Author: Dish Staff

Slacktivist Inc

by Dish Staff

Nithin Coca considers the economics of petition sites:

Make no mistake, online petitions are a business too. In fact, the financial model of Change.org, which reportedly has revenue in the millions, mimics those of Silicon Valley startups. Offer something for free, then sell preferential access. “Sponsored” petitions are highlighted on the site, and what Change.org offers clients is its audience: some 75 million names, who are nudged, through emails, social media, and other methods, to sign those petitions. With each click, Change.org makes a profit, and increases its clientele base. Clients are often organizations with deep pockets: Amnesty International, Sierra Club, and even the Democratic Party.

This profit model has allowed Change.org to grow rapidly and expand into new markets globally. There are other petition sites – the fellow profit-oriented Care2, nonprofits tools from Avaaz, 38 Degrees and Getup, and government-run ones like the White House’s We the People. All are dwarfed by Change.org in size as it turns into a behemoth, dominating petitions in the same way Google dominates search.

Sarah Albers despairs:

Local organizations, formerly the “authentic voice” of the community, have been all but eliminated in modern politics. The problem is not capitalism, but the lack of a meaningful way to act and influence others locally—namely, the absence of the intermediary social institutions of town, church, home; in a word, place. … Today’s political sphere has been atomized. The public has no voice, no agency unless it somehow finds a way to leverage its power in Washington indirectly. This is where slacktivism is so appealing. A click, a share, and you feel that you have influenced something, somewhere.

The Plight Of The Yazidis Isn’t Over

by Dish Staff

While the Yazidis who fled their hometown of Sinjar and sought refuge in the mountains to the north are apparently no longer under siege by ISIS and hopefully will be able to escape to safety soon, Kimberly Dozier points to the others, for whom no rescue is forthcoming:

ISIS has taken hundreds, if not thousands, of Yezidis prisoner, and threatened them with slavery and rape. But a few of the prisoners have smuggled in cellphones and are reaching out—pleading for help. In desperate phone calls to relatives in Iraq and in the U.S., they’re begging for rescue from the prisons, schools or mosques across northern Iraq, where they are being held by ISIS militants.

They all tell a similar tale of horror:

families fleeing on foot caught by militants in trucks and cars. The men are then dragged away at gunpoint from their wives and children, never to be seen again. The younger unmarried women are being told they will be forcibly married to ISIS fighters. Some are taken away and raped and a few have even been sold at Mosul’s main market. The married women aren’t sure what will happen to them and their children—they fear they will be sold into slavery.

Matt Cetti-Roberts spoke to some Yazidis who managed to escape when ISIS overran Sinjar but whose families were not so fortunate. Resaleh Shirgany recounts:

I left my mother. I had never met her before because my parents were divorced, and four other family. [Crying.] They were living in the the Al Jazeera [housing] complex in the northwest of Sinjar. It was the third day after da’ash arrived. They discovered where they were living and my mother was one of five families that were raped. First they raped the women in front of the men, they then killed the husbands while the wives watched and then they killed the women. It was a massacre there. [Crying.] …

The same day when we ran away [from the mountain], my two female cousins who were behind us in a car as we left were captured by da’ash. One of them was pregnant and with her husband and her brother-in-law. They were stopped in the middle of the street. They raped them in front of the people that were with them and I could see it from the back window of the car. Suddenly everyone was gone. They took them away.

Previous Dish on the plight of the Yazidis here.

A Cure For Ebola? Ctd

by Dish Staff

Doctors Without Borders physician Armand Sprecher argues that it would be unwise to administer the unproven Ebola treatment ZMapp to every West African patient:

If the patients have a more than seventy percent chance of dying, why not try something, even if it is not guaranteed to work? One reason is that doctors have a limited amount of time that we can spend with our patients. … There is not a lot of extra time to experiment with unproven therapies. And there are many such therapies. Dozens are brought to my attention with every outbreak. Some have shown promise in rodent models, others in test tubes, and some are of only theoretical benefit. Experience has shown that such potential almost always fails to produce a benefit in non-human primate studies, our best analog of human disease. We cannot subject our patients to all of the possible things that might work. We have to choose wisely.

He adds:

It is not because these drugs are expensive or intended just for North Americans and Europeans that they are unavailable to Africans. They are unavailable because they are not yet ready.

