A victory for genetic engineering

Over the weekend protesters were prevented from destroying the work of a group of scientists researching the next generation of genetically modified crops. The protesters, led by the group Take The Flour Back had planned a “decontamination” of the wheat engineered by Rothamsted Research on Sunday but were kept away from the research site by police. The real heroes however are the scientists themselves. By taking a stand against the threat of vandalism and speaking out in public they’ve shown how weak the the anti-GM mob’s rhetoric-rich, fact-light arguments are. Taken in the context of a growing acceptance of GM technology, this incident represents a significant win for the future of biotechnology in the UK.

Which as far as I’m concerned is a good thing. Fields such as chemistry or physics have already yielded to human intellect and we’ve been able to apply that knowledge to great effect. Biochemistry and biotechnology however, couldn’t even think about getting started until the discovery of DNA 60 years ago and has been playing catch up ever since. Now the field has solved most of the mysteries of the living cell it’s beginning to move towards applying its knowledge too, and it’s going to be beautiful.

The trial in question is an example of just that. I’m in full agreement with the protesters that most GM crops developed to date aren’t fit for purpose. To pick a single example “Roundup ready” crops are engineered to be resistant to glyphosate, a common herbicide, which simply means we can douse our fields in toxins without damaging our precious crops. These early designs are as crude as our first forays into any technology, but what the protesters have failed to grasp is that this new research is smarter, safer and far more refined.

The GM wheat in question has two extra genes to make it resistant to aphids. Instead of getting the plants to pump out toxins, or making them resistant to the insecticides that we produce, the researchers have made the plants produce an insect hormone, farnesene, that discourages aphids from feeding on the plant. It doesn’t wipe them out, just makes sure that they won’t be eating the wheat. Of the two genes that an organism needs to produce the farnesene one is in nearly every organism on earth and the other is present in over 400 plants, from potatoes to peppermint, who use the same aphid repelling trick. The tests have been done indoors, now they just need to see how it works out in the open air.

It’s a pretty smart idea (although admittedly one borrowed from mother nature), using our knowledge of plant and insect biochemistry to design a crop that gives us what we want without trashing the environment. In many ways I’m glad this trial was selected for destruction by protesters, because it highlights so many of the positive reasons that further research into biotechnology is important. It was a relatively easy argument to win already, and that was only made easier by the shocking hyperbole and inaccuracy by the anti-GM protesters.

Their major concern is of transfer of the “new” genes to other plants and animals. They cite wind dispersal of pollen to other plants, seeds getting loose, germinating and growing to contaminate other plants and and gene transfer to unrelated species. First off the wheat variety used self pollinates and isn’t adapted to wind dispersal. Secondly cross-pollination is obviously a large concern for the scientists too which is why they’ve taken every available measure to stop it, while still holding the trial in the open air. As for seeds getting loose, there is an underlying assumption that we’re talking about industrial application of this design, not eight 6x6m plots that have to be carefully monitored even after the trial is over. Gene transfer is barely worth mentioning because a random piece of DNA inserting itself into another cell, as you might imagine, is incredibly rare and transferring those two specific genes which make up just 0.00000013% of the wheat genome is practically impossible. We should be more worried about our children becoming photosynthetic.

Take The Flour Back do raise more problems on their website. The fact that we don’t know the impact of these GM crops on our wildlife, which is rather the point of this test in the first place. That we might suffer health impacts from a chemical we produce in our own bodies. Or that GM contamination of other farmers crops would mean that they can’t sell them, you got the sense they were grasping at straws at this point.

More substantive are the issues around destructive agri-business, which I can agree with, but is entirely irrelevant to a GM trial by one of the oldest running charitable research institutes in the country. If anything Rothamsted Research, by not patenting their designs and releasing the research into the world, are helping to break the grip of corporate profit whores like Monsanto. There may be problems with how GM crops are deployed, but that’s no reason to block off the research at its source.

The world, and the techniques of genetic engineering have moved on since the GM wars of the 90’s. Instead of the scientists hiding and hoping when protesters decided to try and destroy years of their work, they argued the validity of the project and their case was good enough to convince the public and, more importantly, the media. It left the anti-GM protesters looking foolish, especially when they suddenly cancelled a public debate with the scientists in question.

GM technology is going to be huge in this century. We’ve been stumbling around in the dark for decades and now we’re beginning to make some progress. Plants that produce more vitamins, grow faster, replenish the soil with minerals, produce useful chemicals like drugs or petrol and don’t damage the wider environment are all in development. If we don’t put in the time and effort now, we’ll only regret it when we truly need these organisms and the people skilled enough to make them.

How to write a column

Well, after nearly a whole year of writing for Blottr, I think it’s time for me to stop. Over the last year of writing I’ve gone from having a passing interest in politics, economics and current affairs to knowing more than most, I’ve gained a hell of a lot of experience in a career that I’d never properly considered before and had a lot of fun while doing it. I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t taken a stab in the dark and started writing. I thought I’d mark the occasion of my departure by trying to encourage you to give writing a go too.

Why write?

Pretty much for the reasons I’ve outlined above: it’s good experience, you learn a lot, you can write about whatever you want and it’s fun.

If, like me, you want to be a writer, first of all you need to write. There’s really no avoiding it. But unless you’re prepared to move to London and do months and months of unpaid internships, there aren’t all that many opportunities. Writing, online is a place to prove yourself, so do it, because there are hundreds of people with a journalism degree but not so many who’ve actually tried being a journalist off of their own back.

Even if you don’t want a career in writing, it’ll look good on your CV to show you’re a cut above the rest. Maybe you don’t want to write about politics or current affairs, but if engineering’s your thing, write about that. You’ll gain a far greater understanding of the ins and outs writing about it rather than just reading. And a future employer will respect that.

It might look daunting at first to commit yourself to writing on a regular schedule, but frankly, you don’t know what you’re capable of before the deadlines start piling up. Without a strict area to write about, you can pick and choose what to work on in a way you’ll never be able to elsewhere, and it means after a little practice you’ll get to enjoy the pressure. It’s something to do.

A column is your space to do and, say what you want so after a while it barely feels like work at all. Like any job it’s cool when people tell you you’ve done well, and the bonus with writing is that it’s your friends that tell you.

How to write

This guide is going to sound pretty obvious, but that’s kindof the point. There really is no trick, no special talent required to write a good column. Just patience and practice. So if this guide makes it seem easy, that’s because it’s meant to, and because it is. I came at writing up the news from a biochemistry degree, it took a while to get used to, but you do if you stick with it you will.

I’d say it’ll probably takes three or four hours to write a 800 word column, more if it’s factish and complex, less if you’re writing about some frustration that’s been playing on your mind all day. Always less after you’ve practiced a while.

I can’t say I’m an expert, but this is what works for me. I guess if you were going to pin down what kind of article this model would give you, it’d be somewhere between an opinion piece and a news article. It’s okay to be partisan, and express an opinion but it’s better if you have some facts to back it up.

Finding a story

This is often nothing more than spending an hour browsing the web, have a look what’s in the news and see what catches your eye. Personally, I tend to read the broadsheet’s websites and a couple of blogs and writers that I like. (Boing Boing, Matt Taibbi, George Monbiot, Laurie Penny, Rafael Behr) Often it’s a good plan to go looking for something you totally disagree with and deconstruct it to make the opposite argument.

