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Internet companies, stakeholders back energy efficiency

January 31st, 2012
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

When Internet giants such as Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter and Google leave a large carbon footprint, activist stakeholders like Greenpeace are going to notice. Greenpeace has been campaigning on increased energy efficiency in the sector and in 2011 released its report—How dirty is your data?—on the pollution cloud the IT sector was generating.

Greenpeace has “argued that IT companies, by increasing their electricity consumption while avoiding increasing demand for coal, could become a strong force in helping move countries to low-carbon economies”—a position also supported by a variety of multinationals within the ICT realm like AT&T and stakeholders such as the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Taken from “published figures for data-center power consumption and electricity utilities’ reports of their energy sources,” Greenpeace estimated that “Facebook’s reliance on coal” was at 53.2 percent use in its data centers, just below Apple’s 54.5 percent, but “higher than Google’s 34.7 percent.” Twitter’s coal reliance was at 42.5 percent, while Yahoo!’s reliance was at 18.3 percent, the report stated.

Greenpeace launched a massive campaign two year ago to “Unfriend Facebook,” garnering 700,000 supporters, “to lobby the company to change its energy policies,” especially after the social networking giant announced it would open a new data center in Oregon in February 2010. Though the facility was intended to be energy efficient, PacifiCorp was its source of power, which uses coal as its main source of energy.

In October 2011, Facebook announced that it would build a new data center in Lulea, Sweden, “using hydroelectric power for the servers and relying on the local climate to cool the data center for free.”

Facebook has also announced that it will “develop its platform to work more closely with Greenpeace to ‘promote environmental awareness and action’,” and move away from coal, powering its data centers “with clean and renewable energy.” The two organizations came together to publish a joint statement regarding the effort.

“[Facebook] looks forward to a day when our primary energy sources are clean and renewable, and we are working with Greenpeace and others to help bring that day closer,” said Marcy Scott Lynn, of Facebook’s sustainability program. “As an important step, our data center siting policy now states a preference for access to clean and renewable energy.”

For the company’s existing data centers, it will “engage in a dialogue with our utility providers about increasing the supply of clean energy that power Facebook data centers,” in order to make the company less coal-reliant. Through the Open Compute Project, an organization promoting “low-cost, low-energy computing infrastructure,” Facebook, along with Greenpeace, will distribute and promote the results of its “research into energy efficiency.”

“This move sets an example for the industry to follow,” Tzeporah Berman, co-director of Greenpeace’s international climate and energy program, said. “This shift to clean, safe energy choices will help fight global warming and ensure a stronger economy and healthier communities.”

Using Facebook was “particularly effective” for Greenpeace, added Ms. Lynn. “We are excited to work with them to explore new ways in which people can use Facebook to engage and connect on the range of energy issues that matter most to them—from their own energy efficiency to access to cleaner sources of energy.”

In post on January 19, 2012, Google announced that it “has been working on a project to bring” its facilities to “higher standards for environmental management” and that its data centers had “received ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certification.” The company claims it is “the first major Internet services company to gain external certification” for its US data centers. Google set some challenging goals for itself and followed through on meeting the key elements required to reach its goals. Some of the improvements Google has implemented are minimizing the “run time and need for maintenance” of its generators, and extending “the lifetime between oil changes” for them. In the process, the company has reduced its oil consumption by 67 percent.

Google has also implemented a system to “handle, package, ship and recycle every single battery” it uses for its servers’ power supply in each data center, ensuring “the safety of the environment” and its workers.

The company states that its decision to be more responsible when it comes to the environment and safety of its workers, it wants “to be the gold standard in environmental and workforce safety, and because we care about the communities where we live and work.”

The Google data centers that have received the dual certification are:

  • The Dalles, Oregon
  • Council Bluffs, Iowa
  • Mayes County, Oklahoma
  • Lenoir, North Carolina
  • Monck’s Corner, South Carolina
  • Douglas County, Georgia

Google intends to pursue certification for its European data centers as well.

As prominent companies within the sector Facebook and Google are setting powerful examples on how technology and sustainability can be paired to move the world toward a less-fossil fuel intense economy.

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Twitter grapples with censorship issues

January 29th, 2012
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

Microblogging giant Twitter recently announced plans to begin censoring some content in response to restrictions and/or laws in place within individual countries. The six-year-old Internet company has gained prominence as a tool for change in recent years as users employed tweets to reach a global audience during post-election protests in Iran, in the wake of the Haiti earthquake and throughout the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. Some Twitter users and observers have blasted the censoring plans as social suicide, but the company has chosen to publicly address and engage on an issue that has plagued other Internet content related companies.

In a post on January 26, Twitter stated, “As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.”

In the past, Twitter has deleted content, but was only able to do so on a global scale by deleting the tweet entirely. The company has thus far limited itself to snuffing out content related to things such as child pornography or pro-Nazi sentiment, but it could also include tweets from protesters in specific countries like Egypt, Iran, and Syria if given the right opportunity. With its new technology, the site will be able to determine if a tweet is breaking a law in a specific country and remove the tweet from that region while still leaving it visible for the rest of the world to see. If a tweet is removed, the site “will post a censorship notice” for users in that country, much in the same way Google Inc. practices in countries “where its service operates requires a search result to be removed.” Twitter, like Google, will use Chillingeffects.org to share the removal requests it “receives from governments, companies and individuals.” The site “sees the censorship tool as a way to ensure individual messages, or “tweets,” remain available to as many people as possible while it navigates a gauntlet of different laws around the world.” The company will also have the ability to censor individual accounts as well, given their location within a country where a law has been broken.

