Mediaboss Marketing

24 May 2017, 12:56 a.m.

The Black Lives Matter movement began as a hashtag in response to the killing of an unarmed black teenager.

New York: Black Lives Matter, the movement against racial inequality and police violence in the US which began as a powerful hashtag and became a global rallying cry, will be the 2017 recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize - the first time the often-controversial award has gone to a movement and not an individual.

The prize recognises the work of the amorphous racial justice movement that exists under the catch-all moniker, but has nevertheless managed to unite activists from around the world, including in Australia.

The phrase and hashtag was first used by activist Alicia Garza in a mournful, angry Facebook post following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, in 2013, for the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The African-American boy was gunned down by the neighbourhood vigilante while walking home - unarmed - from a trip to a corner store.

"I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter," Ms Garza wrote at the time, "black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter."

The hashtag gained real prominence though in 2014, after the deaths of two unarmed black men during encounters with police - Michael Brown in Ferguson, and Eric Garner in New York - which further focused the national and international spotlight on police brutality and the killings of unarmed black men in the US.

The phrase, which is also the name of the civil rights activist organisation founded by Ms Garza and two other black female activists, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, has proved enduringly powerful.

It has been taken up by anti-racist movements around the world - including by protesters in Australia calling for an end to Indigenous deaths in custody - who feel the lives of black citizens are implicitly or explicitly treated as less valuable than others.

"For me there's a the level of unapologeticness about it," Ms Garza said of the phrase this week.

"In a context where we're often told, to not talk about race, that talking about race is somehow divisive, when in fact those of us who are on the losing end of racial relations want people to talk about it because we want to resolve the contradictions of some people having and some people not, of some people being discriminated against or being kept from opportunities."

Ms Garza visited Australia last year and observed some the parallels in the social and economic inequalities faced by both African-Americans and Aboriginal people, particularly on the issue of mass incarceration. Aboriginal youth in Australia are jailed at 24 times the rate of their non-Indigneous peers.

Ms Garza said though there was also a similarity in the attitudes of the broader ambivalence to this inequality.

"My impression being in Australia was that people now understand how important Indigenous rights are, but still I think there is a bit of a politeness around what is a pretty serious crisis, particularly just in relation to the conditions that Indigenous communities are facing."

"And I think it's similar in the US, where the way we talk about race here is that we've 'moved on' from it, when it's in fact very salient."

The phrase 'Black Lives Matter' has also permeated pop culture and been seized on and inverted by its critics, such as those who chanted 'Blue Lives Matter' at the Republican National Convention last year to affirm their support for police officers. A raft of provocative proposed state laws that aim to classify killing police as a hate crime in some US states have been dubbed "blue lives matter" bills.

The Sydney Peace Prize jury's citation for this year's winners applauded the movement "for building a powerful movement for racial equality, courageously reigniting a global conversation around state violence and racism. And for harnessing the potential of new platforms and power of people to inspire a bold movement for change at a time when peace is threatened by growing inequality and injustice."

The three women will travel to Sydney to accept the prize at the official ceremony in November, and to deliver the annual City of Sydney Sydney Peace Prize Lecture.

The Sydney Peace Prize prize is awarded each year by the Sydney Peace Foundation, which is located within the University of Sydney and receives support from the City of Sydney.

Past winners include prominent leftist thinkers including author and climate change activist Naomi Klein, journalist John Pilger and philosopher Noam Chomsky, as well as human rights campaigners such as author Arundhati Roy and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The story How three Americans won the Sydney Peace Prize first appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald.

Visit link:
How three Americans won the Sydney Peace Prize - Braidwood Times

From the smoke signal to email, advances in communication have had organizational consequences. In this series, well look at how online social networks are beginning to change the way business is done: first, at what coaches and academics have learned about what online social networks are and arent good for; second, at what the latest research says about how to make your personal network work; third, at some of the innovative ways in which Chinese businesses have learned to use social networks; and finally, at how the social network may evolve from here.

Business networking used to be a fairly grim affair. Youd stand around in a convention hall, shaking hands and trading business cards, and very occasionally, make a connection that had some value. Almost without exception, these people mattered much less than the people youd worked with, your long time customers, or old school chums. For everybody but the most determined extrovert, it was a dreaded event.

That nightmare of bad coffee and small talk is still alive and well, but over the last 15 years, a new element has been added to the mix: the online professional network. Although online networking has its grim and desperate side too, its rapid growth suggests that people are finding it useful. Founded in 2002, LinkedIn now has over 500 million members in 200 countries, nearly all of them just a virtual handshake away from an introduction.

Just as social networks and dating services have led to changes in the way people relate to each other in their free time, LinkedIn and other online professional networks and internal messaging software such as Yammer are beginning to change the way people make deals, find jobs, and get their jobs done.

