#Flag of the Federation of Patagonia

[arthurdrakoni]

Flag of the Federation of Patagonia

This is the flag of the Federation of Patagonia. It comes from a world where Britain conquered Argentina and Uruguay in the early 19th Century. Patagonia is a highly developed nation, and is often referred to as the Canada of the Southern Hemisphere. Patagonia also includes part of southern Chile. Chile has never forgiven Patagonia for annexing this land. Though, this occurred during the days of direct British rule. The Falkland Islands are considered indisputably Patagonian territory. 

Like Canada, Patagonia is the result of the bending of two European peoples. In this case, British and Spanish. However, also like Canada, said people have historically had their tensions.   Northern Patagonia has historically been the heart of Hispanic culture. Meanwhile, Southern Patagonia has historically been majority Anglo. The name Patagonia used to refer to the region that became the southern provinces, but grew to refer to the nation as a whole. The ruling Anglos felt that Argentina and Plata were too Spanish for their taste. Hispanic Patagonians were pushed further and further north for much of the 19th Century. In fact, Buenos Aires and Montevideo used to be majority English-speaking cities. Though, Spanish speakers still accounted for a healthy forty percent of Buenos Aires and Montevideo’s population. Patagonia also experienced far less Italian immigration than Argentina did in our world. Catholic Italians weren’t eager to move to a colony of Protestant Britain. Subsequently, Patagonian Spanish has much less Italian influence than Argentina Spanish of our world. The northern provinces, initially, tended to be poorer than their southern counterparts. Things would begin to shift starting in the 20th Century. Industry began to invest in the northern provinces of Patagonia. The influx of industry lead to an increase in wealth among Hispanic Patagonians. Several baby booms occurred during this time, ensuring that Hispanic culture would survive in Patagonia. Hispanic Patagonians made major political gains in the Patagonian parliament. Bilingualism became official government policy starting in the 1950s. Packaging is required to be printed in both English and Spanish, signs are printed in both languages, and all government documents are printed in both of the official languages. There are also numerous Spanish-language schools and universities, though most are located in the Hispanic-majority northern provinces.  Patagonia remains culturally divided among geographic lines. However, tensions have relaxed between Anglo Patagonians and Hispanic Patagonians. Patagonia is also home to immigrants from throughout the world, and prides itself on being a refuge for those seeking better lives. Patagonia has a friendly rivalry with Canada. Canada is referred to by Patagonians, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, as the Patagonia of the Northern Hemisphere.  The flag was officially adopted in the 1970s. Prior to that, Patagonia used a British Red Ensign. Care had to be taken, when designing the new flag, not to favor Anglos or Hispanics. The colors evoke the landscape of Patagonia. The white represents the snow-capped mountains, while the ice blue represents the glaciers. The shape is meant to evoke the textile work of Indigenous Patagonians. The three guanacos were chosen as a symbol beloved by Patagonians of all cultures. In fact, the guanaco is the official mammal of Patagonia.

Link to the original flag on my blog: https://drakoniandgriffalco.blogspot.com/2023/02/flag-of-federation-of-patagonia.html?m=0

[sa7abnews]

How Chinese Fishing Vessels Dominate Domestic Waters Across the Globe

New Post has been published on https://sa7ab.info/2024/08/01/how-chinese-fishing-vessels-dominate-domestic-waters-across-the-globe/

How Chinese Fishing Vessels Dominate Domestic Waters Across the Globe

On March 14, 2016, in the squid grounds off the coast of Patagonia, a rusty Chinese vessel named the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 was fishing illegally, several miles inside Argentine waters. Spotted by an Argentine coast-guard patrol and ordered over the radio to halt, the specially-designed squid-fishing ship, known as a “jigger,” fled the scene. The Argentinians gave chase and fired warning shots. The Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 then tried to ram the coast-guard cutter, prompting it to open fire directly on the jigger, which soon sank.  [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Although the violent encounter at sea that day was unusual, the incursion into Argentine waters by a Chinese squid jigger was not. Owned by a state-run behemoth called the China National Fisheries Company, or CNFC, the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 was one of several hundred Chinese jiggers that makes annual visits to the high-seas portion of the fishing grounds that lie beyond Argentina’s territory; many of these jiggers then turn off their locational transponders and cross secretly into Argentine waters. Since 2010, the Argentine navy has chased at least 11 Chinese squid vessels out of Argentine waters for suspected illegal fishing, according to the government.