Your friends are good to talk over stuff with, because they’ll all have different takes on it and know you well enough to explain it to you so you’ll understand and not reject it outright. Most of all though, get talking to the people who live and work whatever you’re interested in. There’s only so far you can take researching on the internet on your own. Eventually you’re going to have to meet the professionals in your field, and they’ll teach you a lot.

Once you’ve picked a topic for your article, plan out five or six different areas you’d like to talk about on your subject, make some headings and start harvesting quotes, facts and statistics from around the subject. Take this as far as you feel the need to, it’s a balance between knowing what you’re talking about and not getting sidetracked into something you’ll not have space to write about. I don’t tend to start writing until I’ve read maybe 25 or so articles on a subject, maybe an hour or so (I overuse tabs and it burns my computer out a little), spread between news stories and opinion pieces from the papers (always good to read the opposite opinion to your own too) and general web searches. It’s really not much harder than that.

One thing you have to admit when writing articles is how much you owe to other journalists, bloggers and writers out there. Pay your respects by linking their article, not copying tracts of text, and try to add to what someone else has produced rather than steal it.

Writing it up

By this point you should have a pretty good idea of what the main thrust of your argument is, a list of bullet points to expand on and a couple of pages of rough notes copy pasted from your reading. Unfortunately, the first few sentences are the most difficult. Once you’ve got an introduction, you can keep flowing off of that, but it’s difficult getting going and nothing really helps except practice.

You’ll want to structure the article into around 150 words for introduction, 500 for the body and another 150 or so to conclude. Breaking the piece up into chunks certainly helps the writing look less intimidating and helps you keep concise.

The intro

Essentially you either need to make the introduction exciting and provocative enough to grab people’s attention straight away, or to make it engaging enough to ask a question that people will read the whole article to find the answer, or both. The two major techniques for introductions are whether to jump right in and address the subject in the first sentence, or to try and circle around your subject and introduce it from a different angle. Different kinds work better for different articles, you get a feel for it quite quickly.

The body

For the main bulk of the article just work through your list of areas to talk about, trying to explain each while tying back to the main point you’re trying to make. Explain some of the background, why it’s important, why common perception is wrong, what has changed recently, what does this mean for the future, what different people have been saying about the issue and how you rate each of them etc These are just a few things to think about. Maybe some people will have heard it before, but other people probably won’t.

Spend a hundred or so words going into each bullet point and take care to treat each one as it’s own mini article. Write a sentence introduction, explaining how this point links back to the whole. One or two more to expand on that point or get a quote in. And then a final sentence to reiterate why you’ve written the paragraph and hopefully ease into the next point. If your paragraphs are all internally consistent, then it makes it easier for the reader to get what you’re saying rather than garbling on trying to explain five things at once. Obviously it’s not an ironclad rule but its a good structure to work from.

Conclusion

Here’s where you tie up all the issues around your topic, literally conclude. Look at the arguments you’ve made, and what you’ve learnt around the topic and come to a decision. Maybe you’re wrong, but if you give understanding the issue your best shot and mess it up, well, a lot of people are wrong so don’t sweat it too much. Especially if you’re writing on politics, where who’s wrong depends on who you talk to. Just keep an open mind, sometimes you’ll never know where your argument slipped up until someone tells you, and it’ll probably be someone a lot smarter than you are.

So for writing the conclusion, it helps to read over the introduction and the headline before writing and work out exactly what question you’re asking, and then answer it. You’ll often be surprised that somewhere along the way you’ve changed tack and either one of them has to be rewritten. There isn’t all too much advice I can give here, the conclusion is where all your personality comes out.

Proofreading

This is another difficult one if you’re not used to it. It takes a long time to train your brain to see all the mistakes you’re making. What does help is reading it aloud. It sounds stupid, but it’s far easier to spot where you’ve added in or missed out words and even the grammar is easier when spoken. Generally I’ll read over a piece once for a general “Am I making sense here?” sweep, looking for leaps of logic, interesting ideas I’ve left unexplained and cutting bits that are too wooly, repeated or just unnecessary to the central theme. Then again for grammar and spelling, I’ve still not gotten used to this but you can pick it up with a bit of effort. The final run through is to put all the links in, if someone else’s writing or research has convinced you, then it’s only fair to reference them. It takes 30 seconds to learn by googling it.

After that you’re pretty much done. If I have the time I’ll leave it overnight and usually find a few more sentences in the morning I’d like to tidy up.

That is about it. Maybe you’ve gotten all the way to the end of this article thinking “What the hell?! I’ve not learnt anything here I couldn’t have learnt on my own?!” Which, is rather my point entirely. I’d love to share the arcane secrets of writing, but there really is no trick. A year ago I’d have laughed in your face if you told me that by the end of the year I’d have written 150,000 words for a news wesite. But now, here I am, and I’m sure that anyone reading this could do the same. Farewell, and thanks for reading.

When a government goes to war with you

Maybe I’m just being paranoid. I read and write a lot about the creeping surveillance state, questionable government policy and that kind of thing, the issues of the era, global warming and an end of of cheap oil, about to hit the human race like a steam train and I’ve always liked reading science fiction so a dystopia doesn’t seem all too unfamiliar to me. Maybe my mind just works like that. But when you see how fast a government can turn against its people once it feels threatened, in the real world, and in a supposedly liberal and peace loving country, it makes you stop and think whether you were right all along.

I’m referring to the Canadian Bill 78 or the “Act to enable students to receive instruction from the postsecondary institutions they attend” passed into Quebecoise regional law on the 18th of May. Although rather innocuous in name, this emergency law was passed with the sole intent of ending what is now over 120 days protest by the student population. It’s a case study in what happens when a government gives up on ruling by consent, and tries to rule by force instead.

In 2006/7, at the end of a freeze on tuition fees for university students, Canadian students paid $1668 as a base rate plus ancillary fees. Over the next five years the rate would increase by $50 a semester up to $2168. But after having already increased fees by 30%, the Jean Charest’s regional government decided to crank the fee increases into high gear. The provincial budget announced that now the fees would now be rising by $108 a year, right up until 2017 for a grand total of $3793 per year. It’s important to note that despite the latest hike increasing fees by 57% for the student, it only represents an extra 4.7% of the total budget for universities. A huge burden for the individual, especially disadvantaged students, is only small change for the government.

Tuition fees assume that education is only for the personal benefit of the student, rather than something that benefits the student, the children they raise, the company they work for, the prestige of their city and country, their friends, family and neighbors. If everyone benefits from everyone else’s education, it makes sense for the costs to be distributed across everyone too. Even if the fee rises, and the total cost, don’t compare to what has been inflicted on students in the UK, the principle remains: getting people to pay more for education is a bad idea.

A lot of Canadians happened to agree. Since the 13th February thousands of students across the country have been on strike. By the 22nd of March over a third of all college and university students in Quebec were boycotting their classes and 300,000 people marched through the streets for a rally. Protests have been happening daily and there have been several clashes with the police that have turned violent. Pressure has been on the government and student unions to come to an agreement, yet negotiations have consistently failed.

