One of the most obvious examples of this occurred very early in the attack, when the Israel Defence Forces’ official Twitter account posted a tweet that warned Hamas leaders not to “show their faces above ground” because the army was about to launch missiles into their area of the Gaza Strip. This arguably qualifies as a direct and specific threat of violence, which is against Twitter’s terms of service — but so far the tweet remains, and the IDF account has not been sanctioned (there were some reports that it had been suspended, but those appeared to involve another unrelated account). In fact, the IDF account is marked as officially “verified” by Twitter.

We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead.

—
IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

When does Twitter decide to block content?

So far, Twitter hasn’t responded to a request for comment on how it is handling the Israeli conflict and the fact that it is playing out live on the network — complete with photos of rocket attacks, burned-out buildings and even dead bodies (I’ll update this post if and when Twitter responds). The company has often spoken of its responsibility as the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” but for the most part that has involved promoting the rights of individual users in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests, not the interests of governments and armies.

Arguably, Israel would be well within its rights to ask Twitter to remove or censor tweets by Hamas, which is defined by the Israeli government as a terrorist organization. If Twitter has selectively censored tweets by Nazi sympathizers after a request from the German government — using the new powers it introduced earlier this year — then how would it justify not giving Israel the same ability to block Hamas tweets, or filter them based on certain geographical limits?

And it’s not just Twitter, of course: the Israeli army has been uploading videos of rocket attacks to YouTube as the campaign has been unfolding, and some are fairly graphic — including one that blew up a car carrying the head of the Hamas military wing. That video was removed Thursday morning by YouTube, and it appeared that the site might have decided it breached their terms of service, but then the company said it had removed the video by mistake and it was reinstated.

Threats of violence and shocking images are also something that Facebook has been known to remove, but for now at least the network says it won’t be removing content posted by the Israel Defense Forces — which includes an app that curates photos from Instagram, many of which the army said were taken on the ground during its attack on the Gaza Strip.

Our new information gatekeepers are inscrutable

But according to Mike Isaac of All Things Digital, the Facebook spokesperson he heard from didn’t say why the content from the Israel Defense Forces was being left up, or under what circumstances it might be taken down — leaving the question open of what Facebook would see as offensive content in the context of a war. And that reinforces the same problem that has arisen before with Facebook and other similar social networks as a platform for speech: namely, they are effectively a series of black boxes when it comes to decision-making around what gets removed.

When YouTube removed the initial IDF video, it wasn’t clear whether that was an editorial decision or one made in error by an algorithm. When Facebook deletes accounts belonging to Arab women who are fighting for their rights, it isn’t surprising that this is seen by some as censorship, even when it might just be an errant algorithm. And while Google and Twitter both put up lists of the requests they get from officials, the reality is that they remove or filter out plenty of content and never mention it. And when Google selectively blocks a video like “The Innocence of Muslims,” there is no court of appeal that will hear arguments about that decision.

So while it’s a great thing to have all these sources of information — assuming that you believe more information is better, even if it is coming from the communications branch of the army — it is almost all being hosted by proprietary services (although the IDF also has an active blog where it has been posting live updates and even infographics). And while they have all expressed their commitment to free speech in some form or another, they have absolutely no obligation to uphold that, or to tell users when information has been removed, or why.

We may have disrupted our old information gatekeepers — newspapers, television, even governments — but in many ways we have just exchanged them for shiny new ones. And they are just as inscrutable, if not more so.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Hoggarazi

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To some extent, WikiLeaks has always been as much myth as substance, and possibly even more so. The idea of a secretive group of information outlaws with servers located in Iceland or deep inside a Swedish mountain, especially a group headed by a white-haired fellow right out of a spy novel, always seemed almost too good to be true. And anyone who has gotten close to the organization, from Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir — who helped edit the infamous Collateral Murder video showing a U.S. military attack on civilians in Iraq — to former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, has found that the reality lacks a certain something when compared to the myth.