At the macro-level, social networks seem to be good for generating social capital, and economists tend to find that social capital correlates well with economic growth. One 2015 study found that in the US between 2010 and 2014, job growth in the top quintile of metro areas outperformed job growth in the bottom quintile, 8.2% over the four years compared to 3.5%. Regions with high numbers of contacts per capita were also more resilient to economic shocks during the Great Recession.

Dr. Michael Mandel, the leader of the study and Chief Economic Strategist of the Progressive Policy Institute, cautioned in his report that this should be considered correlation rather than causation. However, the effect is so pronounced that in 2015, the McKinsey Global Institute predicted that online professional networks could add an additional $2.7 trillion to global GDP by 2025.

But human capacities may limit the potential of these networks. Scholars have estimated that 90% of communication is nonverbal, which means that online textual communication tends to have limited value in creating a social connection.

Online works OK, but it is not as effective as face-to-face, writes Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, in an e-mail. A video channel (e.g. Skype) works better than a text-based channel. But in the end, it seems that nothing is as effective as face-to-face because you can do things (including physical contact, eating, drinking etc) that play an important role in social bonding that you simply cannot do online.

Other communication experts are even more skeptical about online connections. You lose all contextits a paltrier way of living or working, says Laurence Prusak, a Boston-based researcher and consultant who specializes in knowledge management.

Several studies have suggested that our reliance on texting and online social networks may already be affecting how we interact. For example, one 2015 study by Microsoft Canada found that the average human attention span has shrunk from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds todayone second less than that of a goldfish. Researchers found that when it came to allocating attention, connecting with content on an emotional level, and processing information, moderate social media users performed better than average, while high social media users performed worse.

But Mariano Tufr, founder and director of Leadership Minds, a London leadership training consultancy, believes online networks have a useful role.

In his own firms business development, Tufr says, hes found LinkedIn to be most useful as a way to encourage face-to-face meetings. What Ive noticed is that I can stay in touch with way more people than I did before, he says.

Shawn Callahan, founder of Anecdote, a Melbourne-based corporate storytelling consultancy, also doesnt believe that social media isnt shrinking our attention span when it comes to stories.

Thevastmajority of corporate stories are told orally so I would say social media hasnt really changed that. If anything social media has amplified oral storytelling because each tweet, yammer post or Instagram picture is a trigger for a story to be told face to face among colleagues in the workplace, he writes, in an email.

Even if we can listen, however, other cognitive limits may still limit the value of social networks. In the 1990s, Oxfords Dunbar theorized that the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships is limited to around 150. In some recent research using Facebook data, he found that Dunbars Number still seems to hold true.

On the other hand, artificial intelligence isnt as limited as our own. Researchers have developed tools that allow them to monitor the overall mood of an organization, making it theoretically possible to find emerging sources of trouble early and correct them. New tools such as SenseMaker, a qualitative survey system produced by Cognitive Edge, make it possible to extract insights from qualitative interviews on a massive scale, according to Tufr. SenseMaker lets you listen to everybody and analyze that data and zoom into it as needed, he explains.

The insights generated by such systems may have important implications for organizational performance. For example, one 2015 study that analyzed the online chats of day traders over a two-year period found that the traders who used more emotional language tended to be less successful than their more detached colleagues.

Another study, conducted in 2016, found that the shape of networks actually changes under stress. The studys analysis of instant messages by traders at a hedge fund found that in the face of a price shock, the network tended to turtle up, that is, traders would turn to their most familiar contacts for information, exactly the opposite tactic sociological theory suggests they should take. Sociologists have found that if they need to adapt successfully to an environmental change, people tend to be better off reaching out to weaker ties. Such distant connections tend to have more unfamiliar and possibly useful information, for the same reason that an acquaintance is more likely to have heard of a job opening you havent heard about than your best friend.

More here:
Networking 2.0 Series: Social Capital in a Virtual Age - CKGSB Knowledge

Sacramento Bee

Why California gun owners may be breaking the law on July 1 Sacramento Bee You can't just take something away from somebody that they own without violating the Fourth Amendment. Some gun owners say they're hanging on to their magazines in the hopes pending court challenges will block the ban. They also hope the federal ...

Originally posted here:
Why California gun owners may be breaking the law on July 1 - Sacramento Bee

Illustrative image of cyber counter-terrorism. (photo credit:INGIMAGE PHOTOS)

The foundation of civilization is under cyber attack, said the former commander of Israel's elite intelligence Unit 8200 Nadav Zafir on Monday.

Zafir claimed that the electoral process can be tampered with by unlawful cyber activity and damage infrastructure, putting democratic civilizations at risk.

Zafir, headed what is considered to be the Israeli NSA between 2009 - 2013, made the comments during Cyber Week at Tel Aviv University.

