Engineers Warned of North East Storm Surge Dangers in 2009

At a 2009 seminar in New York City convened by the American Society of Civil Engineers, corporate, academic and government engineers warned that a devastating storm surge in the North Eastern region of the country was inevitable and presented detailed measures to counter it.

Participants in the seminar urged officials to install surge barriers or tide gates in the New York Harbor to protect the city. Their views are contained in 300 pages of technical papers, historical studies and engineering designs, copies of which the society provided to The New York Times. Installing such barriers would be costly and take years to build, so it’s likely that they would not have been in place in time to prevent destruction from Tropical Storm Irene last year or Hurricane Sandy more recently.

“Scientists and engineers were saying years before Katrina happened, ‘Hey, it’s going to happen, folks. Stop putting your head in the sand,’ ” said Malcolm Bowman, a professor of oceanography at the State University at Stony Brook who spoke at the conference and is an editor of the proceedings.

“The same thing’s now happened here,” Professor Bowman said.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has expressed doubt about such barriers and whether the benefits would outweigh the costs which some estimates put at over $10 billion.

“I don’t think there’s any practical way to build barriers in the oceans,” he said on Thursday. “Even if you spent a fortune, it’s not clear to me that you would get much value for it.”

According to Professor Brown the most workable plan would involve a roughly five-mile barrier from Sandy Hook, N.J., to the Rockaway Peninsula while a smaller barrier would stretch across the top of the East River to protect against surges from Long Island Sound. East River barriers might rise from the ocean floor using hydraulics as a threat approached, and the larger barrier would require locks and sluiceways to allow ships and water to pass during ordinary times.

The technology is already being used around the world, including in the Netherlands and on the Thames in London. Several American cities have versions of the structures, and a barrier surrounds St. Petersburg, Russia.

 

Worldwide U.S. Arms Sales Hit New High

Last year overseas weapons sales by the United States tripled to a new record high of $66.3 billion, more than three-quarters of the global arms market, according to a new study for Congress. Russia was a distant second, with $4.8 billion in deals.

The U.S. sales total was an “extraordinary increase” over the $21.4 billion in deals for 2010, the study found, and was the largest single-year sales total in the history of American arms exports. The previous high was in fiscal year 2009, when American weapons sales overseas totaled nearly $31 billion.

Increasing tensions with Iran drove Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman to purchase American weapons at record levels. These Gulf states do not share a border with Iran, and their arms purchases focused on expensive warplanes and complex missile defense systems.

The agreements with Saudi Arabia included the purchase of 84 advanced F-15 fighters, dozens of Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, a variety of ammunition, missiles and logistics support, and upgrades of 70 of the F-15 fighters in the current fleet.

The United Arab Emirates purchased a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, an advanced antimissile shield that includes radars and is valued at $3.49 billion, as well as 16 Chinook helicopters for $939 million.

Oman bought 18 F-16 fighters for $1.4 billion.

Other significant weapons deals by the United States last year included a $4.1 billion agreement with India for 10 C-17 transport planes and with Taiwan for Patriot antimissile batteries valued at $2 billion, an arms deal that outraged officials in Beijing.

 

FCC Wants New Tax on Internet Service

The Federal Communications Commission issued a request in April  for comments on a proposal to tax broadband Internet service and funnel the additional revenue  to a subsidy the agency created last year to expand Internet access. Dozens of companies and trade associations weighed in, but the issue has largely been ignored by the mainstream media.

Numerous companies, including AT&T, Sprint and even Google support the idea.

“If members of Congress understood that the FCC is contemplating a broadband tax, they’d sit up and take notice,” said Derek Turner, research director for Free Press, a consumer advocacy group that opposes the tax.

Consumers already pay a fee on their landline and cellular phone bills to support the FCC’s Universal Service Fund, which was created to ensure that everyone in the country has access to telephone service.

Last year, the FCC took$4.5 billion out of the Universal Service Fund and turned it into a broadband Internet subsidy, called the Connect America Fund. The new fund would subsidize the construction of high-speed Internet networks for Americans who currently lack access, producing new customers for broadband providers without those providers having to actually invest in building those high-speed networks themselves.

Julius Genachowski, the FCC’s chairman, has made expanding broadband access his top priority. He argues that high-speed Internet is critical for succeeding in the 21st century economy and that expanding Internet access is the country’s next great infrastructure challenge.

In recent years, with more people sending emails instead of making long-distance phone calls, less money has been flowing into the program. The Universal Service fee has had to grow to a larger and larger portion of phone bills to compensate.