The spotlight on Assange blinds us to the real issues

As Glenn Greenwald noted in a post at The Guardian this week, much of what has been written about WikiLeaks over the past year has focused exclusively on Assange and the rape charges that Sweden is expected to level against him if and when he is ever handed over to that country. There has been little or no coverage — at least from the mainstream media — about the effects of the ongoing financial blockade of WikiLeaks that was instituted last year by PayPal and Visa and MasterCard (which the organization is trying to get around by using the peer-to-peer money system known as Bitcoin) or who might be behind the recent denial-of-service attacks on WikiLeaks that seem to have been orchestrated by U.S.-based sources. Why? Greenwald has a theory:

“There are several obvious reasons why Assange provokes such unhinged media contempt. The most obvious among them is competition: the resentment generated by watching someone outside their profession generate more critical scoops in a year than all other media outlets combined.”

Whatever the reason, with Assange and his legal and personal problems hogging the spotlight, it’s easy to lose sight of what WikiLeaks has accomplished, whether because of or in spite of Assange’s leadership (or possibly both). Whatever you think of the U.S. government or the U.S. military, the Collateral Murder video was a groundbreaking moment in coverage of the country’s activities in Iraq and by extension the rest of the Middle East, and the release of hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables was also a watershed event, even if the tangible effects of that document dump are difficult to quantify in political terms.

Would any of that information have come to light without WikiLeaks? Perhaps. And it’s important to remember that WikiLeaks didn’t come up with all of those documents on its own — they were delivered to it by the original leaker, who may or may not be former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, the man the government has been holding in a military prison for more than two years without a trial on accusations of espionage.

A former colleague of mine, the Globe and Mail’s European correspondent Doug Saunders, has argued that WikiLeaks was no more than a virtual “brown envelope” for the data that Manning (or whoever it was) came up with, a simple mechanism for distributing the leaks, in the same way that Deep Throat handed over documents to the Washington Post‘s Watergate team in a parking garage. In other words, there shouldn’t be any more attention paid to WikiLeaks than there was to the U.S. postal system or to parking garages. But is that true, or does WikiLeaks represent a significant shift in the global flow of information?

We need a stateless news organization, however flawed

I think it’s the latter. It’s true that WikiLeaks has used publications like the New York Times and The Guardian and Die Zeit to help it sift through and publicize the information that has come out of the leaks it acquired — but that was as much about marketing as anything else. The reality is that WikiLeaks is a publisher, and a radically new variation on the species: one that has no state affiliation, either express or implied, as journalism professor Jay Rosen suggested when he called it the world’s first “stateless news organization.” In a world where even the New York Times fails to discharge its duty properly during events like the coverage of the Iraq war, such an entity is more important than ever.

WikiLeaks has also spawned a kind of mini-explosion of imitators, including leak dumps that are devoted to environmental data, or information about the corrupt political system in the Balkans, or about dozens of other topics. As a recent piece at Radio Free Europe pointed out, many of these have either failed or are in a state of disrepair for a variety of reasons (not least of which is the fact that running an anonymous document archive that can’t be traced or hacked into is exceedingly difficult), and the most famous of all — OpenLeaks, which was set up by former WikiLeaks insider Daniel Domscheit-Berg — is still mostly nonfunctional.

As flawed as they might be, however, they continue to exist. And the example set by WikiLeaks can be seen even in smaller incidents, like the recent “document dump” that Gawker provided of presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s financial records. While there may be no smoking gun in those files, just the fact that they have been made public has changed the game to some extent, and will likely encourage more of the same.

It’s worth noting that even those who have had a falling out with Julian Assange or WikiLeaks, including both Jonsdottir and the NYT’s Keller, have repeatedly said that the organization and its mercurial founder need to be supported, in the interests of freedom of speech. Keller said in an email to me recently that whatever we may think of Assange or his organization, it is a journalistic outlet or entity just as the New York Times or any other newspaper is — and we should be just as protective of its right to free speech and a free press.

