Consumer groups and
privacy advocates are attacking proposed Internal
Revenue Service rules that would spell out how
tax-return preparers may legally sell financial
information and other data from their clients’
returns.
It has long been a
principle of tax administration that no
unauthorized person can get such information, and
that this assurance encourages taxpayers to file
honest and complete returns. That notion is still
a "fundamental underpinning" of IRS
practice, Commissioner Mark Everson said
Wednesday in an interview.
The IRS billed the
proposal, issued in December, as improving
privacy protections for taxpayers, detailing the
steps for getting permission to use the
information. But it has focused attention on a
little-known fact: Although law forbids the
unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer information,
return-preparers have long been allowed to
disclose it, even sell it, if they obtain their
clients’ permission. Once the information
goes out the door, taxpayers have little control
over what happens to it.
The problem, said Evan
Hendricks, publisher of the Privacy Times
newsletter and other publications on privacy, is
that "information about you is valuable in
general, and the more detailed ... it is, the
more valuable it is."
"The real danger
here is that there’s going to be lot of
incentive" for preparers to obtain the
permission surreptitiously, such as by spreading
a lot of papers in front of clients and asking
them to sign them all, Hendricks said.
Jean Ann Fox of the
Consumer Federation of America said that under
the new rules taxpayers could be duped into
releasing their information and run the
"risk of having that information in database
somewhere." That is "dangerous,"
she said, and "essentially turns tax-return
information into a commodity for highest
bidder."
The IRS said in
proposing the new rules that it was updating
regulations dating from the 1970s that had not
contemplated electronic transmission and other
business practices, including the
"offshoring" of some tax-preparation
work by some firms.
"Our concern was
(preparers) were interpreting the regulations in
a way to say (clients) don’t need to know
that their returns are being prepared in India;
it’s all by the same firm," Everson
said. "There’s no doubt in my mind
taxpayers are entitled to know if their return is
being prepared overseas."
The rules also specify
what a preparer must do to get permission from a
taxpayer to disclose return information, up to
and including the entire return. Specific
language is required when a preparer requests
permission, and also in the form given to the
taxpayer to sign.
There is also language
for obtaining the taxpayer’s permission to
use the information within the preparer’s
company or group of related companies. And there
is a procedure for obtaining a taxpayer’s
"signature" electronically.
The IRS proposal says
that a preparer, for example, might ask
permission to disclose that a client contributed
to an IRA or that he would be getting a refund.
Such information could be sold to a bank.
Several large
tax-preparation companies have told the IRS that
they oppose the new rules because they would make
it too difficult for them to obtain permission to
sell clients’ information.
As the government’s
priorities have shifted to national security and
revenue collection, there is more debate over how
strict privacy rules should be.
The IRS recently awarded
the first contracts to private debt collectors, a
strategy authorized by Congress to increase
collection of unpaid taxes. The debt collectors
are barred from having tax information beyond
what is owed, but critics say they worry about
other information leaking out and about possible
abusive practices by collection agents.
Everson said the private
collectors "extend the reach" of the
IRS, and are subject to the same privacy rules as
agency employees.
He said calls for
increased access to IRS data in areas such as
immigration enforcement or federal procurement
should be debated carefully. While there might be
public-policy benefits in one area, there might
also be "a damaging impact" on tax
collections, he said.
Last week, Everson
himself "teed up" the issue of the
different ways corporations report income to the
IRS and financial regulators.
"We have two system
that are in conflict with each other — book
accounting and tax return preparation. Book
accounting seeks to maximize earnings to drive up
share value; tax return preparation seeks to
drive down earnings, reduce taxes and maximize
cash flow," he said.
"Clearly tax
compliance would be helped by great
transparency," such as disclosure of
corporate returns or parts of them, "but
there are very real public policy interests (in)
continuing privacy. It comes down to weighting
various factors," Everson said.
Back to Top
3. THIS ID PROJECT IS EVEN MORE
SINISTER THAN WE FIRST THOUGHT
(The insidious erosion of our civil liberties
will accelerate dramatically if the government
wins the battle over identity cards)
BY
HENRY PORTER
You may have noticed the vaguely menacing
tone of recent government advertising campaigns.