Alexander Macgillivray, general counsel to Twitter, helped draw up the censorship policy for the site, just as he did for Google when he worked for them, which explains the similarity Twitter’s new policy has to Google’s. “The critics are jumping to the wrong conclusions,” Mr. Macgillivray said. “This is a good thing for freedom of expression, transparency and accountability. This launch is about us keeping content up whenever we can and to be extremely transparent with the world when we don’t. I would hope people realize our philosophy hasn’t changed.”

But, Twitter may have suffered a backlash as users protested on January 28 in a boycott, organizing the event by using the hashtag #TwitterBlackout. In a similar fashion to the Internet blackout protest two weeks ago, which included websites such as Wikipedia, Google, and Reddit in response to the controversial anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA, many Twitter users planned to “turn off the tweets” for a day.

What seems to be forgotten is that Twitter has always had the ability to remove content when necessary, but the company does stand for freedom of speech, as it signed the letter to Congress about SOPA along with several other Internet companies like Google and Facebook.

“One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user’s voice,” Thursday’s Twitter post said. “We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t. The tweets must continue to flow.”

One thing protesters failed to notice was the bypass Twitter makes very easy to find in its Help Center so that content can’t be censored or deleted, and all it requires is changing the country in which one resides. The tweets can’t be censored if they’re being tweeted from a country where the law isn’t being broken.

ICT companies and their stakeholders broadly agree on the transformative power of the Internet and efforts to promote universal access. The reality that companies find themselves operating in environments governed by repressive or restrictive regimes that will attempt to limit access is one that all parties have to recognize and manage—and Twitter has shown it is prepared to do just that.

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Struggle against conflict minerals continues

January 27th, 2012
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

Despite the recent departure of a main stakeholder from the Kimberley Process—a standard-setting multistakeholder effort to curb the trade in blood diamonds—similar efforts continue to gain traction on the issue of conflict minerals. The European Union is considering action after the U.S. passed legislation to curb the trade, while the private sector and activist stakeholders simultaneously seek ways to sever the connections between mineral trade, warfare and human rights abuses.

But what happens when implementation of legislation and certification schemes at the local levels is stymied by a lack of infrastructure, corruption and political interests? What is to keep multinational corporations from turning to alternative sourcing to avoid the pitfalls of a lack of local capacity? How do these efforts affect local populations and development? And how long do various stakeholders stay engaged in a process when progress is limited?

Almost a decade after the Kimberley Process came into being to curb the trade in diamonds sold to support deadly conflict, stakeholders are still grappling with such questions. Global Witness, which helped drive the creation of the KP, withdrew from the process in December 2011 in frustration over chronic corruption and the continued ability of human rights abusers to bring their product to market through the KP.

As efforts to stem the flow of conflict minerals move towards systemic shifts in the way the trade is managed, the challenges of the KP may seem all too familiar.

Some American companies like Apple, Inc. are looking to stop the sourcing of any minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in order to prevent conflict minerals from reaching its products—the opposite effect U.S. legislators intended with the Dodd-Frank Act. As much as 90 percent of the previous level of DRC exports have ceased as multinationals back away for to avoid running afoul of pending reporting rule associated with the Act. Hewlett-Packard, Inc. has also joined Apple, Inc. in stopping the flow of potential conflict minerals from reaching its products.

The Dodd-Frank Act, which came into being July 2010, requires the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to force companies to report all minerals, such as tin, gold, and tungsten, used in their products—cell phones, computers, GPS systems—and where those minerals come from, even trace amounts, to prove such minerals were derived from a “conflict free” area of the DRC. Legislators hoped this would pressure DRC rebel groups and other combatants that profit from the trade but has shaken up the international mineral markets.

“If you go from compliance on through, this starts to set up not only nightmare scenarios, but also costly scenarios that make it difficult for companies to ensure an adequate supply of raw materials,” Tom Quaadman, Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness, said.

AT&T has criticized the Dodd-Frank as too broad and raising concerns the new requirements “could trip up companies who contract with manufacturers and have little, if any, control or knowledge about the origins of minor amounts of minerals that end up in their products.”

The United Nation’s (UN) Group of Experts stated in a report that the situation has helped further entrench corruption and made the situation worse by leaving many DRC exporters “bereft of their main, or only customers, and therefore incomes.”

In late December 2011, a UN report confirmed that the “crackdown” on conflict minerals has pushed “trade deeper into the hands of criminals and smugglers “including former rebel officials who are now in the Congolese army. The report warns, “(It) appears to have increased the need for fraudulent operators to seek or accept military assistance in their mineral smuggling operations” and suggests a rise in the smuggling of conflict minerals into Rwanda because Rwanda’s reported production is much higher than what industry analysts deem realistically possible.