That is the true legacy of WikiLeaks: flawed or not, mythical or substantive, it is an engine of free speech and free information, and as such it is worth defending, whatever we might think of its leader.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user New Media Days

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Last week, National Defense magazine broke a story on Boeing’s development of a highly secure Android smartphone for the aerospace and defense industries, but this isn’t the first time the Google mobile OS has been tapped for military use. Elektrobit has customized Android for military and public-safety purposes and is selling that reference design to defense contractors, who then use it to build highly secure smartphones tailored for the military. One such contractor is Raptor Identification Systems, which is tailoring smartphones and tablets with biometric identification capabilities for the U.S. Department of Defense and other agencies.

According to Jani Lyrintzis, VP of special terminals at Elektrobit, 80 percent of the work necessary to build a military-grade smartphone is already available in the Android kernel. Elektrobit completed the software upgrades necessary by adding a highly secure middleware between the applications layer and the operating system, which prevents apps and users from compromising governments’ understandably strict security policies, Lyrintzis said. The rest is industrial design: Phones in the field need to be ruggedized to protect them from the elements, and extra hardware — such as Raptor ID’s biometric scanners — need to be added, depending on their intended use.

“We’ve seen a big reversal in the direction technology innovations are flowing,” Lyrintzis said. “Previously whatever technology was developed for the military eventually moved to the consumer market. About six years ago the trend reversed.”

Building on the work done for Android has enormous advantages, Lyrintzis said. The biggest among them is the streamlining and simplification of the procurement process. Typically a contractor develops a proprietary military application from scratch, building and testing new specialized hardware and software, but by utilizing existing smartphone technologies contractors essentially become Android developers working on a multipurpose platform, Lyrintzis said. In the case of Raptor ID, the DoD no longer gets a single-purpose fingerprint analyzer. It gets a device that can be used to make phone calls, send text messages, surf the Internet and access government servers, as well as scan biometrics and host any number of other military applications.

It may sound crazy today, but Lyrintzis said it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the most sophisticated of military applications — such as controlling unmanned drones — could be done right from an optimized Android tablet. Today’s technology supports it, he said; it’s just a matter of ensuring that the security is airtight, for obvious reasons.

In addition, militaries wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they wanted to take advantage of consumer or enterprise applications already in the market. Rather than enlist a developer to build a specialized expense-management app, commercial app developers could develop more-secure versions of their existing apps for military smartphones. There’s probably not much software available in Google Play or other app stores that the DoD could use off the shelf, but with some security tweaks, a consumer app could be turned into a military-grade app, Lyrintzis said. It may not be long before we see military app stores popping up beside their consumer counterparts.

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The opportunity

The U.S. military is the No. 1 consumer of oil in the entire world and also the biggest spender. The organization has initiated a goal to consume 25 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2025. Pike Research projects that renewable energy spending will grow from $1.8 billion a year today to $26.8 billion in 2030, and recently the U.S. military established the Energy Initiatives Office Task Force, specifically for large-scale renewable energy projects, which will invest an estimated $7.1 billion over the next ten years.

This comes at a time when renewable energy is at a crossroads. The popular Treasury Grant could expire this year, and many statewide incentives are drying up. On top of that, the economy is looking unpredictable at best, and with massive cuts to government spending likely to hit all federal agencies, the DOD may suddenly become the most important agency to renewable energy adoption.

Where does solar fit in?

The military is inking deals across the entire cleantech industry. One obvious technology is biofuels, which the Air Force and Navy are developing for their fleets. The army is also adopting solid state lighting and next-generation batteries.

Domestically, military bases are working to test wind and solar. The technology they use may ultimately replace trucking drums of fuel to military bases in the Middle East, the aforementioned cause of many casualties. Although wind may prove tactically insecure, solar could be a perfect fit for many military bases.

At Skyline Solar we believe concentrating photovoltaics (CPV) are the best fit for military bases in the American Southwest. CPV utilizes sun-tracking technology and mirrors to concentrate the sunlight, which when combined take advantage of the strong sun throughout the day and can be built in projects from a few hundred kilowatts to multiple megawatts. These military bases not only have flat, open land perfect for midsize solar installations but also provide a good test site for similar bases established in the Middle East.