Here is a current example: 'If you know a
business that isn't registered for tax, call the
Revenue or HM Customs - no names needed.' Another
says: 'Technology has made it easier to identify
benefit cheats.'
Whether the campaign is
about rape, TV licences or filling in your tax
form, there is always a we-know-where-you-live
edge to the message, a sense that this government
is dividing the nation into suspects and
informers.
Reading the Identity
Cards Bill, as it pinged between the House of
Commons and the Lords last week, I wondered about
the type of campaign that will be used to
persuade us to comply with the new ID card law.
Clearly, it would be orchestrated by some
efficient martinet like the Minister of State at
the Home Office, Hazel Blears. Her task will be
to put the fear of God into the public at the
same time as reassuring us that the £90 cost of
each card will protect everyone from identity
theft, terrorism and benefit fraud.
The ads might imagine
any number of scenarios. Here is one. 'Your
elderly mother has fallen ill,' starts the
commentary gravely. 'You travel from your home to
look after her. She has a chronic condition but
this time, it's a bit of a crisis and you need to
pick up a prescription at the only late-night
chemist in town. Trouble is, she has mislaid her
identity card and you never thought to get one.
Under the new law, the pharmacist will not be
able to give you that medicine without proper ID.
So, get your card. It's for your own good - and
Mum's.'
It became clear last
week that the government will do anything to get
this bill through parliament, including ignoring
its own manifesto pledge to make the cards
voluntary, a fact that we should remember as each
of us entrusts the 49 separate pieces of personal
information to a national database. By the end of
last year, the government had already spent £32m
of taxpayers' money on the scheme and, at the
present, the expenditure is edging towards
£100,000 a day. No surprise that Home Secretary
Charles Clarke dissembles about Labour promises.
Labour's manifesto said:
'We will introduce ID cards, including biometric
data like fingerprints, backed up by a national
register and rolling out initially on a voluntary
basis as people renew their passports.'
It turns out that there
is nothing voluntary about it. If you renew your
passport, you will be compelled to provide all
the information the state requires for its
sinister data base. The Home Secretary says that
the decision to apply for, or renew, a passport
is entirely a matter of individual choice; thus
he maintains that the decision to commit those
personal details to the data base is a matter of
individual choice.
George Orwell would have
been pleased to have invented that particular
gem. Yet this is not fiction, but the reality of
2006, and we should understand that if the Home
Secretary is prepared to mislead on the
fundamental issue as to whether something is
voluntary or compulsory, we cannot possibly trust
his word on the larger issues of personal freedom
and the eventual use of the ID card database.
Clarke has now
established himself as a deceiver, even in the
eyes of his party. Labour democrats such as Kate
Hoey, Diane Abbott, Bob Marshall-Andrews and Mark
Fisher all understood that the Lords' amendments
of last week simply sought to underline this
concept of a voluntary scheme, which complied
with the 2005 manifesto. Oddly enough, the
compulsory provision of personal information to
the government database is not the greatest
threat to our freedom, though it is in itself a
substantial one. The real menace comes when the
ID card scheme begins to track everyone's
movements and transactions, the details of which
will kept on the database for as long as the Home
Office desires.
Over the past few weeks,
an anonymous email has been doing a very good job
of enlightening people on how invasive the ID
card will be. 'Private businesses,' says the
writer, 'are going to be given access to the
national identity register database. If you want
to apply for a job, you will have to present your
card for a swipe. If you want to apply for a
London underground Oystercard or supermarket
loyalty card or driving licence, you will have to
present your card.'
You will need the card
when you receive prescription drugs, when you
withdraw a relatively small amount of money from
a bank, check into hospital, get your car
unclamped, apply for a fishing licence, buy a
round of drinks (if you need to prove you're over
18), set up an internet account, fix a residents'
parking permit or take out insurance.
Every time that card is
swiped, the central database logs the transaction
so that an accurate plot of your life is drawn.
The state will know everything that it needs to
know; so will big corporations, the police, the
Inland Revenue, HM Customs, MI5 and any damned
official or commercial busybody that wants access
to your life. The government and Home Office have
presented this as an incidental benefit, but it
is at the heart of their purpose.
