Ryan Jacobs is a senior editorial fellow for Mother Jones in San Francisco. His work has also appeared in the Bay Citizen, Sierra magazine, the Point Reyes Light, The Chicago Reporter, and others. During his short reporting career, his coverage has ranged from the discovery of a potentially new species of phytoplankton to the scene of a quintuple homicide.
Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts
By Emily Anthes
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN/FSG
Advances in biotech range from the frivolous GloFish—America's first neon-glowing pet—to goats genetically modified to produce a human enzyme that may ward off the global childhood scourge of diarrhea. In a fascinating romp through laboratories, barns, and pet stores, science journo Emily Anthes interviews the innovators pushing biological limits, and offers elegant explanations of neuroscience and genetics. But though she touches on ethical considerations, Anthes puts a bit too much faith in her subjects' ability to make the right calls.
On Monday, an American cybersecurity firm called Mandiant released a report accusing the Chinese government of systematically hacking into American computer networks and targeting state secrets, weapons programs, businesses, and even the nation's gas pipelines. The New York Times vetted the story and concluded that a growing body of evidence "leaves little doubt" that these attacks are originating from a secret Chinese army base. Adam Segal, senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (an organization that, in the past, has also been targeted by hackers that appeared to be China-based), tells Mother Jones that this "raises the pressure on the increasing drum beat on the US to do something."
So just how freaked out do you need to be? Here's everything you need to know:
How do cyberattacks and cyberwarfare work? A cyberattack is what happens when a hacker penetrates computers or networks for the purpose of maliciously exploiting systems and information. This can lead to identity theft, viruses, theft of intellectual property, or full-on system infiltration (i.e., the hacker can watch your every move). Cyberwarfare is what happens when countries are the ones employing those hackers, often with the goal of stealing state secrets and/or causing damage.
The scheme that Chinese hackers employ to gain footholds on victims' computers is known in computer-speak as spear phishing, according to Mandiant, and it's a scam that's been around for years. The sabotage begins when a victim receives an innocuous work-related email about a meeting or a project from what appears to be a colleague's email address. If the target takes the bait, he or she will click on a hyperlink or download an attachment from the message. In some cases, suspicious recipients have responded to phishing emails with questions about the file's authenticity. The Chinese hackers have responded: "It's legit." When the target downloads the files, they'll be unwittingly installing remote-access software (sometimes referred to as a "backdoor") that allows the hacker to assume control of the victim's computer.
With a few lines of code, the hacker can install other backdoors and programs, upload and download files, capture screenshots of the user’s desktop, record keystrokes and passwords, and shut down the system. The sleuthing can last months or even years, and confidential and top-secret files can be easily transported from the network into the hacker's hands. Here's a video showing an attack in progress:
So what is this mysterious Unit 61398? Unit 61398 (or "61398部队" for the Mandarin speakers among you) is believed to be a top-secret unit of the Chinese government that "engages in harmful 'Computer Network Operations,'" according to the Mandiant report. It's located in a 12-story facility in Shanghai, and could have up to thousands of employees, most of whom are required to speak English, demonstrate computer security skills, and exhibit "team spirit." Richard Bejtlich, the chief security officer at Mandiant, tells Mother Jones that the unit built new headquarters in 2007. Mandiant claims to have known about the unit for seven years, but it's unclear exactly how long it has been around. D.B. Grady, a national security journalist and author, makes the case that "concerns over Unit 61398—a perfectly unnerving name—are no more worrisome than Chinese spies recruiting American agents to steal folders from locked filing cabinets." He adds, "If the US government were really alarmed, we would be threatening to go to war. Instead, we're threatening to give a lot of money to government contractors."