In addition to the broadband fee, the commission also sought comments on taxing text messages, as well as a flat fee on each phone line, instead of the current system, which is based on a portion of the revenue from interstate phone calls.

The FCC could run into legal problems with the Internet Tax Freedom Act, a 1998 law that bans the government from taxing Internet access, but the FCC has long argued that Universal Service is a fee that the providers choose to pass on to consumers and not a tax.

According to Google, taxing broadband service is preferable to taxing the kinds of online services it offers, like email or Google Voice.

“Saddling these offerings with new, direct USF contribution obligations is likely to restrict innovative options for all communications consumers and cause immediate and lasting harm to the users, pioneers, and innovators of Internet-based services,” Google argued.

While Turner says that imposing a fee on broadband access, even a small amount, would discourage many people from buying the service—the exact opposite outcome of what the FCC is trying to achieve.

“For folks who are thinking about adopting broadband, who have much lower incomes or don’t value broadband as much—that extra dollar on the margins will cause millions of people… to not adopt,” Turner said.

 

Transportation Department Launches Test of Wi-Fi to Prevent Car Accidents

The Transportation Department has launched a new program in Ann Arbor, Michigan, entitled “Safety Pilot” which uses Wi-Fi to allow vehicles and infrastructure to communicate with each other in real time to help avoid crashes and improve traffic flow.

“This cutting-edge technology offers real promise for improving both the safety and efficiency of our roads. That is a winning combination for drivers across America,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement.

The program is being run by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute and is the first one conducted in the real world. The test cars, trucks and buses, are equipped with wireless devices that can warn drivers about specific hazards such as impending collisions at blind intersections.

“Vehicle-to-vehicle communication has the potential to be the ultimate game-changer in roadway safety — but we need to understand how to apply the technology in an effective way in the real world,” said David Strickland, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“NHTSA will use the valuable data from the ‘model deployment’ as it decides if and when these connected vehicle safety technologies should be incorporated into the fleet.”

The first phase of the program showed some 90 percent of drivers who used the technology liked the safety benefits and would like to use it.

Dept. of Homeland Security to Use Molecular Scanners That Will Instantly Know Everything About You

Within the next year or so, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security plans on deploying a laser based molecular scanner that can penetrate clothing, many other organic materials and will instantly know everything about those targeted from as far away as 164 feet. From traces of drugs or gun powder on clothing to even what an individual had for breakfast to the adrenaline levels in their body.

All without the individuals who are being targeted even knowing it.

In November 2011, the inventors of the technology were subcontracted by In-Q-Tel to work with the US Department of Homeland Security. In-Q-Tel is a company founded “in February 1999 by a group of private citizens at the request of the CIA, with the support of the U.S. Congress.” According to In-Q-Tel, they are the bridge between the Agency and new technology companies.

The plan is for these new scanners to be utilized in airports and at border crossings all across the United States.

The machine is ten million times faster and one million times more sensitive than any system currently available system and can be used systematically on everyone passing through airport security, not just suspect or randomly sampled people.

In-Q-Tel states that “an important benefit of Genia Photonics’ implementation as compared to existing solutions is that the entire synchronized laser system is comprised in a single, robust and alignment-free unit that may be easily transported for use in many environments… This compact and robust laser has the ability to rapidly sweep wavelengths in any pattern and sequence.”

So not only can they scan everyone, but they would be able to do it everywhere at anytime: the subway, a sports events or even at a traffic light.

According to the undersecretary for science and technology of the Department of Homeland Security, this scanning technology will be ready within one to two years, which means we will probably start seeing them in airports as soon as 2013.

These portable, incredibly precise molecular-level scanning devices will soon be cascading lasers across our bodies as we move throughout airports instantly reporting and storing a detailed breakdown of our persons, in search of certain “molecular tags”.

Going well beyond eavesdropping, it looks like the U.S. government plans on recording molecular data on travelers without their consent, or even knowledge.

ACLU NJ Release Police Misconduct Recording Android App “Police Tape”

A new Android app released by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and OpenWatch.net allows users to secretly record police encounters and upload their recordings to a public website.

“Police Tape,” builds on work done by OpenWatch.net with their “Cop Recorder” and “OpenWatch Recorder” programs. ACLU-NJ’s release adds even more helpful content, like legal advice on citizens’ rights during police encounters.