Last week, Andrew
Burnham, a junior minister at the Home Office,
confirmed the anonymous email by admitting that
the ID card scheme would now include chip-and-pin
technology because it would be a cheaper way of
checking each person's identity. The
sophisticated technology on which this bill was
sold will cost too much to operate, with millions
of checks being made every week.
That is a very important
admission because the government still maintains
the fiction that the ID card is defence against
identity theft and terrorism. The 7 July bombers
would not have been deterred by a piece of
plastic. And it is clear that the claim about
protecting your identity is also rubbish because
chip-and-pin technology has already been
compromised by organised criminals. What remains
is the ceaseless monitoring of people's lives.
That is what the government is forcing on us.
Practically every week
in these columns, I urge you to pay attention to
the government's theft of our liberties. I would
feel a bore and an obsessive if I hadn't pored
over the ID card bill last week and read
Hansard's account of the exchanges in both
houses. One of the most chilling passages in the
bill is section 13 which deals with the
'invalidity and surrender' of ID cards, which, in
effect, describes the withdrawal of a person's
identity by the state. For, without this card, it
will be almost impossible to function, to exist
as a citizen in the UK. Despite the cost to you,
this card will not be your property.
People keep asking me
what they can do about the lurch into Labour's
velvet tyranny and I keep replying that the only
way for us is to re-engage with the politics of
our country. But it is difficult. The new
Conservative regime under David Cameron has not
yet found the voice to articulate the objection
to the radical changes proposed in our society.
Edward Garnier, the Tory spokesman on ID cards,
did his best in the Commons last week, but we
need to hear his leader express the principled
outrage that comes from conviction and unyielding
values. If we don't, we may justifiably wonder if
the Conservatives are sitting on their hands in
the belief that they will eventually inherit
Labour's apparatus of control.
Outside parliament, what
needs to happen is the formation of the broadest
possible front against these changes, a movement
which deploys the most principled democratic
minds in the country to argue with the lazy and
stupid view that if you've got nothing to hide,
you have nothing to fear from Labour's attack on
liberty. I believe that will happen.
Back to Top
4. WHITE HOUSE OUTLAWS
|
BY
RALPH
NADER
|
| |
George W. Bush
and Dick Cheney, two top outlaws smashing
our country's rule of law and democratic
liberties, are testing the American
people's resistance. Every day they are
testing. Every day they think by
flaunting the words, "war on
terror", they can get Americans to
concede more and more of what makes the
United States a constitutionally-abiding
government under the rule of law.
You know what?
With not enough exceptions, they are
right. Day by day, we're giving up what
our forefathers fought to bequeath us
since that famous Declaration of
Independence of 1776. They were
determined that people in this country
would not be arrested without charges and
jailed indefinitely, that they would not
be tortured, or sent to be tortured in
dictatorial regimes, or deprived of
habeas corpus to take their incarceration
to our courts of law, or be snooped on at
the whim of the President and his
deputies or that people in faraway lands
would be destroyed in the tens of
thousands due to a fabricated
war-invasion-quagmire.
They instituted
a constitution so that people would not
be jailed without "probable
cause", or be lied to about taking
this country and its soldiers to war, or
have shoved aside the checks and balances
represented by American courts and the
Congress. All these are being done by two
pro-Vietnam war draft dodgers!
What does all
this tell you about all of us out there
in the great United States of America? A
giant yawn of "who cares" by
citizens, nearly two-thirds of whom now
have turned against these two White House
fabricators in poll after poll regarding
the war, the surrender to Big Business,
the gross incompetence in managing
taxpayer dollars and the Katrina
disaster.
But listen, the
rumble of resistance and opposition is
getting louder and not just from the
increasing number of public
demonstrations around the country.
A new Zogby poll
reports that 72% of American soldiers
serving in Iraq think the U.S. should get
out within the next year, including 58%
of the Marines! Three-quarters of
National Guard and Reserve units support
withdrawal within 6 months. Every month,
more former high-ranking military
officers, intelligence officials and
diplomats are declaring their opposition
to the war.
For a few
examples of many: Retired four-star
General, Joseph P. Hoar, who commanded
the U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf after
the 1991 war, described the Iraq war as
"wrong from the beginning".