In 2017, a year after the illegal incursion and sinking of the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10, Argentina’s Federal Fishing Council issued a little-noticed announcement: it was granting fishing licenses to two foreign vessels that would allow them to operate within Argentine waters. Both would sail under the Argentine flag through a local front company, but their true “beneficial” owner was the CNFC. (The CNFC did not respond to requests for comment.)

The move by local authorities may have been a contradiction, but it is an increasingly common one in Argentina—and elsewhere around the world. Over the past three decades, China has gained supremacy over global fishing by dominating the high seas with more than 6,000 distant-water ships, a fleet that is more than triple the size of the next largest national fleet. When it came to targeting other countries’ waters, Chinese fishing ships typically sat “on the outside,” parking in international waters along sea borders, then running incursions across the line into domestic waters. But in recent years, from South America to Africa to the far Pacific, China has increasingly taken a “softer” approach, gaining control from the inside by paying to “flag-in” their ships so they can fish in domestic waters. Subtler than simply entering foreign coastal areas to fish illegally, the tactic is less likely to result in political clashes, bad press, or sunken vessels. 

While many nations have laws that require vessels fishing in their waters to be locally owned—with the aim of keeping profits in the country and making it easier to enforce fishing regulations—China has found ways around them. Chinese companies partner with locals, or even sell or lease their ships to them, but retain control over decisions and profits. Or they buy their way into local waters with “access agreements.”

Chinese companies now control at least 62 industrial squid-fishing vessels that fly the Argentine flag, which constitutes most of the country’s squid fleet. Many of these companies have been tied to a variety of crimes, including dumping fish at sea, turning off their transponders, and engaging in tax evasion and fraud. Trade records show that much of what is caught by these vessels is sent back to China, but some of the seafood is also exported to countries including the United States, Canada, Italy, and Spain. China now operates almost 250 of these flagged-in vessels globally, including ones that operate off the coasts of Micronesia, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco, and Iran.

A four-year investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project into the global seafood supply chain—which entailed reporting at sea on several ships, including to the waters of Argentina, the Falkland Islands, near Korea and the Galapagos Islands—has for the first time revealed the true size of this hidden fleet, along with the extent of the fleet’s illegal behavior, concentration in certain foreign waters, and the amount of seafood from these ships that winds up in European and American markets. 

“Most national fisheries require vessels to be owned locally to keep profits within the country and make it easier to enforce fishing regulations,” said Duncan Copeland, the former executive director of Trygg Mat Tracking, a non-profit research organization specializing in maritime crime. “Flagging-in undermines those aims.” 

China has not hidden how this approach factors into larger ambitions. In an academic paper published in 2023, Chinese fishery officials and representatives from Zhejiang Ocean Family explained how they have relied extensively on Chinese companies, for example, to penetrate Argentina’s territorial waters through “leasing and transfer methods,” and how this is part of a global policy. 

Experts said the decision by the Argentine government to flag in Chinese-owned vessels after the sinking of the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 confused them, given Argentine regulations that not only forbid foreign-owned ships from flying Argentina’s flag or fishing in its waters, but also prohibit the granting of fishing licenses to ship operators with records of illegal fishing in Argentine waters. Eduardo Pucci, a former Argentine fisheries minister, called it “a total contradiction.”

The trend is especially pronounced in Africa, where Chinese companies operate flagged-in ships in the national waters of at least nine countries on the continent—among them, notably, Ghana, where more than 135 Chinese fishing ships flying the Ghanaian flag are fishing in national waters, even though foreign investment in fishing is technically illegal. Nonetheless, up to 95 percent of Ghana’s industrial trawling fleet has some element of Chinese control, according to a 2018 report by the Environmental Justice Foundation, an advocacy group, the most recent available figures. 

China has also replaced fishing vessels from the European Union, right on its doorstep, in the waters of Morocco. In the recent past, dozens of vessels, most of them from Spain, fished with the permission of the Moroccan government inside the African country’s exclusive economic zone. The agreement lapsed, however, in 2023 and China now operates at least six flagged-in vessels in Moroccan waters. China has also established a growing presence across the Pacific Ocean. Chinese ships comb the waters of Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia, having flagged-in or signed access agreements with those countries, according to a report released in 2022 by the Congressional Research Service in the U.S. 