Nevertheless, here are some infographics showing just how effective Unit 61398 is at getting on your computer, and staying there:
Who is the Chinese government hacking?The short answer: Your business, your water supply, your defense, your newspapers, and probably more. The longer answer: Since 2006, China's espionage division has stolen data from at least 115 American businesses—and that's only the hacking that Mandiant directly observed. The company believes that number represents only a small fraction of the China's overall hacking activity. Not surprisingly, Chinese spies were most interested in hacking national-security-related industries such as aerospace, energy, scientific research and information technology. Here's a chart showing the most-targeted industries (it only includes attacks Mandiant witnessed, and includes some that occurred outside the United States):
Mandiant
But even if you work for an alfalfa farm in Wyoming, hacking could still affect you: According to the New York Times, the hackers are interested in US critical infrastructure—electric grids, oil pipelines and water systems—and are attempting to unlock US military secrets by targeting defense contractors and weapons program (more on that later). Chinese hackers are also taking on media giants that produce journalism critical of China: the Times' computers were compromised recently after a high-profile investigation revealed that members of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s family had accumulated massive wealth from state contracts, and the Washington Post, Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal have also all been targeted. (Mother Jones liability note: China is great! 我们爱中国!)
Why is China hacking the United States?Segal, the Council on Foreign Relations expert, explains:
The Chinese want to move up the value chain. They want to move from "made in" to "innovated in China." So part of it is stealing industrial secrets and helping Chinese companies. There's [also] political and military espionage—having a better sense of what the US government and US opinion leaders and other people think about China and try to influence that, and wanting to steal US military secrets. It's also a kind of deterrent. [It] sends a message to the US that the US homeland is vulnerable and if there was going to be a regional conflict that escalated, the US should know that the Chinese have a way of reaching out and touching us.
Another explanation? Chinese hackers just really wanted to access their social-media accounts, many of which are blocked on the mainland. Mandiant was able to trace some of the hackers' identities because the "easiest way for them to log into Facebook and Twitter [was] directly from their attack infrastructure." And as our colleague Josh Harkinson noted, at least one hacker appears to be "a fan of American and British pop culture"—he used Harry Potter references for his passwords.
So…just how screwed are we? Both private US companies and government infrastructure are pretty bad at stopping hackers from beating down the door. Most private companies "aren't in a position to defend themselves, and if you devote any length of time to break into one of these guys, you're going to find a way in," says Mandiant's Bejtlich.
When it comes to government, the forecast isn't much better: President Obama says that the "cyberthreat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation." Between 2007 and 2009, the head of the Pentagon's Cyber Crime Center confirmed 102 instances in which hackers had infiltrated the networks of government agencies, military contractors, or other entities connected to the Department of Defense, according to a 2010 Forbes report. In 2007, the 10 largest defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Boeing, all suffered security breaches that traced back to China. CFR's Segal says that even though cyber attacks aren't new, "on the defense side, we haven't had too much success" defending against them.
But experts don't necessarily say that means the United States is screwed. Segal says that US-China relations would have to "already be very, very bad or very, very close to military conflict anyway for the Chinese to consider a cyberattack." He adds that "there is some vulnerability to the power grid and industrial sector, but it's not a major threat right now. The major threat is espionage and stealing secrets."
"The way cybersecurity works is the way security works in the real world," Bejtlich says. "It's based on fast detection and response. It's hard to stop someone from breaking into your house, but you can call the police and kick them out." He adds that "defense contractors also learn from their experiences, and the ones who are making the news more tend to do the best job of protecting information that I've seen."
Grady makes the case that many of the cybersecurity concerns are overblown, and are instead, simply a good way for the defense industry to squeeze more money out of taxpayers. "This isn't some kind of new horror. Cyberattacks will become worrisome when someone figures out how to use a copy of Linux to blow up something," he tells Mother Jones. "The motives of defense contractors are pretty obvious, aren't they?" he adds. "The war on terror is all but over, but cybersecurity could mean anything and everything. Where there's fear, there's a lot of money to be made."
What is the Obama administration doing? Last week, Obama issued an executive order on cybersecurity with the aim of protecting US critical infrastructure from hackers, despite pushback from conservatives and big business. The order requests that companies participate in a voluntary information-sharing program so the government can help them stop attacks. "It's not clear that the executive order is going to make it better," Segal says. According to Bejtlich, the administration "is doing as much as it can with the order, but now the focus needs to shift to the House and the Senate."
