Unlike giant sequoias, each of which is a genetically separate individual, a group of thousands of aspens can actually be a single organism, sharing a root system and a unique set of genes. We therefore recently nominated one particular aspen individual growing just south of the Wasatch Mountains of Utah as the most massive living organism in the world. We nicknamed it Pando, a Latin word meaning I spread. Made up of 47,000 tree trunks, each with an ordinary tree’s usual complement of leaves and branches, Pando covers 106 acres and, conservatively, weighs in excess of 13 million pounds, making it 15 times heavier than the Washington fungus and nearly 3 times heavier than the largest giant sequoia.

Pando reached such vast dimensions by a kind of growth, common to plants, known as vegetative reproduction. A plant sends out horizontal stems or roots, either above ground or below depending on the species, that travel some distance before taking root themselves and growing into new, connected plants. […] The sum of all the stems, roots, and leaves of one such individual is called a clone. Quaking aspen clones may spread far across a landscape as they continue to reproduce vegetatively. How far one clone can migrate depends on how long it can live.

And how long might that be? The short answer is that we don’t know. It might seem as if all one has to do is count the annual growth rings in the individual stems. Aspen stems that I’ve studied in the Colorado Front Range rarely exceed 75 years. Elsewhere individual stems occasionally reach 200 years. But the age of individual stems tells us almost nothing about the age of the clone they belong to, since its living stems may only be the latest to sprout. The oldest clone with a firm age is an 11,700-year-old creosote bush (researchers were able to date it by measuring the rate at which its circle expands). But aspens may actually be far older. Based on evidence such as the resemblance of some aspen clone leaves to fossilized ones, Burton Barnes of the University of Michigan has suggested that aspen clones in the western United States may reach the age of a million years or more.

For reference, a million-year old aspen organism would be four or five times older than homo sapiens.

No matter how awesome you think the universe is, it’s awesomer.

Via Slashdot, I see that France has decided to censor its citizens’ Internet access:

The French state and internet service providers have struck a deal to block sites carrying child pornography or content linked to terrorism or racial hatred, Interior Minister Michel [sic] Alliot-Marie announced on Tuesday. […]

Under the French plan, internet users, via a platform, will be able to signal inappropriate sites and the state, receiving the complaints in real time, will then decide whether the sites are to go on a so-called black list to be passed on to internet service providers to enforce site blocks.

Sites containing what appear to be blatant crimes will be referred to judicial authorities, the minister said.

I wrote about why this is a bad idea back in 2006, when Canada implemented a similar blacklist scheme for child porn. In brief:

• Filtering is ineffective.
• Blacklists can and will be abused to silence dissenting voices.
• ISPs are access providers, not content providers; they should be absolutely neutral with respect to what passes through their networks.

But enough about the issues. The real reason I’m writing about this is to make fun of French Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie.

“We can no longer tolerate the sexual exploitation of children in the form of cyber-pedopornography,” Alliot-Marie said.

Cyber-pedo-what?

[Alliot-Marie] insisted that the plan would not “create a Big Brother of the internet” and pledged her support for the “fundamental liberty that is internet access.”

I’m guessing that Alliot-Marie has not actually read 1984, because those two statements constitute a classic example of doublethink. Either that, or Allot-Marie is really so unbelievably stupid that she honestly believes a state-maintained blacklist that blocks access to online information is somehow not a Big Brother-style restriction on the “fundamental liberty that is internet access.”

Look, if you want to argue that child porn and hate speech are so odious that we need the state to keep us from viewing them, go ahead. But at least admit that you are using state power to place restrictions on free speech. To do otherwise demonstrates an utter lack of concern for the truth — and, well, philosophers have a technical term for that sort of thing.

A disturbing rumour:

I’ve recently heard through a grapevine that ACTA negotiants have reportedly signed non-disclosure agreements as a condition of their participation in this week’s secret closed-door meeting in Geneva.

This is an amazing and frightening step backwards in the history of global governance. It also epitomizes the ACTA negotiants’ dismissive attitude towards the importance of credible, transparent trade policy-making in the current global environment.