“Chinese fleets are active in waters far from China’s shores,” the report warned, “and the growth in their harvests threatens to worsen the already dire depletion in global fisheries.” 

As global demand for seafood has doubled since the 1960s, the appetite for fish has outpaced what can be sustainably caught. Now, more than a third of the world’s stocks have been overfished, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations ( FAO). To feed the demand, the proliferation of foreign industrial fishing ships, especially from China, risks depleting domestic fish stocks of countries in the global south while also jeopardizing local livelihoods and compromising food security by exporting an essential source of protein. Western consumers, particularly in Europe, the U.S. and Canada, are beneficiaries of this cheap and seemingly abundant seafood caught or processed by China.

“Illegal fishing and abusive fishing takes away from communities that survive on the same fish,” says Dyhia Belhabib, a principal investigator at Ecotrust Canada, a charity focused on environmental activism. “This means that their current and future economic prospects from this very valuable resource are being destroyed and their food resources depleted.”

But ocean sustainability and food security are by no means the only concerns tied to the growth of China’s control of global seafood and penetration into foreign near-shore waters. Labor abuses and other crimes are a widespread problem with Chinese fishing ships.

In the past six years, more than 50 ships flagged to a dozen different countries but controlled by Chinese companies have engaged in crimes such as illegal fishing, forced labor, and unauthorized transhipment, or transfers of catch at sea to carrier ships that transfer it back to shore, according to the investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project. In one instance, a fisheries observer from Ghana went missing while working on the vessel. Four of the vessels showed a pattern of repeatedly turning off their automated tracking systems for longer than a day at a time while out on the Pacific, often at the edge of an exclusive economic zone. Vessels “going dark” is a risk factor for illegal fishing and transshipment, marine researchers say, because it makes it harder for law enforcement to comprehensively track a vessel’s movement or see if it may have engaged with other ships at sea. 

For most of the past decade, one dead body has been dropped off every other month on average in the port of Montevideo, Uruguay, mostly from Chinese squid ships, according to the Outlaw Ocean Project’s research. Some of the workers on these ships have died from beriberi, an easily avoidable and reversible form of malnutrition caused by a B1 vitamin deficiency that experts say is a warning sign of criminal neglect, typically caused on ships by eating too much white rice or instant noodles, which lack the vitamin. At least 24 workers on 14 Chinese fishing ships suffered symptoms associated with beriberi between 2013 and 2021, according to the investigation. Of those, at least 15 died. The investigation also reported dozens of cases of forced labor, wage theft, violence, the confiscation of passports and deprivation of medical care.

Many of these crimes have taken place on the high seas, beyond any country’s territorial jurisdiction. But increasingly, Chinese-owned vessels are fishing in the local waters of nations where policing is sporadic at best, as governments lack the finances, the coast-guard vessels, or the political will to board and spot-check the ships.

In January 2019, as part of the four-year investigation, a team of reporters from The Outlaw Ocean Project boarded a Chilean fishing ship in Punta Arenas, Chile, where the crew recounted recently watching a Chinese captain on a nearby squid ship punching and slapping deckhands. Later that year, the same team of journalists was reporting at sea off the coast of the West African nation of Gambia, where they boarded a Chinese ship called the Victory 205. There they found six African crew members sleeping on sea-soaked foam mattresses in a cramped and dangerously hot crawl space above the engine room of the ship, which was soon detained by local authorities for these labor and other violations. (Owners of the Victory 205 did not respond to a request for comment.)