Several groups, companies and attorneys “have urged the SEC to phase in the new rules over time to help make it easier to comply,” as well as “narrow the scope of the rule” so the corporation won’t have to “track trace amounts of minerals.” However, human rights groups oppose a “phase-in” period and state that the “SEC needs to follow the Dodd-Frank mandate and implement the rule without delay.” Since the rule is a legal requirement, the SEC can’t stray from its intent.

Amol Mehra, coordinator of the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable, said, “Businesses should be held accountable for human rights issues, and investors find these concerns to be material in that they, at the end of the day, affect companies’ image and bottom line. All companies need to do…is simply tell us what is in their products.”

The challenges facing efforts to remove conflict minerals from the global supply chains of major multinationals are significant but doing nothing is simply no longer an option—and that is a point that stakeholders from across the spectrum continue to agree upon.

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ICT helps advance humanitarian goals

January 24th, 2012
Post by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

Technology has emerged as an integral element of humanitarian response efforts around the world in recent years—put to use in both emergency situations and in efforts to address chronic issues. Almost gone are the days when aid groups and disaster responders operating in hostile or remote environments had to wait days or weeks for information transfers that could save lives. Not only are ICT tools and the Internet changing how aid organizations and the public respond to crises, but they are also helping the global humanitarian community better predict and pre-plan accelerated response efforts.

The potential reach of technology is near limitless and can be applied to any issue. Around the world development experts and organizations are using technology to drive initiatives on education, health care and poverty reduction. The information and capacity that these efforts create feeds directly into the humanitarian community’s ability to manage crises.

The United Nations’ World Food Programme is employing electronic vouchers to fight malnutrition in Zimbabwe for HIV-positive patients and their families. The electronic food voucher, introduced by the WFP, and implemented by Zimbabwean authorities and NGOs, identifies malnourished patients and gives them vouchers they can use to purchase food at designated shops. Zimbabwe’s economic woes of the last decade have left many HIV/AIDS patients undergoing antiretroviral treatment unable to feed themselves and their families, and the program has helped around 570,000 Zimbabweans since it began.

WFP is also using technology more broadly, expanding the organization’s 2005 video game Food Force to fight against hunger by teaming up with Konami Digital. Released 30 November 2011, the game’s most recent version can be found on the social networking website Facebook in both English and Japanese.

Global positioning systems (GPS) provide early weather warnings for areas like Nepal to map health facilities and plan disaster response in the event of a major earthquake. Mobile operator Airtel in Bangladesh “has teamed up with the Campaign for Sustainable Rural Livelihoods,” as well as three other organizations—Oxfam, CARE, and the Center for Global Change—providing fisherman at sea with the early weather warnings using GPS.

In India, scientists are developing a handheld, battery-powered device that can take a sample of urine, blood, or sputum, process it, and alert a health worker whether a feverish child has malaria, dengue or a bacterial infection. Projects such as these can help eliminate some of the logistical challenges with accessing care for impoverish or rural communities.

Text messaging is being used to raise awareness on human rights issues. The Burkina Faso Red Cross, for example, uses text messages to remind government officials, employers, traditional leaders, business owners and others about rights abuses associated with the “exploitation of domestic workers.”

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Geographic Information System (GIS) software is used to “map artisanal mining sites, transportation routes, and mineral trading points” as part of efforts to reform the mining sector. Security and human rights issues on the ground are also monitored using the software. The DRC has been the center of a global battle against the trade in “conflict minerals”—tin, tantalum, gold and others—that has been used to finance massive human rights abuses and bloody conflict.

A major component of how technology is being adapted for humanitarian purposes efforts is ways in which it can be used to streamline information rapidly and unify the efforts of various organizations and individuals.

When the crisis broke in Libya, humanitarian workers and decision-makers realized they didn’t have real time information regarding the events happening within the country. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) teamed up with the Ushahidi initiative, a project that ultimately set new standards to map crises and aid response plans through the use of social and traditional media information. The effort, which relied on 150 volunteers skilled on crisis mapping to manage data coming from within Libya, resulted in the LibyaCrisisMap.net.

“Given that the UN had virtually no access to the country, we now had situational awareness,” Andrej Verity, information management officer at OCHA in Geneva, said. “And, within 48 hours, we had 100-plus response activities collected and compiled – the same amount of data [that] took about four weeks in the Philippines, two weeks in Haiti, and two weeks in Pakistan to be made available.”

Technology has also changed the way caring members of the public around the world are able to help when disaster strikes. As massive natural disasters struck with little warning in 2010 and 2011, aid groups and people around the world turned to social media and other technological tools to help people in Haiti, Pakistan and Japan find missing relatives, and to identify emergency needs and raise funds for relief efforts. In Kenya, an initiative using mobile phones to facilitate cash transfer services—“Kenyans for Kenya”—raised over US $7 million during a period of drought that affected northern and eastern parts of the country.

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Netizens get viral over SOPA/PIPA

January 20th, 2012
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

Anyone surfing the World Wide Web this Wednesday couldn’t help but notice an unusual amount of black as websites across cyberspace blocked out their banners or went completely dark in protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). Some sites participated in the protest for a few hours, while others like Wikipedia for a full 24 hours. The effort brought together stakeholders from a variety of disciplines united in the desire to express concern over Internet freedoms. The effect was almost immediate.