The current chief of the Shin Bet, Nadav Argaman, is scheduled to give a rare talk on Tuesday that will present the audience with some of the means the Israeli security services use to tackle threats from individual hackers. This would be the first time such details will be openly presented to the public.

Today marks the second day of the conference, a unique event that address the challenges of security and privacy, for governments as well as private people, as the Internet becomes ever more present in global communication, finance, and entertainment.

The former chief of the USNational Security Agency (NSA) Keith Alexander also addressed the summit, telling the audience that he recently met with USPresident Donald Trump and that, despite what you hear in the press, the president understands fully existential cyber threats.

Speakers include Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism official Thomas Bossert, who serves as assistant to Trump. Current director of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) Nadav Argaman, Check Point CEO Gil Shwed and former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani are also in the lineup.

Other speakers include chief information security officer of the Indian Axis bank Ashutosh Jain and Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems. Events include an international war game simulation, a panel on the role of cyber in aviation, and even a cocktail party.

In recent years Israel became a celebrated global leader in the realm of cyber security, hi-tech, and technological innovation. Leading many to label Israel as a "Hi-Tech Nation".

This is the sixth year in which Cyber Week had taken place. This year's event will include round table discussions discussing Israeli - French, India-Israel, and UK - Israel innovation and regulation in regard to cyber security.

Those visiting the conference will be greeted by a huge six meters (19.5 feet) sculpture of a Trojan horse created from molten bits of smartphones, keyboards, and television screens that have been made useless due to a virus attack or remote hacking. The piece, which weighs two tons, was designed by Israeli advertising executive Gideon Amichay for the 2016 conference and became an iconic piece at campus.

Share on facebook

View original post here:
Ex-Israeli NSA chief: Foundation of civilization is under attack - The Jerusalem Post

It is very likely, in fact, most probable that NSA does have those tapes, stated Binney.

Binney continued: I think you already have examples of it where you had conversations that President Trump had with the president of Mexico and also with Australia. All of those have been leaked. Also phone calls involving [former National Security Advisor Michael] Flynn and so on and the White House.

And the point is here, you see, I dont know of any time that the president makes a phone call that is not encrypted. So that means that the people who are intercepting the president have to be able to decrypt it. And the people who provide the encryption and the keys to the systems to be used are NSA, he added.

Binney was speaking Sunday night on this reporters talk radio program, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio, broadcast on New Yorks AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphias NewsTalk 990 AM.

Binney was an architect of the NSAs surveillance program. He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31, 2001 after spending more than 30 years with the agency. He has remained a sought-after expert on NSA surveillance.

Binney was responding to a series of tweets from the U.S. president last week in which Trump wrote that he did not make and does not have recordings of his conversations with Comey.

However, Trump allowed that with all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea whether there are tapes or recordings of my conversations with James Comey.

On May 12, after Comey had been fired and there was speculation he was behind leaks to the news media, Trump had ominously issued the following warning on Twitter:

In remarks to the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month, Comey described three in-person private conversations with Trump one in January at Trump Tower before the inauguration and two more in the White House after Trump became president and two phone calls between the two.

NSA Absolutely Tapping Trumps Calls

Asked pointedly whether he believes the NSA is bugging the Oval Office, Binney replied, Absolutely.

In February on this reporters radio program, Binney made national headlines when he alleged the NSA was tapping Trumps Oval Office phone calls.

Binney further contended at the time that the NSA may have been behind a data leak that revealed Michael Flynn allegedly misled Vice-President Mike Pence and other Trump administration officials about the contents of his phone calls with Russias ambassador to Washington.

During the interview on Sunday, Binney addressed alleged illicit NSA domestic surveillance that he says is documented in NSA whistleblower Edward Snowdens slides on the agencys Fairview program, which is supposed to focus on the collection of data from foreign countries citizens utilizing switching stations located inside the U.S.

Binney stated:

The slides showing the tap points across the United States where the targets really are the U.S. population and not the foreigners. If they wanted the foreigners all they would have to do is tap the surfacing points for the transoceanic cables. That would be along the coast. You wouldnt need to tap points distributed with the populations of the company. So that is the main program they are using to collect all this data on the fiber networks.

Binney further stated the NSA could remotely turn on cell phone mics to record offline conversations.

Aaron Klein is Breitbarts Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. Follow him onTwitter @AaronKleinShow.Follow him onFacebook.

P.S. DO YOU WANT MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS ONE DELIVERED RIGHT TO YOUR INBOX?SIGN UP FOR THE DAILY BREITBART NEWSLETTER.

Read the original:
EXCLUSIVE Whistleblower: 'Most Probable' That NSA Has Recordings of Trump Phone Calls with James Comey - Breitbart News