For the antibodies used for the two Americans, only a handful of treatments exist in the world. None of these drugs has gone through the clinical trials needed for their approval for use by drug regulatory agencies. Médecins Sans Frontières hopes to play a role in facilitating the eventual trials that will bring these drugs to market, and from there to see to it that they are made available to the patients that need them.

Meanwhile, Jason Millman examines how public health organizations are working to incentivize companies to develop cures for diseases such as Ebola:

The [World Health Organization] has looked into a “prize fund” approach, among other ideas. Under this model, a centralized fund would reward drug manufacturers at the end of the drug development process or for hitting research and development milestones along the way.

The United States has its own efforts, too. In 2007, the Food and Drug Administration created a voucher program meant to encourage the development of cures for neglected diseases — if a company receives FDA approval for such a drug, the company would then receive a voucher to speed up the agency’s review time for another drug application. However, just four vouchers have reportedly been awarded under this program so far. The National Institutes of Health has also run the Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network since 2012 to try to fill in the funding gap. The NIH network is studying about 90 rare diseases at almost 100 U.S. and international academic institutions, according to an agency fact sheet.

On a related note, New Scientist‘s Andy Coghlan observers that the specific way Ebola kills “has only just been discovered.” He explains:

In essence, the virus blocks what would usually be an instant response to infection, paralyzing the body’s entire immune system … Normally, the body responds to infections by producing a substance called interferon, which acts as a fast-track message to white blood cells, telling them to mobilize genes and proteins. [Researcher Gaya] Amarasinghe’s team found that the Ebola virus produces a substance called VP24, which blocks the channel through which interferon usually travels, crippling the immune system. With its usual protective mechanisms knocked out, a cell is then defenseless against the virus. Amarasinghe says that drugs which target VP24 might provide alternative ways to combat the virus.

Recent Dish on Ebola here.

Spain’s Border Crisis

by Dish Staff

Tom Burridge notes that more than 1,200 Africans have crossed the Mediterranean into Spain this week. Reid Standish has details:

The summer months typically see large numbers of migrants crossing from Africa to Spain in search of asylum or illegal work. But according to the Spanish coast guard, this summer has been one of the worst on record because of calmer seas and lax policing by authorities in Morocco, which migrants use as their launching pad for Spain. Frontex, the European Union’s agency for external border security, told the Spanish daily El País on Wednesday that Moroccan authorities were probably turning a blind eye to the situation in order to alleviate their own migratory pressures, adding that Morocco’s police and coast guard had not been out on patrol since Monday.

Lauren Frayer calls it “the biggest mass migration push into Spain in decades”:

In addition to this week’s arrivals by sea, some 1,600 migrants have tried to scale fences that separate Morocco from Spain’s North African enclaves. Many of them couldn’t get across, since Spain recently fortified the fences with anti-climbing mesh. But on Wednesday, about 80 men managed to climb it, and got stuck atop a three-story-high fence, with border guards watching below, poised to grab them. After more than 10 hours in the August heat, they were helped down to safety — dehydrated and weak, but alive.

Don’t Talk Back To Bibi

by Dish Staff

Sarah Lazare explores Israel’s frightening crackdown on dissent during the Gaza war:

Journalists deemed critical of the war have faced job termination and censure. Prominent Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who has criticized the “dehumanization and demonization of the Palestinians,” hired a personal bodyguard after being attacked while broadcasting live from Ashkelon. Israeli Knesset member Yariv Levin, chair of the Likud-Beytenu coalition, recently called for Levy to stand trial for treason—a charge that, during war, carries a death sentence.

Knesset member Haneen Zoabi—a Palestinian citizen of Israel—has been suspended from most parliamentary activities for six months due to a statement she made about the still-unidentified kidnappers of three Israeli teen residents of West Bank settlements who were found dead in June. She said of the kidnappers, “they are people who see no other way to change their reality, so they are forced to use these means…at least until Israel wises up, and until Israeli society opens up and feels the pain of the other.” Meanwhile, numerous Knesset members calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and murder of Palestinian civilians have faced no formal censure from within Israeli government or the U.S.

