Category: Freedom

The Quick and Powerful Response by the ACLU

via reddit
Image via Reddit.

Over the weekend President Trump enacted what has come to be known as the Muslim Ban. Immediately protestors took to their nearby airports in act of solidarity with the people affected by Trump’s outrageous actions against migration. The protests are continuing today at American consulates and embassies around the world. This is an amazing response by Americans and other citizens to Trump’s ban (which ironically took place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day).

The action that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took over the weekend exemplified the outrage over Trump and the unity of the American people against outright acts of oppression. The ACLU had lawyers ready at nearly every international airport to help migrants and they have publicly spoke out against the Muslim Ban including a seven point action plan to hold the Trump administration to account.

The ACLU received a total of 356,306 donations online, amounting to $24,164,691, which the organization said it would use to fight for the rights of immigrants, as part of a seven-step plan to counter the Trump administration. On Twitter, donation momentum was building as venture capitalists, celebrities and entrepreneurs pledged to match other Twitter users donations.

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Asked what the money from the weekends donations would go toward, the ACLU pointed to a seven-point plan of action aimed at taking on the policies of the Trump administration.

The first step in the plan is filing Freedom of Information Act petitions asking government agencies for documents related to Trump’s potential conflicts of interest, followed by plans to protect the rights of immigrants, including challenging “unconstitutional” immigration policies and defending “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

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Here’s the ACLU’s letter to President Trump.

What It’s Like to Use the Internet in Cuba

The internet is a great resource for connecting people to people and connecting people to services and new ideas. Cuba, like other developing nations, has had a hard time connecting to the internet because of the sheer cost (laying cables underwater isn’t cheap!); and for Cuba the costs are higher since they can’t connect to the internet via nearby Florida. Despite these issues Cubans are getting online.

Over the past couple of years wifi has been made more accessible thanks to chapter technology and lessening of laws. Cubans are getting online in a way that is very unfamiliar to the rest of us and over at Huck Magazine they wrote about the experience.

There, demands overlap out loud like a public protest in which each person calls in their wish for a different future to come true.

The stories of the crowd emerge, each with its own voice, volume and hopes for a life that might some day include them.

From the other side, they are shown rooms, the view from a window, the neighbourhoods where their children or siblings have managed to settle.

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Amnesty International’s Guide to Safe Messaging

safe texting

Thanks to the bravery of whistleblowers we know that the Five Eyes are monitoring all internet chatter regardless of who’s talking. This is a big concern for people who care about freedom and rights to have personal communication. As a result, Amnesty International put together a review of messaging apps so you can make an educated decision around what app you use. They cover the basics of what apps are available and what concerns there are around messaging security.

Why is end-to-end encryption important?

End-to-end encryption is important because it protects your personal data even as it passes through the company’s servers. It means that the company is not able to decrypt your messages or see the content. It recently emerged that Yahoo allowed US intelligence officials to scan hundreds of millions of YahooMail accounts. This could easily happen with instant messaging too, if it’s not end-to-end encrypted.

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Thanks to Delaney!

Standing Rock Sioux Achieve a Victory

Standing Rock #DAPL

This is proof that direct protest action works.

The US Army Corps of Engineers has decided to not grant permission to allow the Dakota Access pipeline to be built as planned. The pipeline was meant to go through burial lands of the Standing Rock Sioux which is offensive in itself, but there’s more to it. The pipeline would have also greatly harmed the local ecosystem and drinking water. In the event of a spill (and pipelines spill all the time) the damage to the natural environment and to people would be epic.

Despite these risks, Energy Transfer Partners and the Army Corps of Engineers will continue to try to build the pipeline elsewhere. Of course this recent development will make it harder to do so and the protestors will continue to fight big oil for the average person’s right to clean water. What’s more, is that the economic argument for pipelines is weak at best.

The Army Corps of Engineers will not grant the permit for the Dakota Access pipeline to drill under the Missouri river, the army announced on Sunday, handing a major victory to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe after a months-long campaign against the pipeline.

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The announcement came just one day before the corps’ deadline for thousands of Native American and environmental activists – who call themselves water protectors – to leave the sprawling encampment on the banks of the river. For months, they have protested over their fears that the pipeline would contaminate their water source and destroy sacred sites, and over the weekend hundreds of military veterans arrived at the camps in a show of support for the movement.

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We Need the Humanities More Than Ever

Over the last decade or so there has been a big push in North America to get students in to STEM education. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are important to study, but they need to be studied alongside the humanities. The push for STEM is a result of the success of the tech sector and how some parts of society have missed out on that success. However, problems arise when we support one of thinking at the expense of others; now, there is a push to bring balance to the education system by celebrating holistic eduction as much as we did STEM.

Sixty years ago this month, CP Snow’s influential, much-debated essay The Two Cultures was published in the New Statesman. He wrote of a “traditional culture” that was “mainly literary”, behaving “like a state whose power is rapidly declining – standing on its precarious dignity … too much on the defensive to show any generous imagination to the forces which must inevitably reshape it”. He characterised scientific culture, on the other hand, as “expansive, not restrictive, confident at the roots, the more confident after its bout of Oppenheimerian self-criticism, certain that history is on its side…”

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