CounterPunch Magazine article on Radioactive Contamination of USS Ronald Reagan at Fukushima Now Available for Purchase as Offprint

For the nuclear bureaucrat, lying seems to be as essential and continuous a human process as breathing.

I am not averse to the argument that a greater reliance on nuclear energy, despite its massive risks, might provide an alternative future preferable to being cooked to death by greenhouse gases.

But I must say that I do not think that nuclear energy should be in the hands of the current crew under the current system.

The nuclear agenda is largely in control of the legacy nuclear powers, whose dominance is enshrined in the imbalanced arrangement of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its creature, the IAEA.  The United States and Russia, in particular, are nuclear horror shows when it comes to the waste, haste, shortcuts, and accidents inseparable from the birth of nuclear science in the crisis atmosphere of a world war and ensuing Cold War.

Neither of these nations, I would aver, is particularly interested in a new, more conservative model of radiation risk baselining that might impose onerous economic, political, and public health costs on their governments.  

The Japanese government (which, under Prime Minister Abe is set on nuclear power as a strategic national initiative) and Tokyo Electric Power Corporation (TEPCO) are pretty much cut from the same cloth.

Prime Minister Abe, in order to secure a key Japanese government priority, the 2020 Olympics, had this exchange with the IOC in September 2013 about the situation at the crippled nuclear power station at Fukushima:

"Let me assure you the situation is under control," [Abe] said.

"It has never done or will do any damage to Tokyo."

Abe replied decisively when pressed by veteran Norwegian IOC member Gerhard Heiberg over Fukushima.

"You should read past the headlines and look at the facts," he said.

"The contaminated water has been contained in an area of the harbour only 0.3 square kilometres big.

"There have been no health problems and nor will there be. I will be taking responsibility for all the programmes with regard to the plant and the leaks."

Fast-forward to April 20, 2014, courtesy of Japan Times:

“It’s embarrassing to admit, but there are certain parts of the site where we don’t have full control,” Akira Ono told reporters touring the plant last week.…

It appears that Abe’s “under control” assurances were based, at worst, on shaky assurances from TEPCO that the Japanese government was in no mood to question in the crucial run up to the awarding of the Olympic bid, or at best upon the rather unsophisticated idea that TEPCO would contain the contaminated water in tanks, so it wouldn’t reach the harbor, until some other more permanent solution got worked out.

Lots and lots of tanks.  

The 1,000 tanks [already “approaching capacity”] hold 440,000 tons of contaminated water. Some 4,500 to 5,000 workers, about 1,500 more than a half year ago, are trying to double the capacity by 2016.

The permanent solution has been slow in coming.

Add to the burgeoning storage tank farm the problems of radiation-averse contract workers hastily constructing and piping tanks and the inevitable problems of leaks, mis-routing, and overflows.   Add the difficulty in getting the balky liquid processing system up and running.  Add the challenges of trying out the new science of freezing a gigantic underground wall of ice to keep water from the ocean.  Add the fact that 400 tons of groundwater flow through the site every day, and after TEPCO struck a deal with the local fishermen to dump 100 TPD into the ocean, it turns out that the water might be too contaminated to dump, anyway.

There are many ways to describe the contaminated water situation at Fukushima.  “Under control” is not the most accurate.  “Fighting a holding action for the next 30-40 years” as the physics of radionucleide decay ineluctably reduces the danger (and Abe and his promises to take responsibility have entered LDP Valhalla) is perhaps a better description.

“Abe lied Tokyo’s way in the 2020 Olympics” is also not complete hyperbole.

With this context, it is not terribly surprising that lawyers for sailors on the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan consider TEPCO a target-rich environment for the lawsuits they are filing to claim redress for TEPCO’s alleged negligence in the matter of the plume of radioactive material that the Ronald Reagan sailed under and, thanks to the unfortunate circumstance of the downwash of a snowstorm, into, while conducting relief operations off the east coast of Japan after the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011.

Their claims have been shrugged off and under-reported in the US and Japan on the grounds that the radiation exposure was so minor it could not have caused any health problems.  I don’t buy it, and not just because there is a predisposition in the nuclear industry to shade the truth.  

There are good reasons to believe that radiation doses were not—could not be-- accurately measured, and that valuable science on the extensive negative health outcomes for radiation workers, derived particularly study of the vast army of Chernobyl liquidators, has not been properly addressed, and a thoroughgoing rethinking of the scientific orthodoxy of radiation sickness and of the global nuclear regulatory apparatus should precede any new wave of nuclear power plant construction.

I addressed the issue of radioactive contamination of the USS Ronald Reagan and its crew in an article for the CounterPunch monthly magazine, “Fukushima’s Nuclear Shadow: Fallout Over the USS Reagan.”  To illustrate the USS Reagan situation, I also discusses little-known elements of the Chernobyl disaster, and the story behind one of the most serious episodes of radioactive contamination from nuclear testing in the United States—in Albany, NY, of all places.