Similar tough criticism has come from
John Deutch, former head of the CIA,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security
advisor to President Carter and Brent
Scowcroft, national security advisor to
the first President Bush.
Retired General
William Odom, former head of the National
Security Agency and security adviser to
Ronald Reagan, wrote that the Iraq war
"is serving the interests of Osama
bin Laden, the Iranians, and is fomenting
civil war in Iraq." He describes the
Iraq war as "the most strategic
foreign policy disaster in U.S.
history."
More recently,
internal memos of criticism or dissent,
Inspector General reports from Defense
the Justice Department, and former
highly-positioned staff within the Bush
Administration, like Colonel Lawrence
Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin
Powell, are taking apart the public
relations sheen concocted by the
Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triad.
Now comes the
conservative American Bar Association -
400,000 lawyers - whose House of
Delegates has overwhelmingly approved a
task force report accusing President
Bush, in polite legal language, of
violating both the Constitution and
federal law. ABA President Michael S.
Greco sent it to Mr. Bush with a cover
letter dated February 13, 2006 (see www.abanet.org/op/domsurvfor
the full report).
The mass media,
which has finally produced many exposes
of the Bush war, ignored the significance
of this condemnation by the nation's
largest body of lawyers, written in part
by attorneys who have served in the FBI,
CIA and NSA. It should have been page one
news.
There comes a
tipping point, however, when the
opposition of the establishment, the
public opinion of the citizenry, the
disgust of the soldiers - their spreading
casualties, diseases and mental traumas -
and the corruption of the large corporate
contractors to whom much of the
military's functions have been
outsourced, all congeal and overcome the
cowardliness of most members of Congress.
Then a surge of Congressional followers
and allies of Rep. John Murtha (D-PA),
war veteran and leading voice against the
Bush Iraq policies, will come to the
forefront.
The illegal,
disastrous (to both Iraqis and Americans)
Iraq war is now almost three years of
quagmire old. The chaos and bloodshed are
worsening.
It is time to
make the spring of 2006 the tipping point
period for constitutionalism, justice and
a sane foreign and national security
policy. More yawns must turn into growls
from outside Washington, DC. See http://www.DemocracyRising.US
for more information.
Back to Top
5.
THE LARGEST DEMONSTRATION IN THE HISTORY
OF CALIFORNIA
(Over 1 Million Protest in Los
Angeles for Immigrant Rights!)
(Author
Unknown)
Today, March 25,
2006, in downtown Los Angeles, over
1 million people demonstrated in support
of immigrant rights. This was the largest
demonstration in the history of
California. March organizers announced
from the stage that the crowd was over 1
million. Univision and
other Spanish-language television
reported that up to 2 million people
marched. The Los Angeles Times,
reflecting police estimates, gave the
march 500,000 - police estimates have
been trying to minimize pro-immigrant
rights demonstration for the last few
weeks.
Today's
demonstration was the largest of many
immigrant rights demonstrations that have
taken place this month. It is an uprising
from the people against the reactionary
Sensenbrenner Bill that passed in the
House of Representatives. The bill
criminalizes immigrants and those who
support them. The demonstrations began
with 50,000 in Washington DC on March 7,
500,000 in Chicago on March 10 (the
largest demonstration ever in Chicago
history), and tens of thousands more in
the last week in Milwaukee, Phoenix,
Atlanta and other cities. In build up for
today's demonstrations, thousands of high
school students walked out of class and
marched yesterday in Los Angeles.
Yesterday in Georgia, tens of thousands
of immigrant workers refused to show up
at their jobs in a work stoppage
protesting regressive legislation passed
by the Georgia State Legislature. These
demonstrations reflect a tremendous
upsurge in the immigrant community.
The A.N.S.W.E.R.
Coalition provided logistical support and
mobilized for today's demonstration in
Los Angeles. Thousands of
A.N.S.W.E.R.'s yellow and
black placards reading "Amnistía,
Full Rights for All Immigrants" were
held throughout the march. A.N.S.W.E.R.
also organized a major contingent in
the march
The rally was
co-chaired by Juan José Gutiérrez,
Director of Latino Movement USA, a member
of the A.N.S.W.E.R. LA Steering
Committee; Javier Rodríguez, a noted
immigrant rights activist; and Jesse
Díaz, a UC-Riverside professor who
helped initiate the march. Speakers
included Raúl Murillo and Gloria Saucedo
of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional; Arturo
Rodríguez, President of the United Farm
Workers; Korean and Haitian community
leaders; and Gloria La Riva and Preston
Wood of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition.