In response to the protests, two of PIPA’s co-sponsors, Florida’s Marco Rubio (R) and Missouri’s Roy Blunt (R) have backed away from supporting the bill. Mr. Rubio posted on Facebook that he and his fellow Senators “heard legitimate concerns about the impact the bill [PIPA] could have on access to the Internet.”

While each bill covers specific agendas, both bills focus on online piracy and illegal copies/downloads of film and music, as well as other media and software. If the bills were to pass, they would not only outlaw those sites containing the pirated content, but they would also outlaw any websites that link to information on how to access the outlawed sites.

PIPA, a bill that looked like it would easily pass on January 24, 2012 now may be in trouble due to the protests.

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia service, and WordPress, a blog service, were two of the many high-profile websites to block their content. Wikipedia’s English-language website left a note, stating: “Imagine a world without free knowledge . . . The US Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.” Google, one of the world’s most popular search engines, placed a black box over its name for the US version of the site, but users could still access the search engine. The search engine also posted on its blog that the bills wouldn’t stop online piracy. Craigslist, an online marketplace, like many others, had a note up asking its visitors to contact representatives in Congress before accessing the main website. According to the US news website Politico, approximately 7,000 sites were blacked out by Wednesday morning.

At the end of the protest—midnight EST—Wikipedia said: “Thank you for protecting Wikipedia.”

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Hollywood’s key supporter of SOPA, “branded the protests as ‘irresponsible’ and a ’stunt’” on Wednesday. While no one protesting is pro-piracy, as some supporters of the bills have claimed, they are pro-freedom of speech, and when proposed bills such as SOPA and PIPA have the potential to infringe on that freedom, American citizens are going to speak up.

Technology has helped small and medium-sized businesses increase their productivity by 10 percent, and the U.S. Internet’s contribution to the GDP is larger than energy, agriculture, communication, mining, and utilities combined. Unfettered access to the Internet for hundreds of millions of Americans remains a vital asset to the world community and U.S. economic growth and job creation.

SOPA and PIPA, in enacted, could hinder the economic possibilities.

WordPress’ co-founder, Matt Mullenweg summed the whole situation up by saying, “The authors of the legislation don’t seem to really understand how the internet works.”

If they did, they could see the potential disaster and consequences of such legislation on America’s Internet freedoms.

Supporters of SOPA and PIPA describe the protests as an “abuse of power.”

“It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information,” Chris Dodd, former Connecticut Democratic Senator and now Chairman and CEO of the MPAA, said. Perhaps Mr. Dodd didn’t check that some of the websites protesting were still accessible. Mr. Dodd also claimed that the high-profile websites’ actions were “yet another gimmick.” The US Chamber of Commerce agrees, adding that any “claims against the legislation had been overstated.”

But the bills are out there for everyone to read, and quite a few have done just that, as well as analyzed and broken down the language.

Chris Heald, a writer for Mashable.com, is one of many who has studied the bills and explained them in an article posted on Wednesday.

“Implementing censorship protocols and giving the keys to the government is a scary, scary thing, and SOPA should be opposed simply based on this provision alone,” Mr. Heald said, referencing China’s Internet censorship and Iran’s Internet firewalls. “Any site that allows users to post content is ‘primarily designed for the purpose of offering services in a manner that enables copyright violation.’ The site doesn’t have to be clearly designed for the purpose of copyright violation; it only has to provide functionality that can be used to enable copyright violation.

“This means that YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Gmail, Dropbox and millions of other sites would be ‘Internet sites . . . dedicated to theft of U.S. property,’ under SOPA’s definition. Simply providing a feature that would make it possible for someone to commit copyright infringement or circumvention is enough to get your entire site branded as an infringing site.”

There are three major supporters of SOPA—the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And it looks as though “Hollywood has outspent Silicon Valley by about tenfold on lobbyists in the last two years.” In total, SOPA has the support of more than 400 businesses. But Wednesday’s blackout protests and the numerous calls to representatives and Senators, which caused many servers to crash, may result in further significant changes to that list.

GoDaddy had to pull their support of the bills because customers protested, and in two days, pulled over 37,000 domain names from the site, transferring them elsewhere.

Spain recently approved similar legislation, creating a government body with the power “to force Internet service providers to block sites” within ten days. Though Spain’s legislation is also supported by the media industries, it is also facing stiff criticism from Netizens.

Congress may still approve both SOPA and PIPA, but President Barack Obama has expressed concerns and may veto them. In a statement issued at the weekend, the White House’s official response was, “While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global internet.”

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China labor condition concerns continue

January 9th, 2012

Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

While China’s labor conditions have remained a mainstay of activist stakeholders’ campaigns and been featured in the international media for years—notably following allegations in 2004-05 about labor practices in manufacturing plants producing products sold in Wal-Mart stores, and reigniting after 10 Foxconn employees committed suicide in May 2010 at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant—some recent stakeholder assessments have found a slow pace of improvement.

Foxconn, one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers, employs nearly one million people throughout China and builds products for corporations like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Motorola, and Dell. Mike Daisey, a monologist who performs an Off Broadway show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in Manhattan’s Public Theater, decided to visit the Foxconn plant recently for a little research to see for himself what the safety and working conditions were, and “what he found surprised him beyond belief.”

