Category Archives: Society

Europe, European Union, Foreign Affairs, Russia, Society, Ukraine, United States

Preventing dismemberment of Ukraine requires conciliatory compromise…

UKRAINE

In the aftermath of the Donetsk referendum on independence for the new ‘People’s Republic’, Roman Lyagin, the region’s self-styled electoral commissioner, has proclaimed a charade of an election result. The fact that the total of the yes, no and spoilt votes exceeded 100 per cent, Western observers – including the British Foreign Secretary William Hague – rightly concluded that this contest was ‘illegitimate’ and had ‘zero credibility’.

Despite the surreal nature of the plebiscite, the outcome is nothing other than deadly serious. The most populous regions of Ukraine, with 4.5 million people and the industrial powerhouse of the economy, now stands on the brink of merging with Russia. We should be under no illusion: the shadowy circle of kleptocratic pro-Kremlin leaders who organised this poll, with the resulting 89 per cent ‘yes’ vote, is leading the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk along a road that seems certain to end in union with Russia.

Ukraine’s new post-revolutionary government has no answer to the challenge. In what was described as a military offensive by the Ukrainian army prior to Sunday’s vote in restoring control over Donetsk, that strategy can only be deemed a fiasco upon reflection. The city of Mariupol, with its half-a-million residents, has effectively been conceded to the pro-Russian movement.

A chink of light may, however, provide a way out of the crisis. One of the referendum’s absurdities was a vague and indiscreet question that asked voters to assent to ‘self-rule’, clearly something which should have been clarified as to meaning. If Kiev were now to open proper talks and dialogue with the pro-Russian movement and make a generous and specific offer of regional autonomy, that might allow both sides to step back from the brink. Those hardliners in Kiev will no-doubt have difficulty in negotiating with a motley collection of Russian allies, particularly as Moscow is once again ramping up the threats to turn off Ukraine’s gas supplies, but the alternative will only exasperate an already tense and bitterly volatile situation.

It seems certain now that, given the events in Ukraine over the past few months, unless a bold and conciliatory move is made by Kiev, the dismemberment of Ukraine looks inevitable.

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Google, Government, Human Rights, Society, Technology

Google’s buyout of drones raises privacy fears…

GOOGLE X

Intro: The addition of drones to Google’s robot army marks the outbreak of aerial combat in its battle for global internet supremacy

The internet giant Google has purchased a company that develops military-style drones in a controversial £36million deal.

Titan Aerospace makes unmanned aircraft that run on solar power and can remain airborne for five years at a time.

Google claims the technology will provide internet access to remote corners of the world. But the move has provoked privacy concerns over the internet company’s ability to snoop on people from great heights. The drones fly at 65,000ft – almost twice as high as passenger planes.

Because the drones are solar powered and always above the clouds they do not need to land to refuel, so the drones are able to cover up to 3million miles before needing to land for maintenance.

However, critics have raised fears over the company’s newly-acquired powers of mass global surveillance. Titan is merely the latest addition to its growing arsenal of robotics firms, and Google is highly secretive about its technological ambitions – all of its projects are run by a closely-guarded division mysteriously known as ‘Google X’.

A spokesperson for Big Brother Watch, a privacy campaign group, said:

… The regulation of drones is something that urgently needs addressing. Given Google’s track record is littered with overstepping the line and infringing people’s privacy, combining their hunger for data with drone technology is a mind boggling proposition.

COMMENT & ANALYSIS

Google’s multi-million dollar bid for a company that makes solar-powered drone aircraft marks the outbreak of aerial combat in its battle with Facebook for global internet supremacy.

The search engine giant has bought Titan Aerospace, a New Mexico start-up that previously caught the eye of Mark Zuckerberg, for an undisclosed price thought to be in the region of £36m ($60m).

Zuckerberg opted instead to snap up Ascenta, a tiny British engineering company based in rural Somerset – which is also working on solar-powered drones – for $20m.

The deals take both companies, which are dabbling in areas such as robots, driverless cars and contact lens cameras, even further into the realms of science fiction.

Despite mounting fears on stock markets over the bursting of a new tech bubble, in similar style to the early 2000s dotcom boom and bust, the Californian colossi remain ready to pay millions of pounds of investors’ money on futuristic technology.

Why, though, some may ask, the sudden interest in aviation? The answer is that Google and Facebook are vying to gain a stranglehold on potentially lucrative new online markets as some of the world’s poorest countries begin to be connected to the internet. Laying cables in the ground, they reckon, will take too long and cost too much, so they are trying to beam out signals from on high instead.

In their eyes, this is an altruistic enterprise, giving poor people cheap access to the internet. The drones, it is claimed, could also provide invaluable data on climate change, environmental damage and natural disasters. Google is excited in welcoming Titan Aerospace to the ‘Google family’.

Behind the gushing, however, critics perceive this new bonding as a highly dysfunctional one. The Titan deal is certain to ignite fresh fears over the internet giants’ power to pry into every aspect of people’s lives once they are equipped with robotic aircraft that can conduct surveillance from a high altitude.

It will also raise further questions among investors who are growing increasingly sceptical of tech stocks. Splashing millions on Titan, even though the company’s drones are still at the prototype stage, will be grist to the mill for the doubters. Eyebrows were previously raised following Google’s takeover of robotics company Boston Dynamics.