At the rally,
Juan José Gutiérrez, Director of Latino
Movement USA, said, "We are people
of dignity and we demand respect. This is
the beginning of a movement that is going
to call for a national work
stoppage."
Gloria La Riva
of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition said,
"The racist politicians thought they
could step on us with their racist
legislation but they have awakened the
immigrant giant and they will feel our
strength when we stop work."
Preston Wood of
A.N.S.W.E.R. LA said, "U.S.
corporations are robbing Mexico of its
resources and forcing people to come as
immigrants for their survival. U.S. Out
of Iraq! Justice for all workers!"
Critical to the
turnout was the mobilization night and
day for over a week of famous Latino
radio announcers from every
Spanish-language station, including
Piolín el Cucuy. The organizers
announced a national meeting on April 8
in Dallas, Texas of all the Latino
immigrant rights leaders in the country
to strategize for a national work
stoppage in late May under the banner
"A Day Without An Immigrant."
The A.N.S.W.E.R.
Coalition believes that the struggle for
immigrant rights, workers' rights and the
fight against racism at home must be part
and parcel of the struggle against war
and imperialism. In the coming days and
weeks, A.N.S.W.E.R. organizers,
volunteers and activists will continue to
participate in all levels of the mass
movement in defense of immigrant rights
and the defeat of the Sensenbrenner Bill.
To learn how you can join with other
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition organizers and
volunteers, email us at http://us.f332.mail.yahoo.com/ym/[email protected].
Back to Top
6. WHISTLE-BLOWER OUTS NSA SPY
ROOM
BY
RYAN
SINGEL
AT&T
provided National Security Agency
eavesdroppers with full access to its
customers' phone calls, and shunted its
customers' internet traffic to
data-mining equipment installed in a
secret room in its San Francisco
switching center, according to a former
AT&T worker cooperating in the
Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit
against the company.
Mark Klein, a
retired AT&T communications
technician, submitted an affidavit in
support of the EFF's lawsuit this week.
That class
action lawsuit, filed in federal
court in San Francisco last January,
alleges that AT&T violated federal
and state laws by surreptitiously
allowing the government to monitor phone
and internet communications of AT&T
customers without warrants.
On Wednesday,
the EFF asked the court to issue an
injunction prohibiting AT&T from
continuing the alleged wiretapping, and
filed a number of documents under seal,
including three AT&T documents that
purportedly explain how the wiretapping
system works.
According to a
statement released by Klein's attorney,
an NSA agent showed up at the San
Francisco switching center in 2002 to
interview a management-level technician
for a special job. In January 2003, Klein
observed a new room being built adjacent
to the room housing AT&T's #4ESS
switching equipment, which is responsible
for routing long distance and
international calls.
"I learned
that the person whom the NSA interviewed
for the secret job was the person working
to install equipment in this room,"
Klein wrote. "The regular technician
work force was not allowed in the
room."
Klein's job
eventually included connecting internet
circuits to a splitting cabinet that led
to the secret room. During the course of
that work, he learned from a co-worker
that similar cabinets were being
installed in other cities, including
Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San
Diego.
"While
doing my job, I learned that fiber optic
cables from the secret room were tapping
into the Worldnet (AT&T's internet
service) circuits by splitting off a
portion of the light signal," Klein
wrote.
The split
circuits included traffic from peering
links connecting to other internet
backbone providers, meaning that AT&T
was also diverting traffic routed from
its network to or from other domestic and
international providers, according to
Klein's statement.
The secret room
also included data-mining equipment
called a Narus STA 6400, "known to
be used particularly by government
intelligence agencies because of its
ability to sift through large amounts of
data looking for preprogrammed
targets," according to Klein's
statement.
Narus,
whose website touts AT&T as a client,
sells software to help internet service
providers and telecoms monitor and manage
their networks, look for intrusions, and
wiretap phone calls as mandated by
federal law.