“What I was really shocked by was institutionalized dehumanization,” he said. “The systems that are put in place are working and the objective of them working is to work people, basically, to death.”

While most Americans don’t routinely consider the human cost associated with the production of popular consumer electronics products, Daisey firmly believes that Steve Jobs knew of the conditions in which his products were built at Foxconn, as does Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook. “Apple is a company that believes in micromanagement. They pay attention to details,” Daisey said. “There is no question in my mind that they know what conditions are like on the ground.”

For the past two decades, multinational corporations have shipped thousands of jobs to companies like Foxconn in China, taking advantage of cheap labor in developing countries. “Unfortunately in doing so, Corporate America chose to ignore its Western values and high labor standards,” Daisey said. Several of the workers Daisey met had been doing the same tedious job over and over for so long that the “joints in their hands have disintegrated from doing that work…. [Hands] literally swollen, literally deformed [and] permanently warped.”

But the days of the docile worker in China are coming to an end, and the Chinese corporations know it. Workers like Lan Yimin, 22, represent “the new generation of Chinese factory workers,” who are unwilling to settle for low wages and long hours. Lan, who works in a factory in Shajing, China, doesn’t want to “eat bitterness—as the Chinese call it.” With more information at their fingertips, and as China’s economy booms, Lan’s generation knows more about their rights than their parents before them did. “The young generation has a wider social circle; we talk more about factory conditions and we know more about our legal rights,” Lan said.

As Chinese workers fight for higher wages and labor standards by going on strike, the Chinese government isn’t sitting idly by. In recent years China has moved legislatively to mandate better salaries and working conditions “and is now trying to maintain a delicate balance of improving income levels for workers while not scaring away foreign corporations with higher labor costs.”

“If the [Chinese] government does not treat the workers’ struggle for collective bargaining seriously, if it decides to treat these demands as political, then this will turn into a political struggle,” says Han Dongfang, a labor activist who, for his role in the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, was deported to Hong Kong.

Microsoft has also come under scrutiny for China-related labors concerns with conditions at the KYE Systems factory where Microsoft hardware is assembled for export to the United States, Europe and Japan. Labor rights advocates have raised questions over 15-hour work days and 65 cents-per-hour pay rates affecting thousands of teenage and young adult workers. Employees are prohibited from listening to music or talking. One worker told the National Labor Committee, “We are like prisoners. It seems like we live only to work. We do not work to live.” Microsoft accounts for approximately 30 percent of the work performed at the KYE Systems factory. Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Acer, Logitech and Foxconn also outsource their production to KYE Systems.

Workers at both the Foxconn and KYE Systems factories sleep in dormitories, work long hours and do not get bathroom breaks during shifts.

“And in what must be the best of both worlds for U.S. companies like Microsoft, the workers give the U.S. companies a pass,” the NLC’s report states. “The young workers never think or talk about the foreign companies and put all the blame on the factory. No one has told them how wealthy and powerful Microsoft and the other companies really are.

“Since the young Chinese workers would never dream of making demands against Microsoft or the other corporations, this permits the corporations to tout their codes of conduct while knowing full well that they will never be implemented. It’s all just part of the game.”

Microsoft responded to the NLC report’s allegations of its knowledge of workers’ treatment expressing the company’s commitment to fair labors standards. “Microsoft is committed to the fair treatment and safety of workers employed by our vendors. Microsoft has invested heavily in a vendor accountability program and robust independent third-party auditing program to ensure conformance to the Microsoft Vendor Code of Conduct.

“Actions for non-compliance with our requirements may include corrective action plans, remedial training, certification requirements, cessation of further business awards until corrective actions are instituted, and termination of the business relationship. We unequivocally support taking immediate actions to address non compliant activities.”

Foxconn Technology Group has announced plans to replace its human workers with one million robots, a feat that doesn’t sound easy, but it would certainly cut down on worker abuse and remove some concerns about low labor standards. While such a strategy may help get rid of the bad publicity associated with the past two years’ suicides, it doesn’t represent the kind of systemic shift in attitudes on labor conditions and rights that the majority of stakeholders want to see from Chinese companies.

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Global Witness departure damages Kimberley Process

January 5th, 2012
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

Global Witness recently made a difficult decision to withdraw from its official observatory position of the Kimberley Process (KP) over concerns the scheme was serving “an accomplice to diamond laundering“—a process by which dirty diamonds are mixed with clean ones en route to international markets. The withdrawal of a key stakeholder from an international process to curb the trade in products used to fund deadly conflict raises concerns not only for the integrity of the multistakeholder process that has driven the KP’s evolution, but for efforts on other supply chain issues such as the trade in conflict minerals.

The KP, which Global Witness helped form in 2003, was initially created due to conflicts in Sierra Leone and Angola where the trade in rough diamonds was used to fund conflict and drive massive human rights abuses, to help regulate the sale of certified rough diamonds and remove “blood diamonds” from the international market.