Facebook, for its part, has come under fire for its recent acquisition of WhatsApp in a $19bn deal, and its $2bn purchase of Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset maker.

Google’s takeover of Titan promises to put at its disposal a swarm of dragonfly-shaped planes that can encircle the globe, staying aloft for up to five years, without ever having to refuel, since they are run on power generated by sunlight.

Titan’s Solara 60 drone has a 60 metre wingspan and is covered in around 3,000 solar panels generating electricity to power its flight. Its cruising speed is around 65mph and it has a range of more than 2.8miles.

The Solara 60 and another model, the smaller Solara 50, is a prototype but commercial versions are expected to be delivered next year.

The lightweight aircraft will be deployed as part of Google’s ‘Project Loon’. The name refers to balloons, rather than lunacy, but the idea stemmed from Google’s launching in 2013 of a number of large, high altitude balloons over the Southern Hemisphere to transmit internet signals.

The company’s growing robotic arsenal includes the sinister-looking Atlas, one of the terrifying looking robots acquired in the takeover of Boston Dynamics, a military manufacturer that produces animal-like and humanoid machines for the battlefield.

Google’s founders, Page and Sergey Brin, claim their mission is ‘to organise the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful’, which sounds innocuous enough.

Yet the very idea of two young billionaires who invented a clever algorithm and went on to command their own robot army and a fleet of drones would, until recently, have sounded like the tale of a Bond villain.

Still, to many, the prospect will be more than a little disquieting.

 

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Britain, Economic, Europe, European Union, Financial Markets, G7, Government, Politics, Russia, Society, Ukraine, United States

Ukraine: Imposing tougher sanctions on Russia is needed…

UKRAINE

Intro: Sanctions, if stringent enough, could bring pressure to bear on Vladimir Putin

A strongly worded statement by the heads of the G7 leading nations condemning Russia for provoking civil unrest in eastern Ukraine was met with pro-Russian militias kidnapping eight international observers. The statement given, largely as a result of diplomatic protocol, said the G7 leaders ‘have now agreed that we will move swiftly to impose additional sanctions on Russia’. But the response of the pro-Russian activists and gunmen seems to be illustrating the clear ineffectiveness of applying any kind of western sanctions policy on the ground.

Some may well argue that to be the case. We should, however, be clear. Sanctions, if stringent enough, could bring pressure to bear on Vladimir Putin. Pragmatically, there is a limit to what the United States and the European Union can actually achieve.  The guarantors of Ukrainian independence and territorial integrity are not only down to the wishes of the western axis and what they hope for, but also of Russia given its close historical connections in so many different ways that it has with the country.

Travel bans on Russian officials and other minor irritations imposed on Russia are so far much weaker than they could have been, and on this a dichotomy of reasons has been laid bare. On the positive side, a reason for the less than tenuous sanctions applied will be that much of the EU, including Germany, is wholly dependent on Russian gas. Though there has been talk of the US diverting some of its rich supplies of shale gas to Europe in reducing this dependence, to instigate such an operation has neither been practical nor affordable.

On the downside, the reasons are perhaps cowardly. Governments, for instance, including our own, have been sensitive to business lobbying, particularly from those Russian oligarchs who would be severely punished if sanctions were tightened. Last month, a government document was caught on camera by a photographer as an official of the British government was about to enter Downing Street. It suggested that the UK should ‘not support, for now, trade sanctions … or close London’s financial centre to Russians.’

The G7 statement was notable for its absence to specify in detail what ‘additional sanctions’ might or could be. Yet, whilst not mere cowardice that has prompted EU governments to hold back from tougher measures, there is a principled argument, albeit slightly cynical, that Mr Putin is doing so much damage to the Russian economy through his own actions that he needs no help from the West in making it any worse. Mr Putin’s nationalist adventurism has certainly seriously eroded his country’s economic interests. Indeed, if trade and other financial sanctions were imposed, it would allow the Russian president to blame ‘the West’ for Russia’s hardship rather than his own folly.

The problem for Mr Putin now is whether he realises that he is biting off more than he can chew. If he tries to assimilate populations into Russia who do not want to be assimilated he will only add to Moscow’s predicament and costs. Although the West should not have accepted Crimea’s annexation without a fight, its population is mostly Russian. Eastern Ukraine is entirely different; the region is quite against Russia’s interest to incite separatism there.

The historical cynic would no-doubt quote Napoleon and say that the West should not interrupt their enemy when he is making a mistake of this magnitude. Financial markets, for example, have already downgraded Russia’s credit rating to just above junk status. Mr Putin’s assertion of Russian power may have won him the support of his domestic audience at home meantime, but this could well change once the bills start arriving.

Given that Mr Putin’s rhetoric is already turned-up against the West, blaming the fall of Ukraine’s government on US and NATO-backed ‘fascist elements’, the notion that Britain, the EU and the US should hold back for fear that the Russian leader would blame us fails to persuade. Sanctions do not always work, that’s true. But they can work, and there is no other option open to those protagonists who support Ukraine’s independence and integrity. Now that Moscow’s proxies have started to abduct and hold hostage international observers, harsher economic pressure remains the best hope of bringing Vladimir Putin to his senses. There is no good reason for not upping the ante on Russia.

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