In a sign of the times, young Israelis who elect to do national service – a civilian alternative to conscription in the IDF – will no longer be allowed to work at the human rights organization B’Tselem, which the national service chief has decreed “acts against the state”:

In a letter to B’Tselem director Hagai Elad, Sar-Shalom Jerbi said his decision came in the wake of the fighting in Gaza. B’Tselem, whose full name is B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, sought to broadcast the names of dead Palestinian children during the 29 days of fighting. “I feel obligated to exercise my authority and discontinue state assistance to an organization that acts against the state and its soldiers, who are literally sacrificing their lives in supreme heroism to ensure the welfare and security of all citizens from all sectors suffering for years from firing on their homes,” Jerbi wrote.

National civilian service has slots for volunteers at organizations on both sides of the political spectrum, such as anti-abortion group Efrat on the right and Hotline for Migrant Workers on the left. B’Tselem has one slot for a national-service volunteer, which it received in 2012. During discussions on a bill in January, Jerbi said national civilian service would be available “only to bodies that do not subvert the existence of the state as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Is Khamenei Done With The Nuclear Talks?

by Dish Staff

The Supreme Leader has always been pessimistic about the negotiations between Tehran and Washington, but in a statement yesterday, he called them “useless”:

Speaking to Foreign Ministry officials, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised Iranian negotiators who have conducted the talks with the United States and five other world powers, and he did not call for abandoning them. But he appeared to give succor to Iranian hard-liners who are adamantly opposed to discussions that could lead to a scaling back of Iran’s nuclear program, which they insist is intended for peaceful purposes only. The remarks came two days after President Hassan Rouhani stirred controversy in Iran by calling opponents of the talks “cowards” and telling them to go to hell. Rouhani, considered a moderate, has been pushing for an agreement that would end the crippling economic sanctions against Iran. Khamenei has consistently been far more skeptical about the talks.

Reza Haghighatnejad highlights the apparent split between Khamenei and Rouhani:

In sharp contrast with Khamenei’s address earlier today, Rouhani has talked about the impact of eased sanctions, the practicalities of working with the U.S. to combat Islamic State insurgents in Iraq, the greater opportunities to tackle world issues.  It’s not only the nuclear program that the world needs to talk about, Rouhani’s camp suggests, and last year’s historic phone call between Rouhani and U.S. president Barack Obama was a symbol Western media–and Rouhani—gladly embraced. Rouhani has even sought out public opinion within Iran, commissioning a poll earlier this year to identify just what the ordinary Iranian public thought about increased contact with the West.

At the same time, the administration has been keen to show itself as tough, practical and resolute: Javad Zarif has said one of the most important outcomes of talks has been an American shift: U.S. officials now have a clearer understanding of what they can expect from Iran. According to Zarif, he and chief negotiator Abbas Araghchi have ensured that no new sanctions have been imposed over the last year—a view dismissed today by Khamenei in front of the world’s most influential diplomats. “They say these sanctions aren’t new, but actually they are,” Khamenei said, which proved that talks over sanctions have led to nothing.

Walter Russell Mead suspects that a “grand bargain” with Iran is a dangerous fantasy, regardless of our apparently aligned interests in Iraq:

[T]he perception that a breakthrough with Iran is just around the corner will encourage the President to slight or sacrifice the interests of traditional U.S. allies in the region. It will strengthen the hand of those in the Administration who tell the President that he should stay the course in the Middle East, pursuing a ‘grand bargain’ with Iran, and supporting ‘moderate Islamists’ and pro-Muslim Brotherhood governments in places like Qatar and Turkey, even if that alienates Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt.

If America takes this course, expect regional tensions to rise, rather than relax, even if things calm down in Baghdad. It’s not clear that the President’s goal of a grand bargain with Iran is within reach, or that it will deliver the kind of stability he hopes for. For one thing, it’s possible that the Iranians are less interested in reaching a pragmatic and mutually beneficial relationship with Washington than in using Obama’s hunger for a transformative and redeeming diplomatic success to lure him onto a risky and ultimately disastrous course.

This Snowden Profile Is Really About The NSA

by Dish Staff

James Bamford’s lengthy new profile of Edward Snowden, based on a series of in-person interviews in Moscow, purports to be a look at the leaker’s motivations but will more likely be remembered for its two new revelations about the NSA’s cyber-espionage activities. The first is that a cock-up at the NSA was responsible for the nationwide Internet outage Syria experienced in late 2012, not the Syrian government as everyone thought at the time:

One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible.