In February 2022, the Outlaw Ocean Project reporters boarded a Chinese squid jigger on the high seas near the Falkland Islands, where an 18-year-old Chinese deckhand nervously begged to be rescued, explaining that his and the rest of the workers’ passports had been confiscated. “Can you take us to the embassy in Argentina?” he asked. Roughly four months later, the reporting team climbed onto another Chinese fishing ship in international waters near the Galapagos Islands to document living conditions. As if in suspended animation, the crew of 30 men wore thousand-yard stares. Their teeth were yellowed from smoking, their skin ashen, and their hands spongy from handling fresh squid. The walls and floors were covered in a slippery ooze of squid ink. The deckhands said they worked 15-hour days, 6 days per week. Mostly, they stood shin deep in squid, monitoring the reels to ensure they did not jam, and tossing their catch into overflowing baskets for later sorting. Below deck, a cook stirred instant noodles and bits of squid in a rice cooker. He said the vessel had run out of vegetables and fruit—a common cause at sea of fatal malnutrition.

In June 2023, the same reporters were contacted by Uruguayan authorities seeking help after a local woman stumbled across a message in a bottle, washed ashore, apparently thrown from a Chinese squidder. “I am a crew member of the ship Lu Qing Yuan Yu 765 and I was locked up by the company,” the message said. “When you see this paper, please help me call the police! Help, help.” When contacted for comment, the ship’s owner Qingdao Songhai Fishery said that Uruguayan police had looked into the matter and concluded that the message “was completely fabricated by individual crew members.” 

Jorge Frias, the president of the Argentine fishing captains’ union, explains that on Argentine-flagged ships, the Chinese call the shots. The captains are Argentinians, but “fishing masters,” who are Chinese, decide where to go and when, he says.

The case of Manuel Quiquinte is illustrative. In the Spring of 2021, Quiquinte, an Argentinian crew member on a squid jigger called the Xin Shi Ji 89, contracted Covid while at sea. Owned by the Chinese, the ship was flagged to Argentina and jigging in Argentinian waters. Its crew was a mix of Argentinian and Chinese workers. Several days after Quiquinte fell ill, the Argentine captain called the Chinese owners to ask if the ship could go to shore in Argentina to get medical care. According to court testimony from another crew member, the company officials said no, and to keep fishing. Quiquinte died on the ship shortly thereafter, in May. 

When contacted by the Outlaw Ocean Project about the death, the vessel’s parent company Zhejiang Ocean Family said that the crew member had tested negative for COVID-19 prior to working on board but had indeed contracted the illness on the vessel and died after his condition deteriorated rapidly. Ocean Family said the vessel belonged to a local Argentine company which Ocean Family has invested in (and which it did not identify), and it was this local company which handled the situation.

To help create jobs, make money and feed its growing middle class, the Chinese government heavily supports its fishing industry with billions of dollars in subsidies for things like fuel, ship building, or engine purchases. The Chinese fishing companies flagging into poorer countries’ waters are also eligible for these subsidies. “The reason why the Chinese subsidize these fleets could be not only for the fish,”  said Fernando Rivera, chairman of the Argentine Fishing Industry Chamber. “It has a very important geopolitical aspect.”

As U.S. and European fishing fleets and navies have shrunk, so too has Western development funding and market investment in Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific. This has created a void that China is filling as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s global development program. Between 2000 and 2020, China’s trade with Latin America and the Caribbean grew from $12 billion to $315 billion, according to the World Economic Forum. China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, two major state-owned Chinese banks, provided $137 billion in loans to Latin American governments between 2005 and 2020. In exchange, China has at times received exclusive access to a wide range of resources, from oil fields to lithium mines. 

The maritime domain is an important front in China’s growth plans, which include exerting power not just over the high seas and contested waters like those in the South China Sea, but also consolidating control over shipping, fishing in foreign coastal waters, and ports abroad. Chinese companies now operate dozens of overseas processing plants and cold-storage facilities, and terminals in more than 90 foreign fishing or shipping ports abroad, according to research by Kardon. 

Though most of these business ventures go unnoticed, some of them have sparked controversy. Starting in 2007, China extended more than a billion dollars worth of loans to Sri Lanka as part of a plan for a Chinese state-owned company named the China Ocean Shipping Company Group to build a port and an airport. The deal was made based on the promise that the project would generate more than enough revenue for Sri Lanka to pay back these loans. By 2017, however, the port and airport had not recouped the debt, and Sri Lanka had no way to pay back the loan. China struck a new deal extending credit further. The deal gave China majority control over the port and the surrounding area for 99 years. 