From halfway across the world, reading opposing but equally biased newspapers and blogs, it’s impossible to judge whether the majority of people agree or disagree with the fee rises. I can’t honestly say whether the students have any democratic legitimacy (as if getting over half of people onside had ever granted anything legitimacy anyway) in wanting the fee hikes overturned. However, what I can say is that the government’s next step was utterly illegitimate for a supposedly liberal country.

The Charest government passed Bill 78 a law that made it illegal for any gathering of strike supporters within 50m of a school or university, outlaws any demonstration of more than 50 people, anywhere in Quebec, without prior police approval, and allows the police to change the time or place of a demonstration at will, compels teachers, universities and student unions to “induce” their members back to school and imposes fines of up to $5,000 on individuals and $125,000 on organisations that break the emergency law. The message was clear: “Keep disagreeing with us, and we’ll fuck you up.”

The bill actually broadened the protest, and prompted the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history on the 22nd of May, when hundreds of thousands of people of all walks of life took to the streets in defiance of this injustice. The fees fight in Canada goes on, the bill’s constitutionality is being challenged in court, and I wish the students and other demonstrators the best of luck, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make.

It took a tuition fees increase and three months of relatively low level disorder, by a small section of the population, to get a country like Canada to pass an emergency law to ban protest. Can you imagine what would have happened here if the riots last year had lasted another day or two? What would have happened if the fuel crisis in March had been a real one? If we’d have been dragged into an unpopular war with Iran? Can you imagine how crazy things would have gotten, and how quickly our liberal tradition would have been thrown out the window? Put a government under too much pressure and they’ll go into lockdown. Right and wrong disappears because it’s too slow to work that out, it just becomes establishment versus the mob. And you’re part of the mob.

Once you flick the switch and make demonstrating illegal, then the entire apparatus of our quasi-totalitarian state can come crashing down on you, just for standing up for what you think is right. Let’s consider what might happen to you if you’re unfortunate enough to be on an anti-war rally, that for reasons entirely out of your control, turns ugly.

On the day of the protest: you’ll be flagged on dozens of CCTV cameras; photographed by forward intelligence teams; probably get kettled for hours without food, water or shelter; liable to be gassed, shot or sprayed by the police; your conversations can be listened into by undercover cops secreted into the crowd; you will have your mobile’s GPS logged and unique identifier entered into a database and have your incoming and outgoing messages, calls and texts intercepted.

If you get arrested you’ll get a formal police record; probably fingerprinted; maybe get your DNA taken if it’s serious; all the messages, call logs, contacts and any location data sucked off your phone and stored; if you look a bit foreign or suspicious you could be held for 30 days without a charge if anyone felt the need to use terrorist legislation; if you made it to court, the government could decide that your case was too important to be seen by the public and hold it in secret and as we saw with the riots, overcrowded courts make it impossible to serve justice properly.

Even if you made it back home safely, you’ll no doubt have made your way onto some sort of police database. Congratulations, you’re now a “person of interest” which also implicates all your close friends and family. Under the upcoming “snoopers charter” you’ll probably get your entire internet history scraped by analysis software. It’ll look for anything political, religious, sexual, drug related, racist, copyright infringing or just weird and compress it into a neat dossier. A dossier like that will come in very handy for the police if they ever want to make a case against you. I’m convinced that once you collect enough data on a person, you can find enough careless errors, unchecked curiosity and perfectly natural deviancy to make anyone out to be guilty. The thing is that if you’re only selecting for people who protest, who by definition disagree with the government, pretty soon it looks like you’re in a fully totalitarian state.

The measures above are just those in place for crowd control now, or at least very soon will be. Who knows how much further our civil liberties will be eroded in the coming years? As I see it, the world is going to become a much scarier place. With the stakes so high, governments seem to have ever twitchier trigger fingers, and I figure being left leaning, liberal and outspoken puts me directly in their crosshairs. Instead of buying a shotgun and a lot of canned food and running off to the highlands, my best defence is to try and keep hold of the freedoms I already enjoy, claw back the ones I’ve lost and keep the government in check. Because I know that if they really wanted to come after me I’d never be able to stop them. So call me paranoid, but it’ll only look like foresight if things ever get messy.

Genetic modification is more natural than you think

Let’s begin with a thought experiment. It’s 20 years in the future and there is only one breeding pair of pandas left in the wild and, as is their nature, they’re more concerned with lolling around eating bamboo than ensuring the survival of the species. Would you step in and “lend a hand”, so to speak? Of course you would. But what happens after they’re still unresponsive to your coercion? Would you clone a panda to preserve them for future generations?

Okay, how about this next one. If you’re going to the trouble of cloning it, why not improve it’s sex drive a little? You’re just offsetting the deficient genetic toolkit nature has given it, right? Maybe that’s a little far, after all who are we to judge pandas for being so prudish? What about in another example? This time our pandas are positively raring to go, they can barely keep their paws off each other, but global warming wiped out all the bamboo. Are you going to let baby panda grow up in a world without sustenance? Couldn’t you just engineer him to be able to eat, oh lets say, potatoes or rice or filet mignon and survive? If it’s just an aversion to performing a dirty sounding procedure like genetic engineering on a fluffy panda cub that’s stopping you, why not take the easier option of making a heat and drought resistant bamboo strain? Or we could just leave the pandas to die?

It’s rather a silly example, but interesting to see at which point people jump on the GM bandwagon. Do you think even recreating nature using genetic technology is wrong? Do you draw the line at tweaking with mother nature’s work? Or do you only accept the necessity when trying to right one of our own wrongs? Personally, and having studied biochemistry I’ll admit I’m rather biased (although some might just call it well informed), I’m all for GM technology. Allow me to try and convince you.

Let’s be clear from the beginning, DNA is DNA no matter where it has come from. All a gene does is tell your body how to make a protein for a particular task, whether its coding for a tool to break down sugar or a tool we call spider silk doesn’t matter a damn to your cells. There’s nothing inherently strange about having a gene from another organism inside you. Or at least not as strange than sharing your body with maybe 400 trillion mitochondria, symbiotic lifeforms that live inside your cells, each with their own entire genome. It rather puts the idea of gene swapping in context.

So it may be perfectly natural for your cells to accept having new bits of DNA, but surely the unnatural bit is having genes jumping around and transferring between species? Well, no not really. Your genome is full of what we call transposons, bits of DNA that just don’t stay still. By historical accident these sequences of DNA become able to cut themselves out of the genome, float around a bit and then randomly re-insert themselves somewhere else. Some, like the so-called Alu sequence can even copy and paste, rather than cut and paste, there are around a million of these 300 letter sequences hopping around in each of your cells right this second.

Transposons are mostly genetic relics, but your body also actively genetically engineers itself. If you want a working immune system, you need to be able recognise every possible chemical, foreign body or defective cell. That means you’ll need a different antibody protein, and a different gene encoding it for each and every one. To save time, and genomic space, your body just splices different variations of a few genes together to generate billions of different types of antibody. Or have you ever thought about what happens in your egg and sperm cells to shuffle up your maternal and paternal genes? That’s genetic modification too. The number of different ways you’ve sliced up just your own DNA is probably comparable to the number of GMOs that scientists have created during the last 50 years of biochemical research.