Originally posted to The Information Policy Blog.

Canada, the United States, the European Commission, and six other countries are secretly negotiating a trade agreement that could sacrifice fair dealing and privacy rights, violate civil liberties and the due process of law, and have a chilling effect on free speech, all in the name of strengthening intellectual property laws.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is only getting attention now because a discussion paper with some details of the agreement was leaked to Wikileaks on Thursday. Since then, there have been two stories about ACTA on Slashdot and articles in a number of Canadian newspapers, including the Globe and Mail and various components of the Canwest empire.

Among other things, ACTA would:

• make infringement a criminal, rather than a civil matter (you can go to prison for trivial non-commercial infringement under ACTA);
• give border guards the authority to search your possessions for infringing content, and confiscate and destroy your laptop or iPod if they decide it has infringing content on it;
• require ISPs to spy on their customers’ online activities and block access to infringing content; and
• allow governments to share personal information about their citizens, evading domestic privacy laws.

These provisions are excessive. First of all, IP protections already quite strong, and existing agreements like TRIPS already cover the concerns ACTA is intended to address. Proponents of the new treaty have presented no evidence that it is necessary. The proposals stem from an unquestioned assumption that stronger IP rights are a good thing, despite vociferous objections from the library community, public interest groups, and ordinary people who feel that IP laws are already too harsh and unbalanced. Unsurprisingly, ACTA apparently makes no attempt to safeguard fair dealing or other end user rights — it’s all about defending the interests of intellectual property owners, with no recognition that copyright and similar laws are supposed to strike a balance between creators’ and users’ interests.

But it’s the new powers proposed to defend owners’ interests that are most alarming. Of particular concern is the plan to turn border guards and ISPs into copyright cops. Border guardsa and ISPs are not qualified to determine what qualifies as infringing content. Border guards in particular are paid to blindly enforce poorly designed rules (as anyone who’s had their toothpaste or hair gel confiscated at a security checkpoint can tell you). They are not IP experts, and no matter how well-trained they may be, they are not qualified to evaluate whether or not you have the right to have a copy of some song on your iPod.

The same is true of the ISPs, as we’ve seen over and over again in the years since the DMCA came into effect in the United States. ISPs have neither the time nor the expertise to judge infringement claims on their merits; as a result, they end up taking infringement claims at face value. In the US, where a notice-and-takedown system prevails, claims of copyright infringement are frequently abused to attack people exercising their free speech rights. The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse documents hundreds of these abuses. ACTA would only make the problem worse by expanding it to other countries — including Canada.

Underlying these concerns is the plain fact that the ACTA proposals would violate the due process of law. Border guards would be permitted to examine, seize, and destroy your property without judicial oversight or proof of guilt. ISPs could cut off your Internet access, not even because you’re a proven infringer, but because some random entity claims you’ve infringed their IP rights. That’s not how things are supposed to work in a democratic society.

But of course, there’s nothing democratic about ACTA. The agreement itself has been developed behind closed doors. It will likely be tabled for discussion at the upcoming G8 meeting this July, but so far no draft text has been released for public scrutiny. Civil society groups have been systematically excluded from the process of drafting the agreement (private industry lobby groups, by contrast, have apparently been involved from the beginning). There was a three-week consultation period in April, but if the government is only giving the public three weeks to respond to something, you can be sure they’re not particularly interested in what the public has to say. Organizations with limited resources, like BCLA, often can’t research the subject, draw up a response, and submit it within that period.

Even the structure of the agreement is anti-democratic. It’s being negotiated among powerful developed countries with strong intellectual property regimes. Developing countries, which have a very different IP agenda, have so far been excluded from the discussion. If ACTA is enacted, those countries will be forced to sign on, and are expressly forbidden from renegotiating the terms of the agreement when they do so.