Other types of solar technology, while not without their advantages, have issues that may be detrimental to military bases. Concentrating solar thermal (CST) technology, which uses concentrated sunlight to heat a fluid and spin a conventional turbine, requires more than 100 times more water per watt than CPV, which is not realistic for desert settings.

Furthermore, CST plants are only economical on a large scale and usually take years to build. In contrast, CPV can be built in modular pieces of a plant quickly. Smaller plants distributed in various areas — also known as distributed generation (DG) — are more secure for the military’s purposes and also less financially risky. On the other hand, standard silicon PV has seen reduced costs and has the longest track record, but it doesn’t provide the same cost per watt that CPV can deliver in desert environments.

Obstacles

There are still some considerations for solar to work for the military. Storage will need to advance and become cheaper and more powerful to make solar viable without backup sources of power. The U.S. DoD is working on this, but it is still something the CPV industry will look to solve. Furthermore, the military adheres to the Buy American Clause, so any solar panel manufacturer must be delivering a product manufactured in the U.S. for consideration.

The military’s continuing advocacy for renewable energy is a boon for the entire industry and could potentially save thousands of lives in future combat scenarios. Smart solar pros are already learning how their technology can work for the military, to fight for a greener and more secure tomorrow.

Bob MacDonald is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer for Skyline Solar. MacDonald has a proven track record of driving revenue growth, building market focus and optimizing operational efficiencies with emerging high-tech ventures. He led the product marketing program at SolFocus; prior to SolFocus he co-founded and served as VP of Sales and Marketing for Onetta, a leading optical amplifier company. During his tenure, he secured funding from Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners. Earlier in his career, MacDonald started the telecom components division of New Focus, a division of Newport Corporation, a leader in photonics development and manufacturing, which enabled the company’s successful IPO and secondary offerings. He holds a BSEE from Brown University, MSEE from Stanford University, and MS and Ph.D. in Physics from Brown University.

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Developed by the non-profit research and development organization SRI International at the behest of government agencies looking for a more surgical approach to eradicating vehicle bombs, the Taurus is the world’s newest, smallest and possibly most capable remote-telepresence robot.

At just 35 centimeters from metallic shoulder to shoulder, it gets down to work when attached to the hand of bigger, burlier bomb-squad robots, which have fairly crude but powerful arms good for bumping and knocking things over, but not so much for executing precise and dexterous tasks like snipping the yellow wire and not letting it touch the blue wire.

But as I learned while visiting SRI’s Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters yesterday, the Taurus also has a softer, more sensitive side (of course, just look at those adorable camera lens eyes). Tom Low, SRI’s director of medical systems and tele-robotics, told us the robot will soon be commercially viable for the elder-care field as well. He sees the Taurus as an extra set of eyes that can move around and monitor the home of an older person to make sure everything is all right. When operated remotely by relatives or commercial entities, it could take care of lots of little things, from turning off an oven to setting a microwave for the correct time.

While the Taurus certainly won’t end the need for people to move on to assisted living facilities, “it could buy one or two years of independent living,” Low said.

The Taurus is the little cousin of the Davinci, SRI’s remotely-controlled medical robot. With the Taurus, bomb squad technicians will be able to use the control panel to place the tiny robot arms right above a target and defuse the bomb from a safe distance. “The arms can unfold and it can do its magic,” Low said.

This would be a big change of modus operandi in the way vehicle bombs are defused in crowded urban settings. Car and truck bombs are typically neutralized by putting another explosive on the device, strategically setting it off and hoping that explosion will break the detonator and prevent the big device from going off. That can potentially cause big problems, especially in a shopping mall or city center.

“If the device is big enough, that’s a big risk you’re taking. There is a chance your detonating will set the big device off and perhaps more certainly, doing so is going to destroy a lot of evidence that could be used to track down whoever planted that device,” Low says. “Forensics are important.”

The Taurus prototype is currently being tested by a Sacramento, Calif.-area bomb squad and will ship to a second squad this summer. Low plans to have it in at least four agencies by the end of the year and available commercially within two years.