In 2018, a Chinese company named Shandong Baoma purchased a 70 acre plot of land in Montevideo, Uruguay, to build a “megaport” consisting of two half-mile-long docks, a tax-exempt “free-trade zone,” a new ice factory, a ship-repair warehouse, a fuel depot, and dorms for staff. The plan was eventually canceled after local protests, but the Uruguayan government later announced that it would build the port itself, with foreign investment, and China’s ambassador in Uruguay, Wang Gang, expressed interest in managing the project. 

More recently, in May 2021, Sierra Leone signed an agreement with China to build a new fishing harbor and fishmeal processing factory on a beach near a national park. In response, local organizations pushed for more transparency around the deal, which they said would harm the area’s biodiversity, according to a 2023 report by The Stimson Center.

In Argentina, China has made or promised billions of dollars in currency swaps and investments, providing a crucial lifeline amid skyrocketing domestic inflation and growing hesitancy from international investors. For Beijing, this money has bought political influence. After the Argentine coast guard sank the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 in 2016, all 29 crew members were rescued from the water, and all but four of them were immediately taken back to China. The captain and three others were rescued by the coast guard, brought to shore, charged with a range of crimes, and put under house arrest.

The judge handling the case initially justified the charges filed. The Chinese officers had placed “both the life and property of the Chinese vessel itself and the personnel and ship of the Argentine Prefecture at risk,” he said. But China’s foreign ministry soon pushed back. Three days later, Argentina’s foreign minister told reporters that the charges had “provoked a reaction of great concern from the Chinese government” and that she had reassured China that Argentina would follow local and international laws. Several weeks later, in April, the Argentine judiciary also fell in line, releasing the captain and the three other sailors without penalty to be flown back to China. By May, Argentina’s foreign minister was on a plane to Beijing to meet with the Chinese foreign minister.

The scourge of illegal fishing and overfishing did not originate with China, of course. Western industrial fleets dominated the world’s oceans for much of the 20th century, fishing unsustainably in ways that have helped cause the current crisis, explained Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia. 

China’s expansionist methods are also not historically unique. The U.S. has a long and infamous record of intervening abroad when foreign leaders begin erecting highly protectionist laws. In the past several decades, the tactic of “flagging in” has also been used by American and Icelandic fishing companies. More recently, as China has increased its control over global fishing, the U.S. and European nations have jumped at the opportunity to focus international attention on China’s misdeeds. 

Still, China has a well-documented reputation for violating international fishing laws and standards, bullying other ships, intruding on the maritime territory of other countries and abusing its fishing workers. In 2021, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, a nonprofit research group, ranked China as the world’s biggest purveyor of illegal fishing. But frequent culprits can also be easy scapegoats: a country that regularly flouts norms and breaks the law can also at times be a victim of misinformation. When criticized in the media, China typically pushes back, not without reason, by dismissing the criticism as politically motivated and by accusing its detractors of hypocrisy.

China’s sheer size, global reach, and poor track record on labor and marine conservation is raising concerns. In Africa, for instance, Chinese trawlers catch 100,000 metric tons of fish each year just from Ghanian waters, and the country’s fishing stocks are now in crisis, as local fishermen’s incomes have dropped by up to 40 percent over the last decade. “Fishing vessel owners and operators exploit African flags to escape effective oversight and to fish unsustainably and illegally both in sovereign African waters,” wrote TMT, the nonprofit that tracks maritime crime, adding that the companies were creating “a situation where they can harness the resources of a State without any meaningful restrictions or management oversight.” In the Pacific, an inspection in 2024 by local police and the U.S. Coast Guard found that six Chinese flagged-in ships fishing in the waters of Vanuatu had violated regulations requiring them to record the amount of fish they catch.

And in South America, the increasingly foreign presence in territorial waters is stoking nationalist worry in places like Peru and Argentina. “China is becoming the only player, by displacing local companies or purchasing them,” said Mr. Miranda, the former Peruvian minister. Pablo Isasa, a captain of an Argentinian hake trawler, added: “We have the enemy inside and out.”

Several major studies have shown that China is not only the biggest player in the global seafood industry, but also the largest purveyor of illegal fishing. On the high seas, there is little-to-no law enforcement, which allows the Chinese fleet to dip into waters where they are not authorized and to use prohibited techniques that can give them an edge — and which makes the myriad human-rights abuses committed on China’s fishing vessels practically invisible.