It is, I can say with some confidence, an eye-opening read.

CounterPunch has kindly made it available as an inexpensive offprint.  The link for purchase is here.

Article in CounterPunch Magazine on NSA Encryption Follies

Also, Snowden Derangement Syndrome and Andrea Merkel’s Phone

I have an article in the current subscription-only CounterPunch magazine on the NSA encryption follies.  

The takeaway from the article is that, thanks to fiddling by the NSA and its corporate partners, Internet security is a jury-rigged omnishambles.  It’s as if the National Transportation Safety Board, with the garages and auto parts suppliers playing along, had undermined the safety standards for brakes and facilitated the insertion of multiple points of failure in the braking system, and then encouraged everybody to drive down the Information Superhighway at 120 miles per hour in order to give more business to the auto repair industry.

With the powers vested in me by the Internet, I command everyone to subscribe…now!  Here’s the link.

The piece has a different take on the NSA’s surveillance excesses than what readers are probably accustomed to.

Edward Snowden’s core concern, and the basis of a lot of the coverage, is anxiety over the massive scope of NSA surveillance.  It looks like the US government never abandoned the goal of Total Information Awareness, articulated during the George W. Bush era by John Poindexter, and simply decided to implement it clandestinely.  NSA wants it all: metadata, unencrypted data, encrypted data, the correlations, whatever.  

Even for those of us who have “nothing to hide and nothing to fear” a.k.a. nobody, this raises the specter of the Panopticon state, where the hidden eye may be everywhere and anywhere, and the subject is pre-emptively cowed into compliance by the fear of being observed.

I have to admit I already feel that way, to a degree.  I look at the computer on my desk and see it as a window in—to me—as well as a window out onto the WWW.

Not just for the US government which, quite frankly, I don’t think devotes a lot of time to worrying about me.  Also for Google.  For instance, the web ads aren’t mass advertising like TV commercials; they are targeted ads based on my Google searches.  Instead of telling me what’s out there, they are trying to get inside me and push my buy buttons based on what they think what’s in there.  Instead of surfing the web, I’m getting enmeshed in my personalized web of preconceptions and plans, spun courtesy of Google, Facebook, etc.  And for botnets.  I assume I’ve got one.  Maybe just one.  I hope so.  Recently, the FBI and Microsoft took down a botnet infecting 2 million computers.  I look at my computer as a device on loan to me from the botnet when it isn’t using the CPU cycles for its own nefarious ends.

The NSA and the US IT industry have a shared interest in exploiting me as a data asset.  The information, services, and connectivity benefits of the Internet is just the honey pot that lures us in.  Just like newspapers and magazines are advertising circulars with just enough journalism and entertainment to get us to crack open the pages.

If we want to restore our digital privacy, it’s going to take a new network: new hardware, new software, new protocols, and billions of dollars (without any government and corporate subvention!).

Good luck with that.

Short of that, enhanced transparency and accountability from the entities degrading the security functionality of the Internet might help.

It looks like the only way we’re going to get that is via whistleblowers.

When the Edward Snowden revelations hit, my first reaction was Wow.  Somebody’s really stuck it to the Man.

However, on some liberal and conservative sections of the Intertubes, something that I call Snowden Derangement Syndrome erupted.  It was as if Snowden had posted dirty pictures of him having sex with mom.  Some seemed to take the position of Don’t you understand?  We’re the Man.  Edward Snowden is sticking it to us!

Well, my general take is that Edward Snowden is a whistleblower, not a spy.  It’s not my job to help the Man sideline, discredit, silence, or incarcerate whistleblowers in order to make His job easier.

Of course, there has been a persistent bubbling of efforts to discredit Snowden along the lines of naif/narcissist/traitor.  Things quieted down when the carefully managed revelations of NSA domestic surveillance undercut the Snowden as hysterical dingbat narrative, but hotted up again with the reports on US spying on allies.  You know, hurts American interests, old news, everybody does it and, in Mike Rogers’ iteration, Europe should be grateful because Nobody Does It Better than the US of A.

These people obviously lost the Lord Acton memo about the corrupting nature of power—including the power bestowed on the NSA by an open-ended and generously funded mandate, secrecy, and sufficient legal impunity to initiate and perpetuate massive, compounded clusterfucks beyond the reach of congressional oversight.

Consider this revelation about the bugging of Andrea Merkel’s phone:

The Economic Times writes the “high-ranking” NSA official spoke to Bild am Sonntag on the condition of anonymity, saying the president, “not only did not stop the operation, but he also ordered it to continue.”