Global Witness’ main concern ahead of the recent withdrawal was KP’s decision in late 2011 “to allow Zimbabwe to export diamonds from the Marange fields, which has been singled out repeatedly by international human rights stakeholders as an area where local government officials are colluding in extensive human rights violations and national authorities have little interest in cleaning up the practices. The NGO also claimed that KP failed to evolve and didn’t address any “clear links between diamonds, violence and tyranny” during the past nine years.

Charmian Gooch, founding director of Global Witness, said in a statement, “Nearly nine years after the Kimberley Process was launched, the sad truth is that most consumers still cannot be sure where their diamonds come from, nor whether they are financing armed violence or abusive regimes.

“The scheme has failed three tests: it failed to deal with the trade in conflict diamonds from Ivory Coast, was unwilling to take serious action in the face of blatant breaches of the rules over a number of years by Venezuela, and has proved unwilling to stop diamonds fuelling corruption and violence in Zimbabwe.”

The decision by KP helps pave the ways for others like Anjin Investment, a Chinese-Zimbabwean company, to sell millions of dollars worth of diamonds from the country. There have been allegations Zimbabwean army officers hold senior positions in Anjin, and that some high-ranking officials—top military personnel such as Emmerson Mnangagwa, General Constantine Chiwenga of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA), and Colonel Sedz—are “involved in the daily management and operations of [Anjin].”

Gooch reported, “Over the last decade, elections in Zimbabwe have been associated with the brutal intimidation of voters. Orchestrating this kind of violence costs a lot of money. As the country approaches another election there is a very high risk of Zanu PF hardliners employing these tactics once more and using Marange diamonds to foot the bill. The Kimberley Process’s refusal to confront this reality is an outrage.”

Anne Dunnebacke, senior campaigner at Global Witness, stated that “the Zimbabwe incident was the catalyst for the organization’s withdrawal,” but that it wasn’t the only reason.

“We’ve been pushing for reform within the process on a number of issues for many years,” Dunnebacke said. “Over the course of the nine years some improvements have been made and we’ve seen instances where reforms have been adopted. But in recent years that has not been the case. There is next to no political will by governments or industry to reform and make it credible.”

Dunnebacke believes that in order for the industry to take action, a different kind of pressure needs to be applied and vowed Global Witness would remain part of broader campaigns to reform the diamond trade. She claims the industry has stepped back with the excuse, “‘We have the Kimberley Process for diamonds, so that’s that—we’ve solved the problem of blood diamonds.’”

Global Witness has 50 participants worldwide, including the European Union (EU) and the United States (US), with more than 70 countries as its members, who “account for around 99.8 percent of the global production of rough diamonds,” and have all “signed the Kimberley Process agreement to adhere to United Nations-backed safeguards on trade” in the rough diamond field.

Farai Maguwu, director of the Center for Research and Development (CRD) that is based in Zimbabwe, believes that while Global Witness withdrawing wouldn’t collapse the entire KP system, it was “a very big blow.”

Maguwu was arrested in 2010 “as an enemy of the state…allegedly for ‘endangering national security’ by holding information pertaining to the Zimbabwean military’s gross human rights violation at Marange’s diamond mines,” but was cleared of the charges after several civil society movements and local and international NGOs lobbied on his behalf.

“The Kimberley Process will never be the same,” Maguwu said of the Global Witness withdrawal. “A very influential member of the Kimberley Process has cast a vote of no confidence.”

Michael Mann, Catherine Ashton’s spokesman for the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, in early December, and after Global Witness withdrew from KP, sent out an e-mail stating that while the KP “may not be a perfect instrument, …it is the best we have, and therefore all parties, including civil society, should work to make it effective.” Mann included, “Abandoning it doesn’t help achieve that common goal.”

The United States became chairman of the KP in the last rotation, a position which was last held by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC’s tenure at the helm was also controversial given that the country is at the heart of trade in “conflict minerals”—tin, tantalum, gold and others—that are the current subject of vociferous campaigning by human rights stakeholders and multistakeholder efforts to address concerns.

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South Korea makes green its business

December 30th, 2011
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

South Korea, a long-standing competitor in the electronics and automobile industries with companies like LG, Samsung, and Hyundai, has entered the renewable energy market with the same vigor that catapulted it to competition status in the above industries beginning almost five decades ago.

When President Lee Myung-bak came into office four years ago, “Green Growth” was his top priority for his country. On its way to becoming one of the top carbon-emission producers in the world, South Korea has taken measures, made commitments, and created committees over the last four years to change its “policies—from waste-management to air- quality to renewable energy. And—this being South Korea—exports are a central part of that.”

“Exports are very important for us,” said Joo Hyunghwan, head of Korea’s Presidential Committee on Green Growth. “We are not well-endowed with renewable resources but we need to increase our energy mix. And we want to develop renewable technologies into a strategic export industry.”

According to Bloomberg’s New Energy Finance’s lead wind analyst, Justin Wu, South Korea “is starting its wind industry at a difficult time, with falling prices and shrinking demand.” But, says Wu, the country’s firms are good at “leapfrogging.”

It’s not the first time South Korea has had to jump forward to attain newer technological capabilities. In the 1980s, the country was able to match competition from Western and Japanese automobile manufacturers by investing in European expertise.

When the wind turbines are most common in Europe, because Europe is the established leader in the market, along with China, buying up European expertise or companies makes sense. Nearly every wind turbine in South Korea is European-made.