All of this contributes to an accelerating pace of unsustainable fishing around the world. After years of similar behavior from Western nations, including the U.S. and Europe, China is leading the way in fishing species to near extinction. The fleet also operates the world’s largest collection of bottom trawlers, which drag nets across the ocean floor, destroying coral reefs and other marine life.

Most marine conservationists and researchers agree that with a third of all fish stocks at the edge or beyond the point of collapse, the trend of overfishing must be reversed, as it threatens not only ocean health, but also global food security and human rights. As stocks decline, driving competition, companies face increasing pressure to cut corners in their fishing practices, which can often lead to the use of forced labor and other human rights crimes. Researchers and advocates recommend scaling back the size of global fishing fleets; tightening the quotas that limit how many fish can be pulled from the water; removing the government subsidies that make seafood artificially cheap; and for companies to take further steps to monitor their supply chains. If this does not happen, according to these experts, environmental degradation and human rights abuses will continue to worsen.

The superpower of seafood, China is unequivocally the most important global actor on the high seas today, but it also plays an outsized role in foreign waters. Better control of the hundreds of industrial Chinese fishing ships in the national waters of poorer, global South countries will be an important part of any plan to protect the oceans.

(This story was produced by The Outlaw Ocean Project with reporting contributed by Maya Martin, Jake Conley, Joe Galvin, Susan Ryan, Austin Brush, and Teresa Tomassoni. Bellingcat also contributed reporting.)

[nothingman]

Two weeks ago, Sidd Bikkannavar flew back into the United States after spending a few weeks abroad in South America. An employee of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Bikkannavar had been on a personal trip, pursuing his hobby of racing solar-powered cars. He had recently joined a Chilean team, and spent the last weeks of January at a race in Patagonia.

Bikkannavar is a seasoned international traveller — but his return home to the US this time around was anything but routine. Bikkannavar left for South America on January 15th, under the Obama Administration. He flew back from Santiago, Chile to the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas on Monday, January 30th, just over a week into the Trump Administration.

He was detained by Customs and pressured to give up his phone and access PIN

Bikkannavar says he was detained by US Customs and Border Patrol and pressured to give the CBP agents his phone and access PIN. Since the phone was issued by NASA, it may have contained sensitive material that wasn’t supposed to be shared. Bikkannavar’s phone was returned to him after it was searched by CBP, but he doesn’t know exactly what information officials might have taken from the device.

The JPL scientist returned to the US four days after the signing of a sweeping and controversial Executive Order on travel into the country. The travel ban caused chaos at airports across the United States, as people with visas and green cards found themselves detained, or facing deportation. Within days of its signing, the travel order was stayed, but not before more than 60,000 visas were revoked, according to the US State Department.

Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

His ordeal also took place at a time of renewed focus on the question of how much access CBP can have to a traveler’s digital information, whether or not they’re US citizens: in January, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) filed complaints against CBP for demanding that Muslim American citizens give up their social media information when they return home from overseas. And there’s evidence that that kind of treatment could become commonplace for foreign travelers. In a statement this week, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said that people visiting the United States may be asked to give up passwords to their social media accounts. "We want to get on their social media, with passwords: What do you do, what do you say?" Kelly told the House Homeland Security Committee. "If they don't want to cooperate then you don't come in."

Seemingly, Bikkannavar’s reentry into the country should not have raised any flags. Not only is he a natural-born US citizen, but he’s also enrolled in Global Entry — a program through CBP that allows individuals who have undergone background checks to have expedited entry into the country. He hasn’t visited the countries listed in the immigration ban and he has worked at JPL — a major center at a US federal agency — for 10 years. There, he works on “wavefront sensing and control,” a type of optics technology that will be used on the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.

Bikkanavar’s reentry into the country should not have raised any flags

“I don’t know what to think about this,” Bikkannavar recently told The Verge in a phone call. “...I was caught a little off guard by the whole thing.”

Bikkannavar says he arrived into Houston early Tuesday morning, and was detained by CBP after his passport was scanned. A CBP officer escorted Bikkannavar to a back room, and told him to wait for additional instructions. About five other travelers who had seemingly been affected by the ban were already in the room, asleep on cots that were provided for them.

