannah Arendt Footnotes #2, new on the Bryan William Brickner Blog, utilitarianism, the famed theory of Jeremy Bentham, is noted for its vacuous political theory. In the second part of the series on The Human Condition (1958), Brickner highlights Arendts book for its 21st century political applicability.

In todays post, Arendt is only footnoting, Brickner offered, speaking casually in a passing way, about the utter vacuum within Benthams utilitarianism where nothing is ever useful.

Arendt notes, Brickner followed, that when Bentham derived his happiness principle from the utility principle, he divorced it from usage; she shows he had to in order to preserve a morality a right and wrong.

This divorce exposes a making culprit (the ego), Brickner continued, and this too is Arendt as The Human Condition is a review of the politics of making and ends up asking: Is all of our making the problem?

Arendt builds on the distinction between homo faber and animal rationale, closed Brickner, as she questions the making human (homo faber) as our future and suggests we take a more basic look at ourselves through the lens of animal rationale.

Brickner has a 1997 political science doctorate from Purdue University and is the author of several political theory books, including: The Promise Keepers: Politics and Promises (1999), Article the first of the Bill of Rights (2006), and Shivitti: A Review of Ka-Tzetnik 135633s Vision (2015). He also writes political fiction, such as the novella thereafter (2013), and is the publisher of The Cannabis Papers: A citizens guide to cannabinoids (2011) and The Bryan William Brickner Blog, a resource for the political science of constitutions and the biological science of receptors.

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Make Id Happen: International Womens Day and Hannah Arendt Footnotes #2 ~ New on the Bryan William Brickner Blog