Stephan: We are asking the wrong questions and, thus, getting ideological fact-free policies, instead of fact-based life-affirming answers. Profit cannot be more important than life itself.
Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It..
Dr. Don Huber did not seek fame when he quietly penned a confidential letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack in January of this year, warning Vilsack of preliminary evidence of a microscopic organism that appears in high concentrations in genetically modified Roundup Ready corn and soybeans and ‘appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals and probably human beings.’ Huber, a retired Purdue University professor of plant pathology and U.S. Army colonel, requested the USDA’s help in researching the matter and suggested Vilsack wait until the research was concluded before deregulating Roundup Ready alfalfa. But about a month after it was sent, the letter was leaked, soon becoming an internet phenomenon.
Huber was unavailable to respond to media inquiries in the weeks following the leak, and thus unable to defend himself when several colleagues from Purdue publicly claiming to refute his accusations about Monsanto’s widely used herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) and Roundup Ready crops. When his letter was finally acknowledged by the mainstream media, it was with titles like ‘Scientists Question Claims in Biotech Letter,’ noting that the letter’s popularity on the internet ‘has raised concern among scientists that the public will believe his unsupported claim is true.’
Now, Huber has […]
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Stephan: We live with the unintended consequences of our choices.
A pattern is emerging. A researcher discovers that a product or service offered by a large (generally US-based) company contains a security flaw or a feature that compromises the privacy of internet users. The revelations are confirmed by other experts across the internet. The company responsible then goes through a predictable series of steps: first, ‘no comment’, followed by indignant denial, then a PR-spun ‘explanation’ and, eventually, an apology of sorts plus a declaration that the bug will be fixed or the intrusive practice terminated.
A recent example was Apple’s extraordinary contortions over the discovery that its iPhone was covertly collecting location data and storing it in unencrypted form. But last week also saw the revelation that devices made by TomTom, the leading manufacturer of GPS navigation systems, had effectively been spying on Dutch users and that the aggregated data had been sold to the police in order to guide the location of speed traps.
Before that, there were the revelations that Google’s street-mapping camera cars were also collecting data on every domestic WiFi network they passed. On the web, many sites now deploy hidden ‘history sniffing’ codes to find out what other sites a user has visited, webmail servers ‘read’ every […]
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