Klein said he
came forward because he does not believe
that the Bush administration is being
truthful about the extent of its
extrajudicial monitoring of Americans'
communications.
"Despite
what we are hearing, and considering the
public track record of this
administration, I simply do not believe
their claims that the NSA's spying
program is really limited to foreign
communications or is otherwise consistent
with the NSA's charter or with
FISA," Klein's wrote. "And
unlike the controversy over targeted
wiretaps of individuals' phone calls,
this potential spying appears to be
applied wholesale to all sorts of
internet communications of countless
citizens."
After asking for
a preview copy of the documents last
week, the government did not object to
the EFF filing the paper under seal,
although the EFF asked the court
Wednesday to make the documents public.
One of the
documents is titled "Study Group 3,
LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco,"
and is dated 2002. The others are
allegedly a design document instructing
technicians how to wire up the taps, and
a document that describes the equipment
installed in the secret room.
In a letter to
the EFF, AT&T objected to the filing
of the documents in any manner, saying
that they contain sensitive trade secrets
and could be "could be used to
'hack' into the AT&T network,
compromising its integrity."
According to
court rules, AT&T has until Thursday
to file a motion to keep the documents
sealed. The government could also step in
to the case and request that the
documents not be made public, or even
that the entire lawsuit be barred under
the seldom-used State
Secrets Privilege.
AT&T
spokesman Walt Sharp declined to comment
on the allegations, citing a company
policy of not commenting on litigation or
matters of national security, but did say
that "AT&T follows all laws
following requests for assistance from
government authorities."
Back to Top
7. DEATH OF THE WORLD'S
RIVERS
(Disaster warning from UN as
investigation reveals half of the
planet's 500 biggest rivers are
seriously depleted or polluted)
|
BY
GEOFFREY
LEAN
|
| |
The
world's great rivers are drying
up at an alarming rate, with
devastating consequences for
humanity, animals and the future
of the planet.
The
Independent on Sunday can today
reveal that more than half the
world's 500 mightiest rivers have
been seriously depleted. Some
have been reduced to a trickle in
what the United Nations will this
week warn is a "disaster in
the making".
From the
Nile to China's Yellow River,
some of the world's great water
systems are now under such
pressure that they often fail to
deposit their water in the ocean
or are interrupted in the course
to the sea, with grave
consequences for the planet.
Adding
to the disaster, all of the 20
longer rivers are being disrupted
by big dams. One-fifth of all
freshwater fish species either
face extinction or are already
extinct.
The Nile
and Pakistan's Indus are greatly
reduced by the time they reach
the sea. Some, such as the
Colorado and China's Yellow
River, now rarely reach the ocean
at all. Others, such as the
Jordan and the Rio Grande on the
US-Mexico border, are dry for
much of their length.
Even in
Britain, a quarter of the
country's 160 chalk rivers and
steams - such as the Kennet in
Wiltshire, the Darent in Kent,
and the Wylye in Wiltshire - are
running out of water because too
much is being abstracted for
homes, industry and agriculture.
This
week an influential UN report
will officially warn the world's
governments of an "alarming
deterioration" in the
planet's rivers, lakes and other
freshwater systems. Klaus
Toepfer, the executive director
of the United Nations Environment
Programme, told the IoS yesterday
that the state of the world's
rivers is "a disaster in the
making".
The UN's
triennial World Water Development
Report, compiled for an
international conference in
Mexico City which opens on
Thursday, warns that "we
have hugely changed the natural
order of rivers worldwide",
mainly through giant dams and
global warming. Some 45,000 big
dams now block the world's
rivers, trapping 15 per cent of
all the water that used to flow
from the land to the sea.
Reservoirs now cover almost 1 per
cent of land surface.
The UN
report says that demand for them
"will continue to
increase", but recommends
that they should be barred from
the world's remaining, undammed
"free-flowing" rivers.
The
United States has dismantled 465
dams in recent years, mainly for
environmental reasons. But last
week, in an abrupt U-turn, it
signaled that it was about to
embark on its biggest
dam-building campaign in decades,
when the Washington State
legislature passed a bill to
allow the federal government to
build a series of dams on the
Columbia, the West's largest
river.