Who else is China attacking? Wait, are we attacking anyone? Check out this amazing chart by Foreign Affairs, showing the number of cyber attacks, and by whom, from 2001 to 2011 (click link for the full chart):
SC Magazine reports that hackers (of unconfirmed origin) are now using phishing emails that claim to include the Mandiant cybersecurity report, in order to gain access to victims. The phishing emails are reportedly targeting Japanese companies and Chinese journalists. Here's a screenshot of one of the fake emails, released by Symantec:
And here's a tweet from Malware Lab claiming that some of the victims may be Chinese journalists:
Weather forecasts predict that SnowstormNemo will be highly unusual in its intensity—the worst blizzard the Northeast has seen in ages. Already, thousands of flights have been canceled and people are scrambling to stock up on emergency supplies. So it might seem like now would be the perfect opportunity for the media to sound the alarm about the connection between climate change and extreme weather. But a new study finds that exactly the opposite is true: When it gets cold out, some prominent newspaper opinion writers start hammering out their next attempt to debunk global warming.
Despite overwhelming scientific consensus about the long-term phenomenon, newspaper op-ed pages are most likely to opine about how climate change isn't real when seasonal temperatures dip. According to a new study published in Climatic Science, annual and seasonal deviations from mean temperatures can explain attitudes (both positive and negative) expressed in 2,166 opinion pieces between 1990 and 2009 in five major newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Houston Chronicle. (It also demonstrated that national public opinion polls aligned with temperature anomalies.)
During heat waves or temperature spikes, the percentage of newspaper columns that agreed with climate change rose. But when winters were rough or temperatures fell, the percentage of disagreement ratcheted up. Lead author and University of British Columbia climate scientist Simon Donner told Mother Jones it was difficult to explain such correlations, but he and his co-author took a stab at it, this way, in the paper:
Furthermore, editors may be more likely to write about climate change or to accept a submission on the subject during or after and [sic] anomalously warm season. Therefore, the relationship between climate variability and the opinion data may arise not solely from people viewing weather or climate anomalies as proof or disproof of climate change, but from the anomalies serving as a reminder of the issue of climate change and as “hooks” for opinion articles.
The problem with writing opinion articles supporting climate change exclusively during heat waves or slamming it during cooler seasons is that it fails to consider that the phenomenon is really "a long-term average," Donner says. "If next decade is warmer than this decade, it doesn't mean every day in next decade is warmer than every day in this decade. There's still going to be variability in the system."
If the public and newspapers are going to trust that climate change is real, even when it's cold outside, scientists and educators also have to step up and be more vocal. "We've got to talk about climate change not just when there's a good 'hook' to talking about it, but even you know, on unusually cold days in the summer," Donner adds.
In 2010, a former Wall Street trader flew into war-torn Sudan to negotiate a deal with a thuggish general. He had his eye on a 1 million acre tract of fertile land fed by a tributary of the Nile in the southern section of the country, a region that later claimed its independence as South Sudan. The investor, who planned to profit by developing and exporting agricultural commodities, boasted about how the region's instability was a principal variable in his financial model: "This is Africa," he told reporter McKenzie Funk, who shadowed him for a riveting piece in Rolling Stone (PDF). "The whole place is like one big mafia. I'm like a mafia head."
Over the last decade (and especially during the last four years) wealthy nations have increasingly brokered deals for huge swathes of agricultural land at bargain prices in developing countries, installed industrial-scale farms, and exported the resulting bounty for profit. According to the anti-hunger group Oxfam International, more than 60 percent of these "land grabs" occur in regions with serious hunger problems. Two-thirds of the investors plan to ship all the commodities they produce out of the country to the global market. And droughts, spikes in food and oil prices, and a growing global population have only made the quest for arable land more urgent, and the investments that much more alluring.
In what a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) characterizes as a "new form of colonialism," investors from the US, UK, and China are gobbling up foreign farmland at "alarming rates" and often with little consultation and compensation of poor small-scale farmers and local populations.