Since South Korea has a great deal of industrial experience in things like shipbuilding and steel, it has valuable production skills that can be transferred to the manufacture of green products such as solar panels or wind-turbines. The country’s conglomerates, which hold strong, well-disciplined values, are “tightly knit into the rest of the economy,” and Justin Wu says that such conglomerates “have a strong desire to move into this new business area.”

To remain competitive in the green technology market, South Korea has begun opening factories in China, though China is steaming ahead in the market. By 2020, South Korea has its eyes set on gaining 10 percent of the world’s renewable technology market. It has also said that by 2030, 11 percent of its total energy will be from renewable energy. Unison is one of South Korea’s turbine manufacturers, and is getting ready to compete with China by setting up a factory there. “Korea is basically an export-driven country,” Unison’s international head, Ham Bom-sik, says. “When we developed wind turbines, our main focus was overseas.” Unison’s exports to Jamaica and the Seychelles, as well as South America, have started off slow, but South Korea isn’t a country to back down from challenging market development opportunities.

South Korea is also looking into tidal power—a green energy obtained from tidal waves—with plan already underway to create more tidal plants after the success of its first tidal plant, and world’s largest, was completed off its western coast. The proposed projects have drawn some criticisms, especially from fishermen and environmental groups.

Ernst & Young, which updates its Country Attractiveness Indices quarterly, reports that “South Korea aims to generate 5% of energy from renewables by 2011, increasing to 11% by 2030. This is compared with a current figure of 2.4%; therefore achievement of these targets would more than double energy from renewables by the end of next year.”

The reports indicates that South Korea is not only looking into wind turbines as a renewable technology to be used within its borders, but it is also looking into offshore wind power, solar power, and hydro power with its Four Rivers Project.

As South Korea expands into the renewable energy arena, its use of “green technology growth to boost the economy” is a new strategy and one that may, given its success, encourage other countries to follow its lead.

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Battle over censored content heats up

December 27th, 2011
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

The battle against censored Internet content is heating up heading into 2012 with the U.S. Congress set to vote on a measure opponents worry would adversely affect the climate of innovation and free expression that helps drive the Internet, and related entrepreneurship and development around the world. From Internet users and private sector players protesting the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) to Michael Posner’s speech entreating multinational corporations (MNCs) to stand up and protect free speech and the World Wide Web, stakeholders are lining up to oppose the changes.

In his speech at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference on October 25, 2011, Posner—the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor—said, “To advance these fundamental freedoms, we need the help of citizens, corporations and global civil society for what is likely to be a long, tough struggle with regimes that do not share our values or our views on the merits of openness. And I particularly want to call attention to the role of companies, because today corporations have more global influence than ever.”

Several Internet corporations have pulled their support of SOPA after customers have threatened to take business elsewhere. GoDaddy was in full support of SOPA until its customers voiced their opposition and threatened to pull thousands of domain names from the domain name registrar. And companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn wrote a letter, expressing their concern over the “legislative measures that have been introduced in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives.”

While the companies support the goals of SOPA and PIPA—to provide additional tools to combat “rogue” websites that practice copyright infringement or counterfeiting—none of these companies agree with the current drafts of the bills, which “would expose law-abiding U.S. Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities, private rights of action, and technology mandates that would require monitoring of web sites.” The companies have asked the U.S. Congress to look for “more targeted ways to combat foreign “rogue” websites,” while protecting innovation and technology “that has made the Internet such an important driver of economic growth and job creation.”

When Internet-related innovations and technology have helped small and medium-sized businesses to increase their productivity by 10 percent, and the U.S. Internet’s contribution to the GDP is larger than energy, agriculture, communication, mining, and utilities combined, the success and substantial benefits of accessing the Internet for hundreds of millions of Americans is a vital asset to U.S. economic growth and job creation.

SOPA has the potential to halt that growth.

Over the next decade, the next 3 billion customers benefitting from that innovation and technology will be residents of developing countries, where companies like Samsung and Microsoft have created jobs and helped drive sustainable development. Samsung Africa, for example, has tapped into innovation to revolutionize education with the launch of the company’s portable, solar-powered classrooms in October 2011. Such advancements provide an opportunity for education to those in rural areas. However, as these technologies advance and are introduced to developing countries, some have used them as tools to silence dissenting voices. China, Vietnam, Egypt and Bahrain are among the countries where authorities routinely seek to censor the Internet and/or prosecute individuals for their online activities.

Though China began censoring its part of cyberspace before the Arab Spring, Posner voiced that the Arab Spring “brought home the power of the Internet to governments far beyond the Middle East, and the result has been more censorship, more surveillance and more restrictions.”

Unfortunately, these repressive governments have the money and the power to block external content and track what their citizens are doing online, Posner noted. “They are exerting overbroad state control over content, over users, and over companies. And they’re trying to change national and international legal standards to legitimize it all.”

There are three major supporters of SOPA—the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In total, SOPA has the support of more than 400 businesses.