The Economic Times also reports the official told Bild am Sonntag that Obama did not trust Merkel, wanted to know everything about her, and thus ordered the NSA to prepare a dossier on the politician.

I don’t think that’s Edward Snowden talking.  Maybe it’s the Acela Babbler, Michael Hayden, passing on third-hand tittle-tattle.  Maybe Keith Alexander is sticking the boot in as he stomps off into retirement.  

In any case, that high level gossip, my friends, is probably more damaging to US diplomacy than the Snowden revelations, and also an indication of the culture of impunity and malice that seems to permeate the upper levels of the NSA and is now directed at President Obama for his equivocal defense of the agency.

Angela Merkel is probably seriously pissed that the NSA tapped her phone--and bragging about it.  In July, Merkel, an East German native who has tried to draw a clear, bright line between the security excesses of East Germany and practices in the West, had defended NSA surveillance as qualitatively different from the Stasi since the NSA was interested in protecting American security.  By that reading, Merkel has been considered a security risk for over a decade.

The revelation has done Germany the favor of alerting it to the fact that its communications security technology—in which it has reposed a high level of confidence—has been compromised.

As discussed in this article from Spiegel, German government communications were supposedly protected by world-class non-USA encryption and security products delivered by ex-Stasi technicians rolled into a company called Rohde & Schwarz.  The implication of the bugging of Merkel’s phone is that the US government has suborned and compromised Germany’s own data security apparatus.  Since Rohde & Schwarz is also a NATO supplier, perhaps the prospect of NATO contracts might have enticed them to hand over the goodies.  Or maybe the NSA hacked and fiddled its way in without corporate assistance from R&S.

For whatever reason, one can speculate that the NSA has done as good a job of fucking up German and NATO secure communications as it has done with overall Internet security.

Ungraceful Degradation

The NSA war on Internet integrity

[This piece appeared at Asia Times Online in a slightly different form on October 15, 2013.  It can be reproduced if China Matters is credited and a link provided.  This article is a companion piece to an article appearing in an upcoming issue of CounterPunch magazine, which discusses the NSA's across-the-board, intensive commitment to overcoming the greatest obstacle to its surveillance activities--and the bulwark of Internet system integrity for commercial and individual users: the access of non-state actors to strong encryption products.  Interested readers can subscribe to CounterPunch Magazine at this link: http://store.counterpunch.org/subscriptions/ ]

The US government has taken a pretty decent open network idea - the Internet - and turned it into a security nightmare.

In one of life's many ironies, the US was forced to degrade the security functions and overall integrity of the Internet because the US Constitution, law, and public and techie opposition combined to impede legal US government surveillance access to communications over the Internet.

Instead of accepting these limits, the US government sought to evade them - by weakening the encryption and security regimes that are at the heart of secure Internet communications for businesses and innocent civilians, as well as for the usual suspects invoked to justify subversion of Internet privacy: terrorists, criminals, and pedophiles.

The role of US IT corporations in crippling the security and privacy functions of the Internet is an awkward and relatively unexplored question.

So far, the most overt naming and shaming has taken place concerning cooperation of the IT bigs in the National Security Agency's PRISM program - which involved controlled, legally colored access to unencrypted materials on corporate servers. Under PRISM, the NSA apparently installed equipment at corporate sites to process government requests for unencrypted user data if it involved people that the NSA was "51%" sure weren't US persons.

Included in the Snowden documents was a slide showing the accession of the US IT heavyweights to the PRISM regime, starting with Microsoft in 2007 and including Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Youtube, Skype, AOL, and Apple. PRISM looked something like exploitation of the CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) mandated backdoors in US telecommunications equipment, albeit with the disturbing realization that these backdoors could be exploited by anonymous NSA analysts without a FISA court order for a week and, when the free week was up, upon resort to the notoriously rubber-stamp FISA court (without the need to show probable cause as is the case when applying to get a warrant to spy on a US citizen).

The Washington Post's Bernard Gellman spoke of NSA efforts to suppress the names of the nine companies named on the PRISM slide:

Speaking at a Cato Institute conference on Wednesday, Gellman said The Washington Post has a practice of talking to the government before running stories that may impact national security. According to Gelman, there were "certain things" in the PRISM slides that they agreed raised legitimate security concerns. But, he said:
The thing that the government most wanted us to remove was the names of the nine companies. The argument, roughly speaking, was that we will lose cooperation from companies if you expose them in this way. And my reply was "that's why we are including them." Not in order to cause a certain result, or to get you to lose your cooperation but if the harm that you are describing consists of reputational or business damage to a company because the public doesn't like what it's doing or you're doing, that's the accountability we are supposed to be promoting.