ACTA is a bad piece of work. It’s unnecessary, unbalanced, and excessive; its development and proposed implementation are profoundly undemocratic; and it will seriously undermine fundamental rights and principles like privacy, free speech, and the due process of law — all in the service of narrow private interests. Librarians, and all Canadians, should oppose this alarming agreement.

UPDATE, May 30: Michael Geist reports that ACTA is “gaining steam, with a binding international agreement likely by the end of the year.”

A frightening proposal from the UK government:

A government database holding details of every phone call made, email sent and minute spent on the internet by the public could be created as part of a centralised fight against crime and terrorism….

Telecoms companies and internet service providers would be compelled to hand over their records to the Home Office under proposals that could find their way into the new data communications bill.

The information would be stored for at least 12 months and police, security services and other agencies across Europe would be able to access the database with court permission.

These new proposals are vastly more invasive than existing data retention laws. Right now, UK telcos are already required to retain information about calls and text messages, but they don’t store recordings of the calls themselves, nor do they store the text of the text messages. Most people, I think, expect this to happen anyway. The new proposals cover the content of all your online activity: which sites you visited and when, the text of every email you send and receive, logs of every IM message you send and every online chat you participate in — in short, everything you do online.

Then there’s the fact that the UK government would be in charge of storing all that data itself, in one big centralized database. Instead of having to go to the telcos to get it, the cops and spooks would just have to ask the Home Office for it. Those same cops and spooks made 439,000 requests for telecommunications data over a 15-month period in 2005-2006. How long do you think it would take for the Home Office to give in to the inevitable pressure to expedite the process a little by cutting out the judicial oversight? After all, Home Office staff have already been caught hacking into their own department’s records; it will be difficult for them to refuse when that nice policeman tells them he needs their help to stop the terrorists.

Several hours of surveillance footage recorded at Vancouver airport the night Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski was Tasered and died were inadvertently erased by the Canada Border Services Agency a week after his death, The Vancouver Sun has learned.

The CBSA is claiming the deletion was unintentional — a result of “confusion over how long the footage would be stored before being erased.” If this is true, then the CBSA is criminally incompetent. I sure hope it’s true, because the alternative is that the CBSA deliberately deleted footage of their own misdeeds. But the authorities would never mislead us about something like that, right?

Either way, the results are the same: Robert Dziekanski was murdered by bureaucratic incompetence and police brutality.

Fortunately, the cops aren’t worried about it:

The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, which is investigating Dziekanski’s death, said Thursday it wasn’t aware the CBSA’s original footage had been erased.

However, IHIT spokesman Cpl. Dale Carr said the team is not worried because one of its investigators reviewed the complete footage before it was erased and was confident all clips of Dziekanski are on the DVD.

“What? They destroyed evidence that might have been crucial to our investigation? This is the first we’ve heard of it. Hey, Jim, you watched all that footage, right? Do you think we might be missing anything important?”

“Gee, Lieutenant, I don’t know. I only watched it that one time, and that was just a few days after the guy died.”

“Before he had that unfortunate reaction to a 50,000-volt shock, you mean.”

“Uh, right. And it was a lot of footage, too — six hours of it! And boy, was it boring.”

“That’s why you made this videotape of all the important parts, right?”

“Well, yeah, but if I’d known they were gonna delete the tapes on us, I would have been a lot more careful about — ”

“You’re not saying you might have … missed something, are you?”

“I sure hope not, Lieutenant.”

“Right. See, folks? Nothing to worry about. Everything’s under control.”

I don’t usually blog about the hideous farce that is American politics, but this is too good to pass up:

When Cheney was told during the ABC News interview that public opinion polls show an overwhelming opposition to the war in Iraq, Cheney’s response was: “So?”

And when the interviewer pressed him asking, “So — you don’t care what the American people think?” he responded, “No,” and explained, “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Americans also roundly reject the position put forward by White House spokeswoman Dana Perino in an effort to explain Cheney’s comments. Asked whether the public should have “input,” she replied, “You had your input. The American people have input every four years, and that’s the way our system is set up.”

I guess those right-wingers really mean it when they say, “The US is a republic, not a democracy.”