The robot and its accompanying remote-control panel will be commercially priced between $30,000-$40,000 — or around the cost of a police car, Low said. He believes that price point will fall within the discretionary budgets of most law enforcement agencies who need it.

“They don’t have to have 10 years of bake sales to afford it,” he said.

But at a price comparable to a new, base-model Cadillac CTS with a tennis ball on the antenna, Grandma might want to start selling her baked goods now.

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Low-Budget Fusion Power: “General Fusion, a startup in Vancouver, Canada, says it can build a prototype fusion power plant within the next decade and do it for less than a billion dollars. So far, it has raised $13.5 million.” — MIT’s Technology Review

Colorado Utility Considers Extra Fees for Solar Users: Colorado utility Xcel Energy has is toying with the idea of charging a fee to all customers who install solar systems after April 2010, supposedly in order to pay for transmission lines. — Denver Post via Fast Company

Carbon Capture Needs a Decade on the Dole: Carbon capture and storage technology will require government subsidies for at least a decade before it becomes economically viable, according to a researcher at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. — Bloomberg

Military Power: Army bases like Ft. Irwin in California, poised to snatch away from Nellis Air Force Base the title of the Pentagon’s biggest solar array, offer two big advantages to clean-energy developers: Lots of secure land and stable demand for electricity. — WSJ’s Environmental Capital

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The iPhone may be taking steps toward breaking into big business, but its little brother is already well on its way to becoming a career soldier. Apparently the iPod touch is becoming quite the staple for U.S. soldiers working in Iraq, partly because it’s such a versatile device capable of replacing and/or augmenting many items in a soldier’s standard kit. The touch is also a relatively cheap piece of hardware considering its usefulness, at least when considered in the context of military hardware.

Cost is not the only advantage the iPod touch has on the battlefield. It’s lightweight, durable (though for military deployment, they usually get some kind of special sheath to add to their in-built resilience), familiar to soldiers, and customizable. According to one Army official in Baghdad (via Newsweek), they also apparently have yet to be hacked by opposing forces. I can picture the new “Get a Mac” ad now, with John Hodgman getting hacked by an insurgent.

The main reason the iPod touch is so handy is its versatility as a development platform. As the App Store ads claim, “There’s an app for that,” and that includes things like translation, tactical mapping, networking/communication, surveillance, image recognition and ballistics calculation. Gun mounts and touch control mean that soldiers can do all of these things while keeping a hand or hands free for other activities and devices, some of which might save their life.

With military action becoming more and more a technological affair, expect to see the combat role of the iPod touch grow even more. Future iterations could prove even more useful, and ordinary consumers might benefit, too. If Apple adds hardware features to make the device more appealing for military use, the rest of us could reap the rewards. I’m thinking a camera and additional types of wireless antennas would be top priority from a military standpoint, and I’m sure consumers wouldn’t complain either.

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The wearable fuel cell, about the size of a hardcover book, isn’t exactly pocket-friendly, but it could help lighten the load for soldiers who SFC said typically have to carry multiple battery packs to keep all their gear running during long missions.

There are already some other companies that have portable fuel cell systems on the market for the military, at least for demonstration sales, including UltraCell and Jadoo Power, but SFC has the distinction of winning top spots in the U.S. Department of Defense’s first Wearable Power Competition last October. SFC took both first and third place, with the M-25 Portable Fuel Cell, which it co-developed with DuPont, taking the top spot, and the Jenny coming in at No. 3.

All of SFC’s fuel cells, from the small to the large, use direct methanol fuel cell, or DMFC, technology, with replaceable liquid methanol fuel cartridges. Some of the company’s bigger fuel cells, which can pump out up to 1,000 watts, are already sold for use in mobile homes, cabins, and boats, as well as for backup power and remote sensor applications.

The Jenny, which generates 25 W of power, has already made it out into the field, according to SFC’s 2008 third-quarter report. In the first half of last year, the company said it delivered an unspecified number of Jenny fuel cells for use in an international peacekeeping mission. Depending on how hot the weather was, and how much power was used, the Jenny should have been able to provide anywhere from 11 to 20 hours of power on that mission before needing a new methanol cartridge.