It’s even natural to transfer genes between species, a bacteria called Agrobacterium tumorfasciens relies on this trick for its survival. It likes to inject some of its own DNA inside plant cells which then integrates into the host genome. Once there the agrobacterium genes cause the plant to express proteins to convert all the food it makes into agrobacterium food. Viruses too, and in particular retroviruses like HIV, are also adept at genetic engineering. Both these types of organism are so good at what they do that we use them as a tools for genetic engineering ourselves. In fact, nearly all the tools we use for genetic manipulation are ultimately taken from other organisms.

So in reality, there’s plenty of genetic engineering going on in nature, the fact that we’re now able to control it doesn’t make the process any more alien. Besides, if you’re constructing your argument around only allowing what is natural you can wave goodbye to your house, your clothes and cooked food and revel in other more “natural” pleasures like snake venom or hurricanes or cholera. We feel perfectly justified in defending ourselves against other aspects of nature, so why not against the dangers posed to us by faulty genetic circuitry? “Nature” doesn’t have a plan, it’s not obligated to defend a poorly adapted species. Gaia doesn’t give a toss (try asking the dinosaurs), but maybe we should? Especially when many species are unable to evolve fast enough to cope with the problems that we’ve selfishly created.

The world of genetics is based on random mutation, recombination and selective pressure. Give a system like that enough time and it will produce works of engineering so inspired as to be bordering on artwork, but dig a little deeper and you’ll realise how much faulty or just plain junk genes we’ve accumulated over the course of evolutionary time. Frankly, a system built on chaos can never be better than one built on logic. Our understanding is growing slowly, but we’re homing in on a perfect picture of the inner life of the cell.

Using the tools of genetic manipulation that nature, god or chance, whatever you’d like to call it, has given us we’re able to take ever more control of the environment around us. Not only do I think we should, but I think we must. In the short term because it is seriously cruel to reject genetic technology that can help sick people. In the medium term because true GM super crops (that will put “roundup ready” to shame) will be our best shot at feeding the planet and GM bacteria present the only feasible solution to sucking CO2 out the air, turning burning oil for fuel into a renewable cycle.

But taking a longer view, once we’ve well and truly fucked up this planet and killed off everything else, so long as we have just a single copy of their DNA, we could build it all again, and only then could we ever be described as “playing God”.

A tale of two privacy vendors

The Pirate Bay, the world’s best known peer-to-peer filesharing network, is blocked from the conventional web in the UK, or soon will be. The landmark court ruling came about not because the site was found to be subversive or harmful or that the owners were involved in dangerous criminality but because the website facilitates copyright infringement.

The High Court hearing on the 20th of February gave six UK Internet Service Providers (ISPs) with 94% of the UK market until next Wednesday to erase the Pirate Bay from the internet. BT have been given a few extra weeks to consider their position. The Pirate Bay themselves weren’t represented at the hearing, as the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act doesn’t require it, and it wasn’t deemed “practical” or “proportionate”.

So the biggest web censorship case in UK history, which sets a legal precedent for blocking any website suggested to be enabling copyright infringement, went by without even hearing both sides of the argument. The big film studios were granted the first ever web block, against the relative unknowns Newzbin2, in October. It took less than 6 months for the British Phonographic Institute to stomp on The Pirate Bay. The question now is: who’s next?

Well almost any website could be classed as facilitating filesharing if all you’re going on is a user posting a link to copyrighted material. You could even make a case for web behemoths Google, Youtube or Twitter to be blocked, not that the entertainment industry would relish going toe-to-toe with other expensive corporate lawyers. Much more likely result of the reckless assault on downloaders, is the copyright war being pushed onto another front, to attack the privacy vendors operating from the outskirts of the web.

The Virtual Private Network (VPN) is one such privacy tool. In essence it grants you anonymity, by routing your internet traffic through a black box, masking the IP address that links web activity to your personal computer. A VPN has plenty of legitimate uses: for people circumventing regional web blocks, evading censorship by states less benevolent than ours and simply getting rid of that slimy feeling whereby you know your movements through the web are being tracked by all number of corporate and government data-miners. But VPNs can also be used for filesharing anonymously and as we’ve seen the entertainment industry can and will take action, regardless of how many people use the service responsibly.

But even within the VPN industry there is conflict over how to deal with the new legal sledgehammer being wielded over them. It boils down to a question of trust. Do you trust that the British legal system will use its powers of censorship wisely and responsibly and submit to them? Or do you decide that free speech, privacy and an unfiltered web trump the concerns of corporate entertainment giants and become a pariah?

In the first camp are the British company Hide My Ass, one of the world’s largest VPNs with nearly 100,000 subscribers. HMA was brought to the attention of the mainstream when they handed over user data on members of Lulzsec. The move brought widespread condemnation from the privacy community, as they saw it, they had paid for anonymity and HMA had rolled over and given it up at the first sight of a court order.

The company themselves are rather more pragmatic, they are a business operating in the UK and have to abide by its laws. They clearly state on their privacy statement that the VPN shouldn’t be used to break the law, and that they’ll hand over information on which of their users were connected to the VPN service during a crime if presented with a UK court order. Ignoring the court order only opens the website to lawsuits of its own and risks getting the whole service shut down or compromised by the secret services.

For a service that serves many people in oppressive regimes, keeping the site running is the greater good, and that means compliance with the law. Despite the feeling of betrayal from some of their more vocal users, HMA see their actions as ethical. “There are plenty of legitimate uses that most of our users happily do without any complaint from anyone, it’s a tiny minority of users that are up to no good.” says Danvers Baillieu, Chief Operating Officer of Privax Limited, the company behind HMA. Sacrificing the troublemakers to keep attention away from the whole makes sense, even if most criminals are using fake details to protect their identity anyway.

Instead of risking being blocked VPNs like Hide My Ass are more likely to be brought into the fold with ISPs and told to comply with the block on sites like Pirate Bay. It’s censorship through the back door, but because they’ve set their benchmark against the laws of the worst regimes in the world the British legal system is more than adequate protection for the majority of their users even if it’s not perfect. “Ultimately, if an order was made and it was binding, we’d abide by it. But equally if it became a real problem, we’d have to weigh up our options as to operating from another country.”

On the other end of the spectrum and possibly first the legal firing line could well be the Swedish service iPredator, set up in 2009 by some of the people involved with The Pirate Bay. Their association with “known criminals”, sure to feature heavily in any prosecutor’s case, makes them an easier target than most and an attractive one for corporate lawyers that like an open and shut case to set a precedent and get the legal ball rolling before moving onto more ethically dubious ventures. That said, the Swedish filesharing community is as close as you get to professional copyright fighters and they won’t go out without raising a storm.

Providing privacy is more than a business, for iPredator, it’s a cause. The arguments they use to rebut copyright law and privacy today reflect the big problems of tomorrow, namely the trend towards data-warehousing and excessive surveillance by governments. “On one hand we have piracy of movies on the other hand we have piracy of our privacy by companies and governments. The system works in both ways.” They point out that you’re unlikely to be able to access your own datapool because it’ll be held under a foreign jurisdiction, that you don’t even know when you’re being spied upon and there aren’t any laws holding companies liable for data breaches and what happens to your information afterwards.

As iPredator see it, laws upholding copyright simply have no legitimacy, if their service is used to circumvent them, then so what? Usually laws arise in response to cultural attitudes, take gay marriage gaining legal status as an example. But “in the case of P2P we have laws that are pushed down our throats to define social norms, which is not how it should be, and in essence robs us of our freedom.” said a spokesperson of iPredator. Copyright “theft” in the digital age lacks the injured party of physical theft, it’s a fundamentally different concept to the acts the our laws were supposed to prevent.