“This app provides an essential tool for police accountability,” ACLU-NJ Executive Director Deborah Jacobs said in an advisory. “Too often incidents of serious misconduct go unreported because citizens don’t feel that they will be believed. Here, the technology empowers citizens to place a check on police power directly.”

ACLU-NJ recommends that only New Jersey residents use the app due to certain states still trying to criminalize the act of citizens recording police in public. The app’s terms and conditions also recommend that users consult an attorney before publishing any recordings online.

A version of the app for iOS devices was still awaiting approval from Apple.

“Historically, vivid images of police mistreating citizens have seared our public consciousness and in some cases spurred important changes,” ACLU-NJ Policy Counsel Alexander Shalom explained. “Photos and video are critical to ensuring police accountability and police should know that the eyes of the public are on them at all times.”

Internet Providers Testing Metered Plans for Broadband

In South Texas, Time Warner Cable customers have been given “usage trackers” that tally up all a household’s internet use. Customers who sign up for a light plan of 5 gigabytes of broadband, the equivalent of two high-definition movie downloads, are rewarded with a $5 discount each month if they don’t go over. If they do, they pay $1 for every additional gigabyte.

“We’re moving away from one-size-fits-all,” said Jon Gary Herrera, a Texas spokesman for the cable company, which now tends to call itself a broadband company instead.

Some of Time Warner Cable’s competitors are moving in the same direction toward pricing tiers for higher speeds and larger amounts of broadband at home. Usage-based billing may be advantageous for a companies bottom line but it is definitely the opposite for customers watching more and more video on the Web, as well as companies like Netflix that distribute content. Some believe that as customers are made more aware of how much broadband they’re using each month, they’ll use less of it. This will in turn protect traditional forms of entertainment distribution but will also have the negative effect of discouraging  new Internet services.

Executives at cable and broadband providers say it is in their best interest to make broadband a must-have product. “The exploding growth of online video usage undercuts any argument that cable is standing in the way of this business,” said Brian Dietz, a spokesman for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the industry’s trade group.

But some government officials aren’t convinced. The Justice Department’s antitrust lawyers are conducting an investigation into the cable industry’s treatment of online video companies with an eye toward deterring anticompetitive behavior. Some analysts say the investigation could actually accelerate the move to usage-based billing.

Usage-based billing is seen by some as a fairer alternative to broadband caps, a term most closely associated with Comcast, which had been enforcing a limit of 250 gigabytes per Internet customer per month. Although only a small minority of customers ever exceeded the cap, it became a lightning rod for competitors like Netflix, which accused Comcast of unfairly favoring its own services.

Comcast said this spring that it would start to test usage-based billing. “Our network is not an infinite resource, and it is expensive to expand it,” David L. Cohen, a Comcast executive, said at the time.

Along with news and entertainment, the futures of entire industries — commerce, health care and transportation — are being built atop a broadband foundation. Companies big and small are coming up with ways to get faster broadband to more people; many people believe that broadband speeds will inevitably improve as time goes on, just as computer chip speeds have.

Critics say that the marketplace lacks sufficient competition, which keeps the price of broadband higher than it otherwise would be. They wonder whether strategies like usage-based billing will worsen what is already an economic barrier for some Americans. “It’s like locking the doors to the library,” said Nicholas Longo, the director of Geekdom, a new collaborative work space for small companies in San Antonio.

Time Warner Cable started testing usage-based billing in San Antonio four months ago by offering the $5 discount to lighter users. Customer service representatives at a suburban call center are now trained to ask new customers about how they use the Web; once uses (listed on a work sheet) like “Internet gaming,” “watching TV/movie clips” or “video chat” are mentioned, callers are steered toward a pricing plan with unlimited bandwidth.

The Netflixes of the world are wary of these moves, though there may be little they can do. Concerns about both caps and usage-based billing have already caused one would-be online video competitor, Sony, to rethink its plan to sell a bundle of cable channels over the Internet.

Dish Network and other companies have been preparing plans for similar bundles, which could help cause the so-called unbundling of television that consumer advocates have dreamed about for decades. But “these guys have the pipe and the bandwidth,” said a Sony Network Entertainment executive, Michael Aragon, referring to cable and broadband providers, while speaking at a meeting sponsored by Variety in April.

Still, Mr. Aragon added, “We do believe there’s a business model out there.”

Obama Admin. Urging Appeals Court to Reinstate $1.5 Million File-Sharing Verdict

The Obama administration is putting pressure on a federal appeals court to reinstate a $1.5 million verdict against a Minnesota woman for sharing two dozen songs on Kazaa.