About 40 minutes went by before an officer appeared and called Bikkannavar’s name. “He takes me into an interview room and sort of explains that I’m entering the country and they need to search my possessions to make sure I’m not bringing in anything dangerous,” he says. The CBP officer started asking questions about where Bikkannavar was coming from, where he lives, and his title at work. It’s all information the officer should have had since Bikkannavar is enrolled in Global Entry. “I asked a question, ‘Why was I chosen?’ And he wouldn’t tell me,” he says.

The officer also presented Bikkannavar with a document titled “Inspection of Electronic Devices” and explained that CBP had authority to search his phone. Bikkannavar did not want to hand over the device, because it was given to him by JPL and is technically NASA property. He even showed the officer the JPL barcode on the back of phone. Nonetheless, CBP asked for the phone and the access PIN. “I was cautiously telling him I wasn’t allowed to give it out, because I didn’t want to seem like I was not cooperating,” says Bikkannavar. “I told him I’m not really allowed to give the passcode; I have to protect access. But he insisted they had the authority to search it.”

NASA

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Courts have upheld customs agents' power to manually search devices at the border, but any searches made solely on the basis of race or national origin are still illegal. More importantly, travelers are not legally required to unlock their devices, although agents can detain them for significant periods of time if they do not. “In each incident that I’ve seen, the subjects have been shown a Blue Paper that says CBP has legal authority to search phones at the border, which gives them the impression that they’re obligated to unlock the phone, which isn’t true,” Hassan Shibly, chief executive director of CAIR Florida, told The Verge. “They’re not obligated to unlock the phone.”

Nevertheless, Bikkannavar was not allowed to leave until he gave CBP his PIN. The officer insisted that CBP had the authority to search the phone. The document given to Bikkannavar listed a series of consequences for failure to offer information that would allow CBP to copy the contents of the device. “I didn’t really want to explore all those consequences,” he says. “It mentioned detention and seizure.” Ultimately, he agreed to hand over the phone and PIN. The officer left with the device and didn’t return for another 30 minutes.

NASA employees are obligated to protect work-related information, no matter how minuscule

Eventually, the phone was returned to Bikkannavar, though he’s not sure what happened during the time it was in the officer’s possession. When it was returned he immediately turned it off because he knew he had to take it straight to the IT department at JPL. Once he arrived in Los Angeles, he went to NASA and told his superiors what had happened. Bikkannavar can’t comment on what may or may not have been on the phone, but he says the cybersecurity team at JPL was not happy about the breach. Bikkannavar had his phone on hand while he was traveling in case there was a problem at work that needed his attention, but NASA employees are obligated to protect work-related information, no matter how minuscule. We reached out to JPL for comment, but the center didn’t comment on the event directly.

this is from an IRL friend of mine. this is NOT my america. EVER. #MuslimBan Siid is a US Citizen. @CustomsBorder u say "Welcome Home" #NASA http://pic.twitter.com/W4UtF88rJy

— Nick Adkins (@nickisnpdx) February 6, 2017

Bikkannavar noted that the entire interaction with CBP was incredibly professional and friendly, and the officers confirmed everything Bikkannavar had said through his Global Entry background checks. CBP did not respond to a request for comment.

He posted an update on Facebook about what happened, and the story has since been shared more than 2,000 times. A friend also tweeted about Bikkannavar’s experience, which was also shared more than 7,000 times. Still, he’s left wondering the point of the search, and he’s upset that the search potentially compromised the privacy of his friends, family, and coworkers who were listed on his phone. He has since gotten a completely new device from work with a new phone number.

“Sometimes I get stopped and searched, but never anything like this.”

“It was not that they were concerned with me bringing something dangerous in, because they didn’t even touch the bags. They had no way of knowing I could have had something in there,” he says. “You can say, ‘Okay well maybe it’s about making sure I’m not a dangerous person,’ but they have all the information to verify that.”