Instead of operating on a practical basis, iPredator take a moralistic stance towards privacy and so have engineered a system to protect its users from any and all legal threats. Sweden already has the most permissive internet legislation in the world, but it is the technical details of the site that give most protection. Most of the logs a litigant might want, for example a certain website visited by a user, simply aren’t recorded and any subscription details a user provides don’t necessarily have to be correct. Whereas some might call a business not knowing what its users are up to irresponsible, iPredator would call it essential.

Finding the balance between providing a service that’s private enough to be useful yet doesn’t encourage illegality is difficult, if not impossible. I can’t help but feel that people getting up to no good, is a price we’ll have to pay for the majority to retain their liberty. Globalised industry has captured government’s across the world to such a degree that they can’t be wholly trusted to act in our interests, their laws are increasingly divergent from what the citizens of the world think the law should be. If we’re going to be protected from their unjust laws, we’ll need these tools and if that costs the entertainment industry (and remember it doesn’t cost them half as much as they whine about it) in the short term, then so be it.

As legal pressure builds up on privacy vendors like proxy services, Tor and VPNs there will be an increasing urgency to conform or to suffer the consequences. Most are likely to comply with the law of their home countries, trading off the loss of reputation with the ability to continue operating, in a legal environment which is at the very least more permissive than wherever else a user might be connecting from. But if a perfect free web is your aim, then the only choice is to keep fighting against censorship for corporate interests, and that will be what keeps driving the anonymising arms race. The harder the law makes it to stay private on the conventional web, the stronger the pressure for entrepreneurs to develop anonymising services and the greater the incentive for users to switch over to them.

Newzbin2 and The Pirate Bay won’t be the only websites blocked from the UK, a second round of torrent websites will surely follow. We can only hope that as the copy-wars drag on, the entertainment industry doesn’t cause too much collateral damage in its pursuit of profit by hunting down privacy providers. Institutionalising the willing VPNs will make them another tool of government and exiling the rebels leaves us without access to what will be the last bastions of a truly unfiltered web. I can’t imagine the country as a whole will mourn the loss of VPNs, but by God will we regret if our government ever reduces us to needing them.

How close to a police-state are we?

How far can a government go in squashing dissent before it can be termed “oppressive”? On first glance it might appear a rather inane question and one certainly loaded with all kinds of preconceived ideas about the state. Even if you can get past that, any response will have enough caveats and extenuating circumstances attached to rob you of a black and white answer. Yet it remains an important question to ask, if only to realise that suppression isn’t an on or off switch but a whole array of techniques, common only in their overriding purpose: to keep you quiet and off the streets.

When we think of suppression of protest our minds wander towards the Syrian or Bahraini army firing on protesters, Egypt disrupting mobile communications during protests, China monitoring and blocking the web, the networks of spies and informers in Gaddafi’s Libya, the American tanks rumbling around Kabul or the stench of corruption hanging around the Russian elections. In short, we see oppression is something that happens in faraway places.

What we’re far less comfortable with is the idea that the tools of oppression are being deployed against us every day. The methods employed here are more subtle, but nevertheless have the same goal. Whether we’re talking about disproportionate “total policing” of protest events, blocking people from protesting outside parliament, using de-humanising riot gear, recruiting agent provocateurs within protest movements, threatening to use rubber bullets, kettling, beating or arresting, it’s all the same. You could even argue that not giving into the demands of protesters is a form of suppression. How many times have you heard “Oh, you’ll never achieve anything.” as a reason for staying at home rather than taking to the streets to fight for what you believe in?

Whatever the method, suppression of protest means preventing any true challenge to the establishment and making damn sure that no-one wants to go on a protest ever again. Just because you live in the relative safety of the United Kingdom doesn’t mean that there aren’t people seeking to boost their own legitimacy by preventing you from exercising your democratic prerogative.

At the root of this uncomfortable truth is the fact that no-one can rule another without consent. Whether you’re a leader of a democratic state or a military junta doesn’t matter, you’ll still need people to recognise you as ruler. The only notable difference between the two extremes is quite how blatant you can be when trying to manufacture your consent to rule. Killing and maiming aren’t quite open to democratic governments, but nearly everything else is still on the table.

The civilised West prefers more subtle methods and the case in point at the moment is the security around the Nato summit in Chicago, but the tactics used shouldn’t sound at all dissimilar to anyone living near the Olympic site. The mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former Chief of Staff to Barack Obama, has turned the city into a virtual police state. A legacy that will last far longer than the few days the leaders of the free world will be discussing how to contain China’s growing power while retaining the impression of promoting world “security”.

Miles of roads and highways have been shut down to establish a security cordon, eight foot tall security fences erected, F-16s and helicopters fly overhead, national guard deployed on the streets with a large reserve on a “training exercise” on the outskirts of the city, half a million pounds of new riot-control equipment and two new sound cannons. With the world becoming increasingly peaceful, the western military-industrial complex is branching out into security. Business may be booming, but no potential buyer would do so without a demonstration of the goods, and what better test subjects than your own citizens?

More worrying are the stringent new laws on getting a protest approved in Chicago, unlike the equipment, these changes are permanent. For example protest organisers are required to register each banner or soundsystem too large to be carried by a single person and have become liable for damages incurred by whoever happens to turn up on the day. It might sound petty, but it’s enough to dissuade casual organisers and keep the professionals at a slow enough pace to allow government to ram through any truly horrific legislation in day or two and avoid any major backlash.

In the West though, these kinds of tactics are really the reserve of the lazy or desperate. A true leader governs with the absolute and unforced consent of the people and a decent politician can inspire trust even in those whose opinions offer from their own. Moving down the scale, a bad politician stifle dissent by allying with the media, dividing his enemies or massaging the truth. An incompetent politician can simply makes sure that anyone that disagrees with them simply can’t be heard, and that road doesn’t end in a pretty place.

Governments across the world are facing a crisis of legitimacy. A well informed populace, a deep seated mistrust of politics and tough economic times are a recipe for unrest. But instead of attacking the root causes of this mistrust, they’ve started attacking us. I can’t in good judgement say that I’m being oppressed by my government, but the measures that they’re planning certainly fall somewhere on that scale. The danger is that the longer they try to use force, fear and coercion to keep the lid on this social pressure cooker, the bigger the eventual explosion will be.

Excessive security, provided by a shady industry with little to no concern for what regime they’re actually securing, is a danger to us all. Suppression of protest might be more familiar to us abroad, but allowing these practices to become normalised ensures that eventually they’ll be turned against us. We’re not a police-state, but it’s certainly the direction we’re travelling in.

Too many posh kids with power

Michael Gove has become the second Conservative MP in just under a week to take a pot-shot at their leadership and claim that the ranks of the elite are stuffed with public schoolboys. Speaking at a conference of headteachers in Brighton, Gove said that the dominance of the publicly educated in politics, the media, sport, business and the rest was “morally indefensible”.

While not quite as incendiary as Nadine Dorries referring to Cameron and Osborne as “two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk,” Gove’s comments still pack a punch. The Conservative has never overcome its upper class image. For a party containing an (un)healthy proportion of privately educated millionaires, they’re awfully sensitive to being called privately educated millionaires. It doesn’t help that all too often their policies look like a crude form of social engineering, stitching up the poor to give a certain kind of middle class social climber an easier ride.