A Minnesota federal judge lowered the verdict to $54,000, ruling that the jury’s award “for stealing 24 songs for personal use is appalling.”

The Copyright Act allows penalties of as much as $150,000 per infringement.

The decision by US District Judge Michael Davis follows the third trial in the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuit against Jammie Thomas-Rasset. She is the first file sharer to take an RIAA lawsuit to a jury trial.

Despite the judge’s reduction, Thomas-Rasset appealed the lowered damages verdict, (.pdf) claiming the Copyright Act was unconstitutional because of its large or “excessive” awards. The RIAA on the other hand, claims that judges do not have the power to alter jury awards dealing with copyright infringement.

The Obama administration, which is intervening because the constitutionality of the Copyright Act is at issue, agreed with the RIAA that the act was constitutional.

“The Copyright Act’s statutory damage provision is reasonably related to furthering the public interest in protecting original works of artistic, literary, and musical expression and its constitutionality must therefore be sustained under the applicable, highly deferential standards of judicial review,” the government wrote (.pdf) to the Missouri-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Davis has overturned the judgments of three separate juries in the Thomas-Rasset case dating back to 2007.

The first trial of Thomas-Rasset, of Minnesota, ended with a $222,000 judgment, but Davis declared a mistrial, on the grounds that he’d improperly instructed the jury on a point of law. After the second trial, Davis tentatively reduced the award from $1.92 million to $54,000, and ordered a new trial on damages if the parties didn’t agree to that amount or settle. That third trial ended in the $1.5 million judgement that Davis reduced again.

Judge Davis, the nation’s first judge to reduce the amount of damages in a Copyright Act case, said fairness demanded his decision to reduce the latest award to $2,250 per track.

The RIAA said in a legal filing with the appeals court that Judge Davis’ decision “is fundamentally incompatible both with Plaintiff’s constitutional right to have a jury determine what amount of statutory damages is just, and with the deference due to congressionally authorized awards.”

Most of the thousands of RIAA file sharing cases against individuals settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. The RIAA has ceased its 5-year campaign of suing individual file sharers and, with the Motion Picture Association of America, has convinced internet service providers to take punitive action against copyright scofflaws, including terminating service.

Bars Installing Facial Detection Cameras Inside Venues

SceneTap, an Austin-based nightlife start-up, recently launched its facial detection software at 25 bars in San Francisco. Using a free iPhone or Android App, an individual can get a snapshot of the San Francisco bar scene, including male-to-female ratio, average age, and crowd size — all in real time.

The way it works, according to SceneTap is that bars place special facial detection cameras inside their venues, which pick up on facial characteristics to determine the approximate age and gender of the bar crowd. All your personal information remains anonymous, and nothing about you or your face is stored long-term.

Venue owners will have access to this aggregated demographic information, and over time they can use it to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

SceneTap is already up and running in a half-dozen other cities, and to date, the company’s cameras have tracked more than 8.5 million people in bars and restaurants in these cities.

 

Iran Executes Alleged Mossad Agent

“The end of the road has nothing except repentance — and rope,” Majid Jamali Fashi was quoted as saying just moments before he was hanged for the January 2010 bombing that killed Tehran University physics professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi.

He was sentenced to death for crimes of “defiance of God,” or using arms against Iran’s Islamic government, and spreading “corruption on the earth,” or damaging public security and order, according to the official IRNA news agency.

At least four Iranian scientists have been killed since Mohammadi was murdered with a bomb rigged motorcycle. Iran blames Israel’s Mossad spy agency, the CIA and Britain’s MI-6 for targeting Iranian scientists in an attempt to halt Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.. Washington and London have denied any roles.

Israel Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said Tuesday the slayings “are not connected to us in any way.”

Israel and others have pointed the finger at Iran for alleged revenge attacks, including a February bombing in New Delhi that wounded an Israeli diplomat’s wife and the discovery of a bomb in Bangkok that is believed to be linked to a plot to target Israeli diplomats. In Azerbaijan’s capital of Baku, security officials arrested 22 suspects last March that were allegedly hired by Iran to commit terrorist attacks against U.S. and Israeli embassies.

In Vienna, meanwhile, Iran and the U.N.’s nuclear agency held a second day of talks over suspicions that Tehran might have tested atomic arms technology at a military site. Iran denies the claims, insisting it only seeks nuclear reactors for energy and medical research.