Bikkannavar says he’s still unsure why he was singled out for the electronic search. He says he understands that his name is foreign — its roots go back to southern India. But it shouldn’t be a trigger for extra scrutiny, he says. “Sometimes I get stopped and searched, but never anything like this. Maybe you could say it was one huge coincidence that this thing happens right at the travel ban.”

via The Verge

[jenkins1230]

America's Chief Game Keeper Is an Incompetent, Corrupt, Loudmouth Who is Drunk on Power

Writing in The New York Times, Timothy Egan details the very real threat that Ryan Zinke, the Mad King governing our public lands, is to the America we know and love:

The emperor of the outdoors rode into town on a horse named Tonto, and soon demanded that his own special flag fly outside his headquarters whenever he was in Washington. He believes fracking is proof that “God loves us” and, despite being from Montana, doesn't know how to properly set up his fly line when fishing in front of the cameras. “He had rigged his reel backward,” Elliott D. Woods wrote of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke in a wonderful profile in Outside Magazine. “Seems like an inconsequential thing, but in Montana, it's everything.” As it turned out, it was quite consequential. When the magazine next tried to dial into an Interior conference call, it was denied access. You may think that Stormy Daniels is in charge of the natural world under Donald Trump. And yes, the boorish behavior of the president and the porn star makes for better reading than an account of the quack running Interior. But if someone were trashing your house, you'd want to pay attention. And Trump, using the very strange Zinke, is going after the sacred foundations of America's much-loved public lands, brick by brick. Zinke has been called the Gulfstream Cowboy for his love of using charter planes to fly off to the nesting grounds of wealthy donors. But he's more like a mad king. And this monarch has control over the crown jewels of America's public land. They are not in safe hands. Last month, the secretary attacked Patagonia, the outdoor retailer, after it protested the largest rollback of public land protection in our history with a website home page of a black screen and stark message: “The President Stole Your Land.” It is your land, all 400 million acres of it, though you wouldn't know by the way the Trump administration has ceded control to the private predators from the oil, gas, coal and uranium industries. It is also your water, the near entirety of the outer continental shelf that Trump is opening to extractive drilling. Almost a dozen states have protested. The waters off the coast of Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, were given an exemption after Zinke met with the governor, who said drilling was bad for tourism. Your public servant at work. Zinke is upending a century of bipartisan values as part of a Trumpian culture war. When asked why the president shrank national monuments in the Southwest by two million acres, Zinke said it was a way to strike back against “an elitist sort of hunter and fisherman.” Huh? Could this be the same regular guy who took a helicopter to ride horses with Mike Pence? The cabinet member who wants to charge $70 to get into our most iconic national parks? The man whose nomination was championed by Donald Trump Jr., elephant killer and dictionary definition of elite hunter and fisherman? Defenders of public land have pushed back. This week, a majority of the nonpartisan National Park Service advisory panel resigned in frustration. The board, federally chartered to help guide the service, said Zinke had refused to convene a single meeting with the members last year. Silly bird-lovers. Don't they know you need to charter a plane for Zinke if you want to get his attention? A much less-connected group, the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, responded with an essay from a board member who lives in a 500-square-foot abode in the Rocky Mountains. “We hunt, gather, garden, can, smoke, dry, jelly and pickle as much of our own food as we can,” wrote Tom Healy. “According to Mr. Secretary, I am an elitist.” The writer is from Whitefish, Zinke's hometown in Montana. Where have you heard that before? Ah, yes, a tiny energy company from Whitefish with two employees - three if you count Zinke's kid when he was an intern on a side project - finagled a $300 million, no-audit, no-bid contract to help rebuild Puerto Rico's electric grid. Zinke said he had absolutely, positively nothing to do with it. Look, it could have been worse: Sarah Palin was an early favorite for interior secretary. Zinke is an ex-Navy SEAL, and looks the part. Enough nutty things come out of his mouth to make him a perfect Trump guy. “The government stops at the mailbox,” he said at a rally last year, “and if you come any further, you're going to meet my gun.” Note to Mr. Secretary: Don't shoot the sheriff, or the census taker. It took a bribery scandal to bring down an interior secretary in the Teapot Dome affair of the 1920s. Today, the corruption is all upfront. Energy Secretary Rick Perry gives bear hugs to coal barons while doing all he can to have the government prop up their industry. The Environmental Protection Agency is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the polluters it is supposed to regulate. Over at Interior, they haven't yet figured a way to charge Americans for the air we breathe. But the next time Zinke's flag is up, something may be in the works.

From: Terrierman's Daily Dose