Which is exactly what makes Michael Gove’s comments so incongruous. It’s not that the overabundance of publicly educated people in power isn’t a problem, but that Gove’s education reforms seem set to entrench exactly the kind of social segregation that began this inequality of representation. I don’t doubt that there will be many academies and their free-school cousins that do very well from unleashing themselves from local government, but by and large they will be the schools with the natural advantage of good catchment areas and good funding or a lucky break with a head teacher. The real test of the system will be what happens to the rest.

In essence an academy will no longer be responsible to the Local Education Authority and will be able to choose how they deliver the national curriculum, the length of the school day and term dates and the pay and conditions of staff. The basic message is that academies are free to do as they please in the pursuit of excellence. In return for investing a wadge of cash, usually around 10% of the school’s capital, an academy’s corporate, charity or faith sponsor gets to install its own governors and take some control of running the school. It turns out that a million or two or so can get you quite a lot of control. Overall, academies don’t get any more money per pupil from the government but that shot in the arm of investment capital has made converting an attractive option for over two in three secondary schools in the UK.

The academies will, in theory at least, promote creativity and innovation in teaching. The combination of freedom from local government, the fear of parents abandoning ship to set up their own free schools and the “radical” thinking of business is supposed to create a competitive environment where schools are driven to be at the top of their game and have to work to stay there. Even that weak theory begins to fall apart when academy chains running hundreds of schools take over all the schools in a local authority. Just like the NHS, the free market education system will end up owned by business conglomerates unwieldy and bureaucratic as the institutions they replaced. Only less accountable, and making a quick buck off your taxes.

My major issue with academy and free schools is that the criteria schools are competing on aren’t the ones that will actually improve education. If you start making league tables and exam results the be all and end all of a school’s success then it doesn’t take long before a school’s stated goal of “providing a comprehensive education to all comers” becomes “getting x number of A*-C grades this year”. Personally I’d want to go a school that taught me, rather than taught me how to pass exams. I think a lot of kids going through that particular torture at the moment would agree with me. Schoolchildren aren’t stupid, they know when they’re being fed BS and people are surprised when they don’t take it seriously.

It’s not just the teaching quality as a whole that suffers from the exam culture, but many academies are taking active steps to doctor their intake and fudge their statistics.
Free schools are notorious for being able to cherry pick the brightest students from outside their catchment areas, bumping their scores and leeching from others. We can also expect to see more indirect social engineering, as in: why bother having a woodwork class when the only kinds who want to do it are dreck? One school has permanently excluded five year seven pupils in a single year. That’s five 11 year olds whose careers are most likely ruined. Maybe they deserved it, but you can’t rule out that the school simply wasn’t going to risk a few bad apples pulling the rankings down. It is obvious that the good schools will end up oversubscribed, giving them a large pool of talent to pick from and the ones left over will mop up the rest. What was a two-tier system has had a third crammed onto the bottom.

The shame of it is that letting schools innovate for themselves is a cowardly policy. There may be some successes but there will be many more failures. I’d have thought it was the job of an education secretary to assess the differing models of education, of which hundreds around the world have been tried and tested, decide the best and lead us in that direction. Gove’s answer to the problem of our education system seems to be “Oh, god knows. You decide.” The horror of it is, as Mark Henderson henderson pointed out in The Observer, the lack of a scientific controls means we can’t even learn anything from this dangerous experiment. Even if academies do improve results we’ll never know if it would have been better to leave them alone.

This column is too short to list all the shortcomings of academy schools, but suffice to say that whichever schools do succeed they’ll do so at the expense of others. The plans do nothing to address the failings of the state education system, only open up a whole new spectrum of methods for failure. Its legacy will be a fractured system, with next to no national standard and another parasitic industry to feed. As the academy system implodes we’ll see an ever widening gulf between public and private schools, the only difference being that a select few public schools can catch them up.

If we’re really going to address the problem of class in this country rebranding our schools isn’t enough. The biggest barrier to educational attainment isn’t in school at all, it’s in the home. What really makes kids struggle is when their parents have to work and stress so hard that they don’t have the time to raise them. The fact that children see no rewards to work when they watch their parents grind themselves out every day. Or that poorer parents can’t afford to send their kids off for months of unpaid internship or years of university for the chance at success. The real problem is wealth, or rather its distribution.

To get a political system, or any power structure for that matter, that accurately represents society there are only two choices. We either ensure material equality for everyone to have an chance of success, or we have the structures in place to compensate for the natural advantage or wealth. If we want to educate every child their fairest chance of success, they need to be insulated from the grinding realities of poverty, illness and a dysfunctional home life. Creating this insane school system won’t change a thing.

Is media the new religion?

“A policeman can control a small crowd only for the time he is watching them, but a priest can put a policeman in the mind of every one of their flock, forever” With the UK becoming increasingly secular, is it any wonder society seems to be coming off the rails? If we’re lacking an internal policeman, then what has taken its place?

According to the 2001 census 72% of the UK regard themselves as Christian, with another 5.2% making up the rest of our religious diversity, practicing Islam, Sikhism, Judaism, Hinduism (or even Jediism). At first glance it might seem that we are in fact a rather theistic people, but under closer examination the high rate of response tends to fall apart.

An Ipsos Mori poll commissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation, questioned those who ticked the Christian box in the 2011 census found that surprisingly few are actually religious in the strict sense. Just under half hadn’t visited a church in the last year except for weddings or funerals, 37% of people who said they were Christian rarely or never prayed outside of church and only three in ten said they ticked Christian because they genuinely try and follow Christianity, with four in ten saying it was because they try to be a good person and associate that with Christianity.

The most interesting question was on where people go to for guidance on right and wrong. A little over half said they consult their own moral compass, a quarter said they ask family and friends and only 10% of “census-Christians” look to religious teachings and beliefs. So even amongst the nominally religious parts of our population most people draw their own moral boundaries. Boundaries that are far more plastic than they used to be in the past.

At the root of it, is a problem of choice, and that nowadays there’s too much of it. Back in the middle ages, you learnt nearly everything of the wider world in Church, and crucially so did everyone else. God is great, the earth is flat and stealing is wrong. You might disagree, but with a society so homogenous you’d find it difficult to say so without being burnt at the stake. With a lack of alternative faiths or belief systems, then the Church can tell you the Truth, and you’ll accept it.

But today no-one holds a similar monopoly on Truth. Most respectable religions, philosophies, life-styles or moral codes can only offer at best a truth, or some truth and that puts everything into question. For every moral absolute you can find another viewpoint that says something different. Human nature may not have changed in centuries, but the world we live in certainly has. We have always picked up our personal morality from a blend of the morality of society, from our family and friends and from our own moral judgement. Nowadays that moral guidance is no longer seeded through religion but we do get influenced by other means.

Nowadays you’re less likely to be religious but more inclined to align yourself to the dominant media conglomerates of our times. You attend the holy church of The Guardian, read the gospels of The Mail or the sutras of The Independent, you might follow the sermons of saturday night ITV or the subversive cult screenings on Channel 4 or maybe you prefer a more evangelical sect and like to tune in to the demagogues from across the pond on Fox News.

