The Reason Review — March 2018
March’s headlines often read as if they’d been borrowed from the height of the Cold War, with espionage, blackmail and the consolidation of autocratic power becoming recurrent themes—the constant failure of UK companies to tackle their gender pay gaps further added to feelings of déjà vu. Of course the continual revelations about data breaches at Facebook and blockchain’s new use as a vehicle for illegal imagery kept reminding us that this was definitely 2018, no matter how much Vladimir Putin thought otherwise.
Blockchain Fears Realised
“Since all blockchain data is downloaded and persistently stored by users, they are liable for any objectionable content added to the blockchain by others. Consequently, it would be illegal to participate in a blockchain-based system as soon as it contains illegal content.”
This month, researchers at RWTH Aachen University in Germany discovered that anonymous persons have been using bitcoin’s blockchain technology to store child abuse content. This Guardian article reveals how blockchain — an open-source, distributed ledger that records bitcoin transactions — can also be used to store small bits of non-financial data, and how some of this data is taking the shape of illegal images and links to unsavoury dark-web content.
Indeed, it appears the concerns Interpol raised about blockchain technology years ago are now being realised; the organisation sent out an alert early in 2015 detailing how the very design of bitcoin lent itself to the possibility of malware being permanently hosted, with no recourse currently available to wipe such data.
Samuel Gibbs’ article also notes how the existence of such unlawful material within the blockchain essentially “endangers the multi-billion dollar markets powering cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin”, making this revelation not only a moral and legal quandary, but a pressing financial one, too.
Data Harvesting the World
“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”
Whistleblower Christopher Wylie has revealed how Cambridge Analytica used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 in one of Facebook’s biggest ever data breaches. Wylie worked with a Cambridge University academic, Aleksandr Kogan, to obtain the data, which was then used to build a system that could profile individual US voters and target them with personalised political advertisements. It was only by late 2015 that Facebook noticed that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale.
But how did this occur? Third party data. Facebook now has strict protocol in place governing its usage that had yet to be instated in 2014. Wylie’s allegations state that the data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by Kogan—a personality test that some 270,000 people downloaded, and were paid to take. Crucially, they agreed to let their data be used for academic purposes. And that should’ve been the end of it. However, by agreeing to the app’s terms, users were also allowing it to collect information on their Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool of some 50 million individuals.
The seriousness of the allegations lies in the contention that they were used to inform and unduly sway voters in both the EU Referendum and the 2016 US presidential elections.
#PayMeToo
“These figures show us what we expected — we still see an underrepresentation of women at the top and and overrepresentation at the bottom.”
A slew of further revelations about the extent of the UK’s gender pay gap have been a constant source of column inches in March’s news reports. Their dominance over the news cycle has been the result of new legislation that requires every company with a staff of over 250 to report its gender pay gap — public sector bodies by March 30 and private companies by April 4.
In the run-up to the deadline, The Guardian reported extensively on new statistics week by week, observing that the companies with the widest gender pay gaps had held off reporting their payment policies until closer to the deadline, most likely to avoid being targeted for in-depth analysis, as in this piece on the extent of the pay gap at Channel 4, that mirrored the skewed payment policies of the BBC reported in February of this year.
Overall, the picture was pretty dismal for payment equality, with both private and public sector employers falling far short on parity of pay. The NHS — an organisation made up of 77% women — reported a gender pay gap in 90% of its trusts, while private school Eton College reported paying its female staff a median hourly wage 31% lower than its male employees.
The Spy Left Out in the Cold
“The unified international response to the Skripal poisoning shows that the West will only suffer so much provocation.”
Reality sometimes seems stranger than fiction. In a plot that could have easily come from the pages of a John le Carré novel, the sleepy cathedral town of Salisbury was the scene for the poisoning by means of a deadly nerve agent of the former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Both remain critically ill, while a policeman who treated the victims and was affected himself has since been discharged from hospital.
Recalling the radioactive poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko by means of polonium-210, the finger of accusation has been pointed at Putin and Russia. This is due to the fact that the nerve agent used, Novichok, has apparently only ever been produced by the Russian state. Predictably, Russia has disputed the claims, but this denial seems to be standard practice for any news or revelations that Russia finds contentious, true or otherwise.
This time, however, there has been swift and unified international condemnation with scores of countries following the lead of the UK and expelling Russian diplomats. Russia has vowed to retaliate in kind, but after years of increasingly brazen behaviour, has it finally overstepped the mark?
Leaders Consolidated?
“While Mr Putin’s re-election operation went smoothly, his next term will be a minefield.”
To the surprise of absolutely no-one, Vladimir Putin emerged victorious from Russia’s presidential elections on March 19. Amid a growing international furore over Russia’s alleged involvement in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, Putin secured 76% of the public vote — a significant lift from the 64% he secured from the previous contest in 2012. While hundreds of discrepancies and suggestions of tampering were identified by independent election monitors, it’s worth remembering that the election was already all but a one-horse race: Putin’s main rival, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was barred from entering.
As The Economist reports, Putin’s new six-year term should technically be his last. At present the Russian constitution only allows a leader to serve two consecutive terms, and Putin assumed office in 1999. That said, the former KGB officer may be tempted to follow the approach of Xi Jinping, who also reaffirmed his leadership status in March: at the start of the month, the Chinese parliament scrapped the two-term limit for presidents, effectively installing Xi as president for the duration of his life. On that occasion, the motion to approve the change secured a whopping 99.8% of the vote from the National People’s Congress. While Putin recently laughed off the notion that he might eventually run for a third term, he may find the idea less funny in six years’ time.
See Something
“The West African country of Niger has the highest rate of child marriage in the world. This tradition jeopardises the future of the young girls forced into such marriages and endangers their health.”
Al Jazeera has turned the spotlight on to Niger, a country infamous for having the highest rate of child marriage anywhere in the world. One third of all girls there are married at 15, and 80% are married by the age of 18. Not only does this practice jeopardise their future ambitions, it can endanger their health, sometimes with fatal consequences.
Read Something
“Climatic Change is dedicated to the totality of the problem of climatic variability and change — its descriptions, causes, implications and interactions among these. The purpose of the journal is to provide a means of exchange among those working in different disciplines on problems related to climatic variations.”
The March–April issue of the Climatic Change journal is essential reading for those looking to stay up to date on all things climate change. The latest release, Volume 147, includes original papers on Nitrogen pollution, the Paris warming targets and safe carbon budgets, penned by leading experts from a variety of fields and disciplines.
Do Something
“Taking place between the 7th and the 15th of April, the Big Spring Beach Clean (BSBC) is the largest and most effective volunteer beach cleaning project in the UK, if not Europe.”
Between April 7 and 15, hundreds of volunteers up and down the country will be hosting beach cleans to remove plastics and other marine pollution from the UK’s coastlines. It’s too late to organise your own, but you can find your local event, pitch up and take part in a project that has cleared up 152,741 kilos of crap from the UK’s beaches to date. A few of the Weapons of Reason team will be down at West Wittering on April 15 if you want to come and say hello.
The Reason Review aims to go beyond the headlines and find the stories and angles the newspapers have missed. We give you the extra context behind the bigger stories, explain to you why some seemingly smaller events matter and offer you something more interesting and informative than the simple facts.