Global
warming is endangering even the
rivers that have largely escaped
damming.
The
relatively untamed Amazon was hit
by its most serious drought on
record last autumn. And salmon
are dying in Alaska's Yukon River
- the world's longest undammed
watercourse - because its waters
are getting too hot.
On
Tuesday an international day of
action will see demonstrations
across the globe to draw
attention to rivers' plight.
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8. ELECTRONIC
WASTE A TICKING TIME BOMB
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BY
GILES
SLADE
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So
the telegraph is no more.
It served us well for 148
years. Now the film
camera is dying at age
117. The sleek cell phone
you bought just two years
ago is obsolete, too --
even if the thing still
works. And Wall Street
couldn't be more
delighted at the
quickening pace of
obsolescence.
Konica-Minolta's
stock surged this month
after it announced it
would abandon its
film-based products.
Kodak, which pioneered
the film camera in 1889,
will probably also stop
making film cameras,
because its sales from
digital products have
outstripped those of its
film-based line. Nikon,
the industry standard,
has already stopped
making most of its film
cameras.
These
companies have realized
two things. First, a
digital camera in
inexperienced hands is
nearly as good as a film
camera in the best hands.
Second, digital
photography will be a
healthy source of product
obsolescence for decades,
because improvements will
come along every six
months. And consumers are
happy to spend good money
to upgrade.
A
similar cycle of
improvement, consumption
and obsolescence defines
all successful electronic
products. And because
manufacturers are aware
of their products'
increasingly short life
spans, they usually
"underbuild"
the more expensive
components to save money.
After about a year, for
example, the batteries of
iPods start losing their
capacity to hold a
charge. True, Apple has a
cumbersome mail-in
program that allows you
replace the battery for
$60. But iPods are not
meant to be repaired.
They are meant to be
replaced by newer models
and thrown away. That's
why Apple seals the
battery inside the iPod
case. And that's why some
iPod customers are now
very angry.
The
practice of deliberately
making electronic devices
disposable began with
transistor radio
production in the
mid-1950s. The first
pocket radio, Raytheon's
Belmont Boulevard of
1945, came with spare
vacuum tubes. Do it
yourselfers could fix it
themselves. But by the
time Sony shipped the
TR-63 to the American
market in 1957,
transistors were
hand-soldered into tiny
circuit boards, making
radios effectively
unrepairable because of
expensive labor costs.
Very soon the casings of
Japanese radios began to
reflect this
disposability. They were
offered in a changing
variety of fashions and
colors and were made of
brittle plastic.
Other
manufacturers soon
understood that
underbuilding and
promoting obsolescence
made them more
competitive.
Second-generation -- 2G
-- cell phones, for
example, were originally
made to last five years.
When it became obvious
that they were being
retired after only 18
months, manufacturers
lowered standards, cut
costs and introduced new
models.
Manufacturers,
of course, want you to
spend your money. And
nothing discourages them
from creating mountains
of electronic waste while
they encourage you to do
just that. Unlike Europe,
the United States has no
electronic-waste laws
that compel manufacturers
to disassemble their
discarded products to
make it possible to
recycle them.
This
problem has become
enormous and extremely
dangerous, because
electronic devices
contain permanent toxins
such as lead, mercury,
cadmium, chromium and
barium. By 2009, 250
million computers will
become obsolete. By that
time, 300 million TVs
will have to be replaced
with digital upgrades. At
about 11 pounds each, TV
screens contain much more
lead than computer
monitors do. The total
lead in discarded
computers and analog TVs
will amount to 4 million
to 5 million tons -- and
it will soon be leaching
into groundwater near
you.
Maine
now forces electronic
manufacturers to collect
and recycle discarded TVs
and computer screens. Its
law was unique until Gov.
Christine Gregoire signed
Washington's own
electronic recycling
bill. The strong
bipartisan support ESSB
6428 received is a clear
indication that what we
do with electronic waste
has become a mainstream
issue.
But
much more needs to be
done. Nationally, the
United States is simply
unprepared to deal with
the time bomb contained
in electronic waste. If
Congress does not act
quickly, the damage done
by Hurricane Katrina
tragedy will pale next to
the poisoning of our
water by America's
obsolete trash.
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