The media you consume fulfils the same role as religion did, it teaches you about the workings of the world, it teaches you the Truth. The difference is that people are more free to pursue their own interests and inclinations, rather than the more prescriptive teachings of religion. But whatever your mode of consumption, the more media you expose yourself to, the more the message will bleed into your subconscious and quietly adopted as your own. It isn’t to say that it is a bad thing, just something that needs to be handled with a little caution.

Isn’t it better that we can seek out the people, the reportage, the TV shows and and websites that best suit us? Rather than having to conform to a one-size fits all value system. Some might say that the rise of moral objectivism in the wake of dying religions is the cause of what might appear on the surface to be a kind of social breakdown. On balance however the plurality of culture, taste and opinion, fed by a diverse media surely does our society a greater service.

That isn’t to say that our modern media driven world isn’t without its pitfalls. Just as with religion to consume without analysis is to be indoctrinated. It certainly doesn’t help that the mainstream media, and advertisers in particular, have gotten very good at pushing all your subconscious buttons to keep you passive and receptive to the message they’re preaching. If you’re going to survive amongst the countless hoards of people trying to get your ear (and your money), you need to become a crafty consumer of your media, drawing from many sources and never following blindly.

Religion in its traditional sense may be dead, but it lives on as part of the cultural milieu. As religion’s power has dwindled it has been less able to hold the population into a single hegemonic mass. To some extend society has suffered from it, as social cohesion gives the appearance of breaking down. But with today’s rich cultural landscape taking inspiration from film, music and reportage alongside the more established art, science and religion the sources of inspiration, joy and understanding have never been as rich. Society may not have quite corrected for this sea-change in moral values, but I have faith in the ever adaptable human race to adjust to tolerate the most diverse societies in world history.

The loss of religious hegemony has undoubtedly cost us in some sense, but what some might call a fractured society is more like a celebration of quite how varied the human species is.

Copyright or Copywrong?

Can you imagine that copyright and intellectual property law used to be a tool to protect the lone inventor from having his ideas stolen by big business? Oh how the tables have turned. The news this week has been positively bristling with uses and abuses of copyright law to enable industrial giants to win power and influence over their competitors. Google, through their not quite yet subsidiary Motorola, have threatened to block the sale of nearly all Microsoft’s products in Germany over a video codec, yet another judge speaks out against the illegality of the US’s takedown of Megaupload and of course Pirate Bay is going to be wiped off the face of the UK web within weeks.

We should never be surprised when a capitalist does what is quite obviously wrong in order to do what’s right for their business. If companies are going to trade petty legal threats with eachother, then to a certain extent we have to just let them, even if those legal costs eventually get passed to the consumer in higher prices. But when the vampire hacks of corporate law begin setting legal precedents against free speech, against a life free from surveillance and against companies which are ultimately more dynamic and more innovative than their globalised counterparts, we should stand up and make our displeasure known. Before the means for making our protest are erased from the web entirely.

The Motorola versus Microsoft case is a great example of the lifecycle of a corporation. Motorola, a predominantly communications company since 1928, were for a time one of the largest mobile phone manufacturers and made billions selling ranges like the RAZR. But overexposure to a crowded mobile market meant that since around 2008 they’ve been struggling to turn a profit and began to do what all companies do when they feel their wallets pinched, start behaving like an asshole.

Motorola has a rather wide suite of patents and copyrights, many of which have since become an industry standard so are subject to special rules. Because the technology is essential to operating in the global market the licences have to be granted but the fees must be Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (FRAND). In the Microsoft case, Motorola decided that its two video encoding algorithms were worth 2.25% of the sales price of Windows, the Xbox, Internet Explorer and Windows Media player, Microsoft disagree.

It’s not as if Motorola is the only one guilty of using their patent library to strongarm their competitors. In some sense this battle is coming to a head now because Apple and Microsoft have been scalping Google for royalties from the sale of Android phones, and if you go back a little further because Google, via Motorola want a slice of all sales of the iPhone. They’re all as guilty as each other.

The real shame is that whereas the giant companies are demanding billions of pounds from eachother, the lowly programmers and technicians who actually designed those products stay on a basic wage. It doesn’t do much for the creative spirit when your R&D team know they’ll receive only the most minimal rewards for the work they put into the company. It’s not even as if copyright law really works for the smaller companies either, more often than not they’ll end up subsumed into the corporate machine rather than face the astronomical legal costs that their established competitors can rain down upon them.

You can see this innovation stifling dynamic in the Pirate Bay switch-off. A monument to the colossal greed of the entertainment industry, which to listen to their whinging you’d imagine was on its last legs but in fact whose profits have risen year on year, despite the global recession. The block isn’t going to work, it’s too easy to circumvent, the entertainment industry still offers a crappy DRM locked product and there are always going to be people who want to steal.

I’d vouch for the idea that it’s not really the downloading that the industry is going after at all. After all there are still millions of people that have never illegally downloaded anything and they tend to have a lot more cash. No, it’s what Pirate Bay are only just beginning to get into that is far more dangerous to the entertainment industry’s future survival.

A less well known fact, to the general public at least, is that Pirate Bay are getting into promotion. A recent competition for independent film makers and musicians got over 5000 entries, the winners got huge amounts of free promotion just from association with the website. George Barnett got over 4,000 new Facebook fans and had his video views 85,000 times in just a few days. Crucially promotion through Pirate Bay cuts out the middleman. No labels roping you into an exploitative contract, just talent. It’s bands and film makers being able to make it in the world without them that really terrifies the entertainment industry. Copyright happens to be the only political and legal lever they have to try and wipe the competition off the face of the earth and if they set a legal precedent for blocking free speech then who cares.

Increasingly Intellectual Property is just a tool for corporations to play silly buggers with eachother. A way to take the hard work of their poorly rewarded employees, usually paid for by some state subsidy on R&D, and wreak havoc with it. Racking up huge legal fees in tit-for-tat court cases, mangling and swallowing up the fledglings who’ll one day out compete them and ultimately starving off their industry of the very innovation they’ll need to survive.

This isn’t just an issue of copyright although it certainly contributes, its more of an emergent property of big business. I for one say burn them all to the ground, if human nature has taught me anything it’s that something better will come along to a take its place.

Anders Breivik: Videogame Trained Killer?

Can videogames teach you how to kill? More specifically, did they train Anders Breivik how to perpetrate the massacre on Utoya island? The media, who’ve spent the week breathlessly poring over Breivik’s court case, have been hyping the fact that he spent a lot of time playing Call of Duty and Warcraft. “Breivik played video games for a year to train for deadly attacks,” shrieked a Times headline. Even the normally moderate Guardian went with the headline “Anders Breivik ‘trained’ for shooting attacks by playing Call of Duty.”

Yet the mainstream press consistently failed dissect what Breivik was actually saying about his gaming habits, preferring to take the statements of a psychotic at face value to shoehorn in the “videogames are evil” narrative and boost their pageviews in the process. The fact is that the games Breivik played could have never trained him for the massacre and to claim otherwise is a distraction from the real issues at stake.

The time that Breivik spent playing World of Warcraft was, in his own words “a sabbatical year”. He felt that after working long hours on his failed business projects he deserved a break to fulfil a “dream” working on his manifesto and gaming all day. Many have taken this as evidence of Breivik’s social isolation. In a certain sense this is true, but it isn’t the full picture.