The Senate Judiciary committee approved PIPA and the floor vote is scheduled for January 24, but Sen. Ron Wyden has put a hold on it. SOPA supporters lead in the majority on the committee, and when Congress returns in 2012, the bill is expected to be approved, but “Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, has introduced the so-called OPEN Act that would cut off the flow of funds to alleged pirate Web sites without requiring them to be blocked.”

“Silicon Valley has already given birth to game-changing technologies and a profoundly new approach to philanthropy. Many people here have made it their life’s work not only to develop transformative technologies but also to put them in the hands of people in places where digital empowerment is leaps ahead of political or financial or educational empowerment. Never have great ideas gone from dream to global distribution so quickly.

“But with great code comes great responsibility.”

Posner is correct. There is a giant responsibility that comes with the World Wide Web, but if we don’t figure out how to preserve its current nature; if we don’t protect its freedom, “the autocrats will figure it out for us” and that freedom could vanish.

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WFP goes online to recruit Food Force

December 24th, 2011
Posted by Senior Director, Juliette Terzieff:

Mobile telephone applications are now being used in myriad ways by the humanitarian community to progress development goals and overcome some of the traditional challenges that have hampered aid efforts in the past. From delivering information about HIV/AIDS patient care to predicting weather patterns to aid farmers, the use of text messaging via mobile telephone has had a widespread impact on the world’s population. The United Nations’ World Food Programme is looking to broaden the link between ICT and humanitarian efforts to include the general public and raise awareness.

The WFP has teamed up with Konami Digital, Japanese electronic entertainment company, to expand on their 2005 video game Food Force, which had over 6 million downloads, to fight against hunger. Released 30 November 2011, the most recent version of the application can be found through the WFP and on the social networking website Facebook. This game can be found in both English and Japanese.

“The social media and gaming landscape has been transformed since the original Food Force and now there is great scope for a game that allows players to grow and strengthen their networks, while doing good,” said Ms. Roman. “There are millions of online video games and a few of which help support the fight against hunger. Food Force will be the first one to build large communities of people who will be able to make a dent in hunger.”

The game features six missions through which players discover and overcome the challenges to mounting an effective emergency humanitarian response. Players must conduct hunger assessments, purchase supplies, successfully complete airdrops and manage delivery convoys before helping plan community rebuilding.

Similarly, Zynga, a video game company that creates games for social media websites like Facebook, helped Water.org—Matt Damon and Gary White’s water project—last December when they offered a Water.org-branded blue water bison on their game FrontierVille. The 28 millions players of the game learned about their mission and could purchase the bison, and Water.org raised $300,000 for Water.org. Mike McCamon, Chief Community Officer, said in a statement, “I cold-called Zynga out of the blue. It was incredibly effective and took us about as far away from the pandering, puppy-dog-eyes style of messaging as you can get.”

According to the United Nation’s Mobilizing Social Change report, as mobile coverage rapidly increases around the world and expands into rural areas where the infrastructure to host widespread Internet access does not yet exist “mobile technology holds great promise for making health prevention and medical care more effective for the world’s poorest people.”

Cellular phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are being used to gather and send data about political and economic crises, as well as environmental disasters and hunger crises, via text messaging.

Though NGO workers use voice and text messaging the most, they report in a variety of ways, “including photo and video (39 percent); data collection or transfer (28 percent); and multi-media messaging (27 percent),” and they use the mobile applications for “data analysis (8 percent), inventory management (8 percent), and mapping (10 percent).” As NGOs invest more money into mobile technology, the more likely they will use the technology for higher-end functions. The biggest benefit of mobile technology that NGOs have experienced is time savings, as 95 percent of workers have reported. Using mobile technology gives individuals the ability to mobilize quickly—91 percent—much as those marching during the Arab Spring used social networks to organize. Technology allows NGOs to reach “audiences that were previously difficult or impossible to reach (74 percent)” and gives them the ability to quickly and accurately transmit gathered data to necessary sources.

According to the UN report, “of the one billion people living in extreme poverty, 75 percent live in rural areas” where information, education, and supplies are limited. By 2007, mobile telephone networks covered 90 percent of the world and worldwide penetration of mobile telephone use hit 50 percent by 2008, marking 3 billion subscriptions. By 2009, more than 12 million people per month in India alone would subscribe to mobile networks.

With such a large penetration, “mobile technology plays an important role in communications efforts during the various phases of a humanitarian catastrophe—from the early warning phase through the immediate disaster response and longer-term reconstruction efforts.” From health crises to natural disasters, reestablishing communication networks swiftly helps refugees to reconnect with loved ones. As each situation is unique in its communication needs, “ranging from mass broadcasting of text messages in the early warning phase, for example, to decentralized two-way communication among relief workers and affected populations in the aftermath of a disaster,” these early warning systems using mobile telephones allow the opportunity to get relief to affected areas more quickly and to gather important data in a timely manner. A prime example of implementing this mobile technology was when World Food Programme (WFP) alerted Iraqi refugees via text messaging when the food shipments arrived.

In humanitarian emergency scenarios where the stakes are high and information and communication technologies (ICT) are highly scrutinized, the role mobile phones and mobile technologies play are deeply significant and extremely important to the global community. While there are different approaches the private sector, and mainstream and activist stakeholders, remain committed to testing new ways to use available technology to increase the effectiveness of response and the communication around humanitarian efforts.

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