According to the PNAS study, the land grabbing phenomenon has already claimed some 203 million acres, or about .7 to 1.75 percent of the world's total farmland, since 2002, with the majority of acquisitions after 2008.Out of 41 land grabbing speculators, the US ranks second, with 9.14 million acres grabbed, an area larger than the country of Qatar. And according to another report from the Oakland Institute, highlighted by my colleague Jaeah Lee, many of the purchases are carried out by private equity funds, university endowments, pension funds, and hedge funds looking to strengthen their portfolios by capitalizing on declining natural resources. And as Mother Jones blogger Tom Philpott has noted, the grabbers have an average per capita GDP about five times the size of the grabbed.
Take a look at the top five land-grabbing countries below and their respective claims:
Data within the PNAS report also indicate that the "mafia head" approach of targeting vulnerable countries for investments is not just the strategy of a lone land-grabbing cowboy, but standard practice. It's easier to wrest land and displace small-scale farmers in countries with a weak rule of law, according to Oxfam. In many cases, the land is developed to export crops or commodities for biofuels, and in other cases, left to sit idle so it can increase in value before it's sold.
Of the countries that lost the highest percentages of their cultivated land, nine out of 10 have malnourishment rates of 5 percent or more (see chart below). And according to Foreign Policy and Fund for Peace's Failed States Index, all the states in the graph below, with the exception of Uruguay, are categorized as unstable.
Given that 86 percent of the world's water resources flow into agricultural production, the grabs also hijack a good portion of rainwater and irrigation water. The graph below shows that the top five annual per capita water grabs exceed or come very close to the amount of water needed for a balanced diet for that country's citizens.
In October of 2012, Oxfam called on the World Bank to freeze its agricultural investments in land in order to review its policies and develop stronger guidelines on how to avoid land grabs. According to Oxfam, the World Bank's projects have been cited in 21 formal land rights complaints since 2008 by communities from Asia to Africa.
But the World Bank rejected the suggestion, saying that it would "do nothing to help reduce the instances of abusive practices and would likely deter responsible investors willing to apply our high standards." It acknowledged, however, that enforcing those standards "is challenging." It's a challenge that must be overcome, or land grabbing, as Oxfam says, could become "one of the great scandals of the 21st century."
After years of highly publicized debate surrounding the fate of an oyster operation on Drakes Estero in the Point Reyes National Seashore, the Interior Department has decided against renewing the company's lease and has ordered it to vacate the property within 90 days. "After careful consideration of the applicable law and policy, I have directed the National Park Service to allow the permit for the Drakes Bay Oyster Company to expire at the end of its current term and to return the Drakes Estero to the state of wilderness that Congress designated for it in 1976," interior secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement. "I believe it is the right decision for Point Reyes National Seashore and for future generation who will enjoy this treasured landscape."
Salazar plans to designate 2,700 acres of the estuary, including 1,100 acres the farm operated on, as wilderness, the first such distinction for a marine area on the West Coast. Environmental groups—including the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the National Parks Conservation Association—and conservationists hailed the decision as a special victory for a parcel of water and land that hosts 90 species of endangered birds and the biggest colony of seals on the coast.
But owner Kevin Lunny, who bought the property in 2004 from another oyster operation, was predictably devastated. "It's disbelief and excruciating sorrow," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. His team of thirty will lose their jobs, and seven families who live on the property will be displaced. The region, which is also home to many other ranchers, will also lose a historic farm that has thrived on the inlet since the 1930s and well before the park existed. (Full disclosure: I worked as a fellow for the small, Pulitzer Prize-winning weekly Point Reyes Light newspaper, where my colleagues aggressively covered the saga and did not shy away from publishing editorials criticizing the government's role in the matter.)
Several high-profile oyster farm supporters have also criticized the way the National Park Service and the Department of Interior have handled the issue. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) said she was "extremely disappointed" with Salazar's choice. "The National Park Service's review process has been flawed from the beginning with false and misleading science, which was also used in the Environmental Impact Statement," she said in a statement. Park Service officials have alleged that the farm's operations had a negative impact on marine life. But in 2009, a review by the National Academy of Sciences found that park officials "had made errors, selectively presented information, and misrepresented facts" in their studies. In August, the organization concluded that there was no evidence to support claims about effects on seals and shoreline habitat.
Nonetheless, the shacks, motor boats, and oysters racks will be removed. And the National Park Service will soon preside over a new swath of wilderness.