The year living with his mother and playing the fantasy game Warcraft upwards of 12 hours a day did serve to cut him off from the old life that he was soon to give up. The point that many commentators have missed is that Breivik developed a new social group in the online realm. Developing Breivik’s three characters to the highest levels in the game meant he spent countless hours questing, raiding and chatting to other players.

During his time Breivik even ended up becoming a guild leader, corralling players together to complete the hardest of the game’s challenges. His leadership skills were somewhat in question, he wanted the guild to move away from its casual roots and its members to dedicate more energy to questing. He rubbed a few people up the wrong way, but wasgenerally regarded as a valuable player, a good tactician, a better listener than he was a talker but generally “normal”.

World of Warcraft is a sideshow in the Brevik trial. Warcraft is a fantasy game more akin to fast paced team chess set in a cartoonish middle earth and could have never prepared him for the killings. If anything it only served as a cover for Breivik to break his old social and emotional ties, giving him the time and space to plan his attacks. “Some people like to play golf, some like to sail, I played WOW. It had nothing to do with 22/7.”

As for Call of Duty, Breivik is rather more explicit in its role in his “training”, but even then manages to misrepresent what is actually possible in the game. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is a first person shooter set in the present day, you play as a soldier running along a scripted set of corridors/streets/outdoor spaces gunning down reams of enemies. In this sense the game is disturbingly similar to Breivik’s actual killing spree. But to call it training really stretches the bounds of possibility.

Specifically Breivik says:“It’s very good for acquiring experience related to [gun] sights systems.” Yes, the game does give a decent simulation of looking down a barrel of a gun, but it would be of little use in the real world. Breivik himself even admits that you could give a holographic sight “to your grandmother and she would have been a super marksman.” The point is that a gun is a pretty intuitive thing to use and “practicing” in a simulation as crude as Call of Duty isn’t going to teach you anything. Call of Duty also gives an excellent simulation of running and jumping but letting your still crawling infant play the game isn’t going to teach him how to walk.

Any tangible gains that Breivik might have gotten from the game are likely to be found in what he calls “target acquisition”. Training your mind to parse a target from your field of vision and focus on it. A twitchy, reaction-time based shooter like Call of Duty probably would give you some improvement in this skill, but joystick twiddling aim in the game simply doesn’t translate to handling a real life weapon. Call of Duty didn’t make Breivik a hardened commando, he was never anything more than a psychopath, with vastly overpowered weapons, killing unarmed children.

Videogames didn’t train Breivik to be a killer, he was a killer who played videogames. In the search for a scapegoat for the atrocity the mainstream look to the easy targets, something that they might be able to legislate against. The terrible truth is that you can’t legislate against the moral perversion (never mind mental illness) that Breivik clearly suffered from.

What actually trained Breivik for his shooting spree was quite obviously his time practicing with the actual weapons he used to commit the crime. What made him inclined towards killing was his sense of frustration, a dearth of right-wing propaganda and a clear mental imbalance. Videogames are such a small part of his story they don’t deserve to be brought up.

A fact far less publicised is that in his manifesto Breivik extensively quotes the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips and Jeremy Clarkson. Saying videogames made him a killer is just as fatuous an argument as saying that reading the Mail or watching Top Gear is going to turn you into a killer too.

The Americas Divided

Over the weekend Columbia hosted the sixth Summit of the Americas, in which leaders from the two continents meet to discuss their shared future and foster cooperation. Or at least that is the general idea. This year the summit was defined by the changing balance of power in the region as the long standing distrust of the USA begins to ferment into outright dissent. South America senses that the power of the US is waning and is taking the opportunity to come out from under the shadow of Washington’s neo-imperialist policy towards its closest neighbors.

The US has treated the South Americas as its personal playground for most of the century, but the scars it inflicted on the region have never entirely healed. The CIA backed coups against democratically elected leaders of the 60’s and 70’s in Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and more, and the training and assistance the US gave to the military juntas that sprung out of the aftermath have left a painful legacy, one that even now some areas of the South are struggling to emerge from.

One can understand the frustration of many Southern leaders in having to supplicate themselves their childhood bully, and now wanting to exert their independence. With South America as one of the fastest growing regional economies, this new found confidence poses a problem for the US, who rely on the South to buy over 40% of its exports and for more than half of the US’s imported oil. The worries for the US are compounded by the Chinese, who have been aggressively investing in the region and have surpassed the US as the main trade partner in several Latin American economies.

This backdrop of waning imperial power in the North and growing economic influence in the South sets the scene for the rest of the summit, with the US trying to defend policy areas that have up till now remained unchallenged.

The major point of contention is the continued exclusion of Cuba from the Summit of every other nation in the Americas. Cuba was kicked out of the Organisation of American States, which leads the summit, shortly after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. In line with the US policy of isolation towards the country, when regular summits began in 1994 Cuba wasn’t allowed to attend.

Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa decided to boycott the Summit in protest against Cuba’s absence. When gauging support for the proposal that Cuba be allowed to the 2015 meeting fully 32 of the 34 representatives wanted them to be allowed to attend, only the US and Canada disagreed. Many countries, including the Colombian host President Juan Manuel Santos have said that they will not permit another summit unless the situation is rectified. “It seems the United States still wants to isolate us from the world, it thinks it can still manipulate Latin America, but that’s ending,” said Bolivian President Evo Morales, “What I think is that this is a rebellion of Latin American countries against the United States.”

President Obama said that it was because of Cuba’s authoritarian rule that they could not be allowed into the summit. The more cynical, or debatably more realistic, commentators say that it has more to do with the strong anti-Castro bloc in the key voting state of Florida. A Cuban spokesperson said that Obama had been forced to use the US’s “imperial veto” and was in no position to lecture anyone about democracy. They kind of have a point when the US faces 94% opposition to their continued diplomatic embargo.

Other issues on the table were the US’s drugs policy, which critics in the South say is ineffective in curbing demand and is ravaging the countries along the trafficking highway into North America. In Mexico alone, 50,000 have died in the last 6 years as a result of the warring drug gangs not to mention the widespread corruption of local government, the police and the military and the routine murder of journalists. Again, hands tied by an intractable domestic situation and election politics, Obama was unable to promise any reform.

The Falklands too proved to be a difficult issue, with near unanimous support for Argentina’s claim over the islands. Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez was one of several who left the Summit before it had officially closed.

In fairness to Obama the Summit wasn’t a complete failure. A free trade agreement was negotiated with Columbia, and over 330 business executives were at a simultaneous conference to discuss investment opportunities in the region. Also, most leaders praised Obama’s calm, considered attitude. “I think it’s the first time I’ve seen a president of the United States spend almost the entire summit sitting, listening to the all concerns of all countries,” said Mexican President Felipe Calderon. “This was a very valuable gesture by President Obama.” But lacking any real power to affect those concerns, listening was the best he could do.

So while there were no seismic fallouts from the Summit, the message was quite clear: Latin America has its own concerns and the US can’t or won’t do much to help. Unless the US wants to further distance itself from its closest neighbors, it will need to give up concessions. If it can’t the newly unified South will forge their own path, one that will send it colliding with ever more frequency against the interests of its former oppressor.