Gellman believes that it's because the names were released that many of those technology companies started to be vocal advocates of greater transparency about the program. While they "previously had very little incentive to fight for disclosure because it wasn't their information that was being collected and there was no market pressure," he said, these companies "are now, because they are suffering business damage and reputational harm, pushing very hard in public debate and in lawsuits to disclose more about how the collection program works," which current FISA Court orders prohibit them from telling the public about. [1]

The NSA Nine, perhaps alerted to the upcoming PR firestorm, went public with defenses that sought to give a picture of limited, by-the-book, almost grudging cooperation. There was a lot of generous reporting about the struggles of Google, Facebook, Yahoo! et al to buck their NSA gag orders so they could reveal to an eager world how hard they have struggled to protect user privacy. Also, the PRISM revelations were explained and excused in the public media since they involved responses to FISA court warrants with specific, identified targets and, for that matter, were targeting "non-US persons", ie non-US citizens residing outside the United States.

What IT professionals found more disturbing than government backdoors into corporate servers, however, was Snowden's revelations of the NSA's war on encryption.

As I describe in an article in the upcoming print edition of Counterpunch, the NSA has aggressively acquired capabilities and resources in pursuit of its goal to crack encrypted e-mail, virtual private networks (VPNs), and mobile device communications.

Possible corporate collusion in the apparent NSA campaign to undermine the integrity of encryption and, for that matter, degrade the systemic security functionality of the Internet has received relatively little attention.

It can be speculated that some US IT corporations may have cooperated with the NSA in weakening security standards, installing backdoors, and botching implementation, perhaps with the idea that these were vulnerabilities that probably only the NSA could exploit.

Some of the most egregious NSA shenanigans have been in the arcane area of fiddling with the random number generators that lie at the heart of encryption. If the randomness is compromised incrementally, cracking becomes easier. And the more networked computers an attacker has, and the more messages are stored for analysis, the more important the reduced randomness of the encryption becomes.

It can be seen how US corporations might go along with the US government's machinations in this area; after all, the possibility of a non-NSA actor acquiring all those capabilities to exploit random number generator flaws seems vanishingly small.

At least up until now, there seems to be a code of techie omerta (and maybe the well-founded fear of a lawsuit) that precludes calling out IT bigs for climbing into bed with the NSA on the encryption issue.

Counterpunch on the Egyptian Revolution

Counterpunch has a remarkable wrap-up of the Egyptian Revolution, courtesy of one Esam El-Amin, that goes beyond self-congratulating and self-justifying spin to deliver just-the-facts-ma'am reporting of what happened, combined with trenchant analysis.

Here's the link to When Egypt's Revolution Was at the Crossroads.

Here's a taste:

February 2: Displaying Courage and Steadfastness in The Battle of the Camel

Once Mubarak lost control of his security apparatus and could not rely on his military, he turned to his third and last circle of protection, his political party, the NDP. But for the past five years he had turned the day-to-day management of the party to his son, Gamal.

On Jan. 29, Gamal convened the major political figures and business tycoons of the NDP to devise a plan to end the sit-in and the demonstrations in Tahrir Square. They had a two-track plan. Mubarak would give a speech, on Feb. 1 that would draw sympathy, as he recalled his service to his country for over six decades while pledging to oversee major reforms. In the speech, he promised not to seek re-election, to leave in September and die in Egypt.

This ploy actually made inroads within many segments of society and threatened to split the opposition. The small pro-government “loyal opposition” actually welcomed the speech, while the youth rejected it out-of-hand.

But Gamal’s second maneuver backfired badly. He was hoping that by splitting the opposition through his father’s speech, he could finish off the remainder through direct attacks in Tahrir Square. By the morning of Feb. 2, he sent a few thousand people demonstrating in support of his father, led by some famous actors and sports figures.

Around 2 PM that day, the unexpected and brutal attacks by the goons of the NPD was in full force, but was faced with stiff resistance by the protesters. For sixteen hours the demonstrators in the Tahrir Square were attacked by clubs, knives, horses, camels, Molotov cocktails, and live ammunition ...Dozens lost their lives while thousands were injured.

At certain crucial moments, this wild idea, whose objective was to empty Tahrir Square, might have succeeded, especially as the protesters were under siege by midnight and being pushed outside the square. While the protesters were pleading with the army to intervene and protect them, it stayed true to its promise of remaining neutral.

It was thousands of members of the MB that descended on the Tahrir Square (estimates range from three to five thousand), led by major MB figures, El-Erian, Mohammad El-Biltagy, and Safwat Hegazy, that broke the siege, fighting and pushing back the NDP attackers for the entire night. By dawn, the battle of the Camel, as it is now dubbed in Egypt, had fizzled and Tahrir remained firmly in the hands of the revolutionaries.

All youth and opposition groups have since acknowledged that if it were not for the courage and skill of the MB, the outcome of the attacks might have been different.