The bigger scoop, however, is about a program codenamed MonsterMind, with which the NSA is trying to automate the process of detecting, defeating, and striking back against cyberattacks:

The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country—a “kill” in cyber terminology. Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability:

Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That’s a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”

Yishai Schwartz pans the profile, which he says “reads like a release from a Snowden PR press office”, and Bamford’s “bewildering reluctance to ask any challenging questions at all”:

Bamford never asks why Snowden accepted—and even pursued—a series of high-level jobs in signals intelligence despite his misgivings. Bamford never pushes Snowden to face the moral complexity of his choices. And he never asks Snowden to explain whether it was responsible of him to release troves of information that not even he himself had seen. Most remarkably, Bamford seems unwilling to push Snowden on even his most outlandish claims, like Snowden’s insistence that he tried “to leave a trail of digital bread crumbs” so that his colleagues could determine what he had taken, prepare for future leaks, and mitigate damage. Alas, Snowden explains to a sympathetic Bamford, the NSA was simply too incompetent to decipher his clues. …

Now, national security isn’t quite Grimm’s Fairy Tales, nor is it a Dan Brown novel, so perhaps it might have made sense for Bamford to ask why Snowden chose this particular method for helping out his old colleagues at the NSA. And although Bamford is clearly enamored with Snowden’s brilliance (virtually the only family quotation about Snowden that Bamford thought worthy of inclusion was Snowden’s father’s proud mention of his son’s high IQ scores), it’s doubtful that Snowden’s attempts at helping were simply too clever for the combined powers of the American intelligence agencies. But again, Bamford doesn’t see fit to ask.

The piece reinforced Dreher’s sympathy for Snowden, though he acknowledges the moral dilemmas that Bamford largely elides:

If I had been in Snowden’s shoes, I might have done the same thing, out of fidelity to the moral law. As Augustine said, an immoral law is no law at all. At the same time, it is perfectly clear that a government riddled with even a thousand Snowdens, who believe they have the right to determine which of the government’s secrets to make public, could not function. Snowden may have had a clear moral mandate to become a whistleblower, but what about someone whose motives weren’t as pure as Snowden’s seem to have been? Where do you draw the line? In the case of the church, or Wall Street, I would cheer for any whistleblower who broke his (assumed) pledge of loyalty to expose grave injustice or serious wrongdoing. But national security is a more serious matter, and not one to be taken lightly. This is what troubles me about the Snowden case, even though my sympathies definitely lie with him.

Does This Look Like Humanitarian Aid To You?

by Dish Staff

Jeremy Bender scrutinizes the Russian aid convoy en route to eastern Ukraine:

The trucks of supplies have been joined by helicopters, surface-to-air missile systems, and possible anti-aircraft weapons systems. According to The Interpreter, this weapon [in the tweet above] is possibly a 9K22 Tunguska battery, which had been mounted onto a Kamaz truck. Tunguskas are anti-aircraft weapons that can fire both missiles and 30mm guns. They are capable of shooting down low-altitude aircraft, although the gun can also be used against ground troops. … The Russian convoy has raised a number of red flags, even aside from this heavy contingent of guns and armor. The convoy has failed to abide by conditions put in place by both Ukraine and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) — the convoy is traveling under the ICRC flag, yet the organization has not been able to verify the contents of the trucks.

If it really is just a humanitarian convoy and not a Trojan Horse as the Ukrainian government believes, Linda Kinstler considers what Russia stands to gain by sending aid to Ukraine:

Kremlin propaganda portrays the Kiev government as fascist junta that’s committing humanitarian atrocities to its own people, oligating Russia to step in and defend its brothers over the border. Rostov, the Russian town through which the convoy is rumored to be traveling, has been trumpeted in the Russian press as the place where some 13,000 Ukrainian refugees have fled – almost certainly a huge overestimation. A relative of mine who lives there told me that volunteers have been going door to door soliciting food donations for the refugees, and that the local population has been mobilized in support of Russia’s humanitarian mission. Now, Russians will be able to cheer on the humanitarian convoy as it passes through their towns, bolstering Putin’s already sky-high approval ratings at home. It will also be a welcome sight for those in Ukraine who feel abandoned by Poroshenko’s government. “The population of Donetsk is going to look out and say, ‘the Russians care about us,’” says Kipp.

Sending the convoy also buys Putin insurance against the separatists, who could very well bring their fight back across the border if things don’t go their way in Ukraine.

Previous Dish on the possibility of a Russian invasion here and here.