As for when the technology will trickle down to the consumer, Medis Technologies has come out with a small fuel cell charger for cell phones and other portable devices that you can buy right now. But their fuel cell runs on sodium borohydride, generating a waste product — borax — and costing more energy to produce than it provides. Of course, methanol isn’t so safe either, and the byproducts from methanol fuel cells are carbon dioxide and water.

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How ’bout a Hummer Tax?: Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has floated the idea of higher registration fees for SUVs, prompting backlash from Beantowners worried about a possible burden for commercial truck drivers. — Wired’s Autopia

Algae’s Bloom, Bust, Boom Cycle: A new system called Supersucker lets scientists harvest invasive, abundant algae from coral reefs for use as fertilizer. — NYT’s Green Inc.

Pentagon Battle Over Green Ammo, Protectionism Looms: The Pentagon’s efforts to get greener have begun to collide with its mandate to support U.S. businesses, which currently can’t compete with foreign makers of nontoxic, non-dud producing rounds. — WSJ’s Environmental Capital

EPA’s Stopgap Solution for Regulating Carbon: Observers say the EPA is unlikely to pursue small emitters in any carbon regulation, instead focusing on big sources like power plants and automobiles — with momentous consequences for the scores of new coal power plants that have been proposed nationwide. — Time

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It’s a good thing we’re on friendly terms with New Zealand, because one of the residents of that green, hilly island recently acquired 60 pages of sensitive U.S. military data. Total cost of national secrets? $15. Which would’ve been great if that’s what the man who bought it was in the market for, but he was actually just looking for a working MP3 player, which Ars Technica reports the used iPod was not. Data found on the iPod included the personal information of military personnel, and details about mission briefings and deployment.

The purchaser of the used iPod, Chris Ogle, has been looking through the information, and even tried calling some of the numbers listed. Some of the calls actually connected with the correct individuals, indicating that the information is not, in fact, out of date. He also says he’s made the U.S. Department of Defense aware of the mix-up, but has yet to receive any word back from them. Maybe they’re hoping that if they stay real quiet this will all go away.

This is a fairly sensational example, but the fact is that many people don’t think about making sure their personal data is really gone from their iPod before selling it or trading it on the secondhand market through sites like eBay, Kijiji, and craigslist. Your iPod, just like a computer hard drive, contains data that can be recovered unless you go out of your way to make sure it can’t. Proper data erasure is even more important now that the iPod Touch can retrieve and store emails and other sensitive information.

If you have an older iPod that still supports disk mode, then you’ll want to use Disk Utility to completely reformat the drive, and then Restore the iPod using the latest firmware available for that model. Check out this useful tutorial describing exactly how to do that in detail for more info. You can also do a secure erase from Disk Utility, but for any of this to work you have to enable Disk mode on the device.

If you have an iPod touch, you could just do a Restore, which will wipe all your data, but to be extra safe, you may want to try formatting the iPod a couple different ways. First, go to Settings > General > Reset and choose the “Erase All Content and Settings” option. Once you’ve done that, proceed with a normal Restore when you connect the device to your computer, but set it up as a new iPod, instead of restoring from a backup.

That may still leave bits of information on your device, so here’s another method to try that involves writing over sensitive info with filler material and then erasing again, as described by Macsimum News:

1. Change passwords for all mail accounts that are synced to the iPhone or touch.
2. Make sure the device can no longer open the mail accounts.
3. Do an erase/restore of the iPhone or iPod touch, preferably using another computer or at least another account than the one the device was synced with.
4. Sync as many songs/videos of a non-compromising nature and nothing else to the newly restored device as will fit.
5. A good tool I recommend using to fill the drive up with data (songs/videos), is PhoneView. You can directly access the disk on your iPhone to totally fill it up.
6. After you have filled the drive up, do another erase/restore.
7. Repeat steps 4/5 with different content and erase/restore again. The more times you do this, the more times the data will be overwritten, thus having a less chance of recovery.

There you go, now you can make sure that if there’s a leak of sensitive information about your country’s military, it won’t have come from you.

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