It would be cheaper to provide actual housing and support for BC’s homeless than it is to provide existing non-housing services to the same people:

A new study says providing shelter for the homeless with severe addictions and mental illness throughout British Columbia could save taxpayers millions of dollars.

“Addiction is the most prevalent mental health problem in both the street homeless and at-risk populations, followed by concurrent disorders and, less frequently, mental illness alone,” the Simon Fraser University report says.

The paper — titled Housing and Support for Adults with Severe Addictions and/or Mental Illnesses in British Columbia [warning: 15-page PDF] — says providing non-housing services for such people currently costs the public system more than $55,000 per year per person. It says providing adequate housing and supports could reduce this cost to $37,000 per year….

“The costs of providing supported housing and other health services to this population … is lower than the cost incurred through the use of emergency departments, the corrections system and emergency shelters when they are homeless,” the report says.

(Hat tip: David Eby. If you are at all interested in poverty, homelessness, or the social impact of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver — and if you live here, you ought to be — I strongly recommend reading Eby’s blog. He works with the Pivot Legal Society, a non-profit that provides legal assistance to people in the Downtown Eastside.)

From the Vancouver Sun:

The B.C. Court of Appeal has backed B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Don Brenner’s decision to kill the Canadian Bar Association’s landmark attempt to force governments to provide adequate civil legal aid to poor people.

In a majority ruling Monday, the court agreed with the province’s senior trial court judge and said he was also quite right to assess costs against the CBA. […]

“Although the action is intended to assist low-income members of the pubic and its spirit is commendable, I do not consider that the altruistic nature of the action should be afforded much weight until at least the [bar association] has established it can meet the minimal test of disclosing a reasonable claim,” [Court of Appeal] Justice Mary Saunders wrote. […] “Access to legal services is fundamentally important in any free and democratic society. In some cases, it has been found essential to due process and a fair trial. But a review of the constitutional text, the jurisprudence and the history of the concept does not support the respondent’s contention that there is a broad general right to legal counsel as an aspect of, or precondition to, the rule of law.” […]

For almost two decades, legal aid across Canada has been a growing concern because of government cutbacks.

Provinces have curtailed legal aid services, narrowing the types of cases they cover, raising the eligibility criteria, making it harder to qualify.

(Originally posted, with minor changes, to The Information Policy Blog.)

Finland’s initiative to block access to child porn sites is also blocking over 1,000 legitimate websites — including one belonging to a vocal critic of Finnish censorship.

The initiative is the result of a law passed in 2006 to filter foreign sites containing child porn. Finland’s national police force maintains a secret list of sites that contain, or link to, content that they consider to be child porn. When they find a site, they add its IP address to their list — thus blocking, not only the offending site, but also any other sites on the same web server. (For more details, check out this excellent overview of the censorship process.)

“But that’s Finland,” you’re thinking. “Who cares about Finland?”

Alas, much the same thing happens in Canada. Project Cleanfeed manages a list of sites that it classifies as child porn. The list is kept secret from the general public, but the major Canadian ISPs — Shaw, Telus, Rogers, Bell, MTS Allstream, SaskTel, and Videotron — all use it to filter your Internet access.

There are all sorts of problems with the project. The group that manages Project Cleanfeed has a good reputation, but as Cory Doctorow has pointed out, secret lists are ripe for abuse. (Remember, the Finnish police are using a very similar process to block a vocal critic of their censorship practices.) There is an appeal process, but it’s overseen by the same organization that blocked the site in the first place, and you can’t appeal if you don’t know that your site is on the secret list.

The ISPs’ participation also sets a bad precedent, since it means that they are acting as monitors of site content, rather than as neutral common carriers. And if they’re already blocking some types of content, what’s to stop them from blocking other types of content? In fact, as I understand it, by violating their own neutrality, they may be legally liable for their failure to block other types of illegal or objectionable content. For those of us who support net neutrality, this is obviously of some concern.

(I wrote about Project Cleanfeed in more detail back in 2006, when the project first got underway.)