Why America's Deadly Love Affair With Bottled Water Has To Stop

Last year, Americans drank more than 10 billion gallons of bottled water. Wildlife and the environment paid.

By Tara Lohan

This spring, as California withered in its fourth year of drought and mandatory water restrictions were enacted for the first time in the state’s history, a news story broke revealing that Nestlé Waters North America was tapping springs in the San Bernardino National Forest in southern California using a permit that expired 27 years ago.

And when the company’s CEO Tim Brown was asked on a radio program if Nestlé would stop bottling water in the Golden State, he replied, “Absolutely not. In fact, if I could increase it, I would.”

That’s because bottled water is big business, even in a country where most people have clean, safe tap water readily and cheaply available. (Although it should be noted that Starbucks agreed to stop sourcing and manufacturing their Ethos brand water in California after being drought-shamed.)

Profits made by the industry are much to the chagrin of nonprofits like Corporate Accountability International (CAI), a corporate watchdog, and Food and Water Watch (FWW), a consumer advocacy group, both of which have waged campaigns against the bottled water industry for years. But representatives from both organizations say they’ve won key fights against the industry in the last 10 years and have helped shift people’s consciousness on the issue.

A Battle of Numbers

In 2014 bottled water companies spent more than $84 million on advertising to compete with each other and to convince consumers that bottled water is healthier than soda and safer than tap. And it seems to be paying off: Americans have an increasing love of bottled water, particularly those half-liter-sized single-use bottles that are ubiquitous at every check-out stand and in every vending machine. According to Beverage Marketing Corporation (BMC), a data and consulting firm, in the last 14 years consumption of bottled water in the U.S. has risen steadily, with the only exception being a quick dip during the 2008-2009 recession.

In 2000, Americans each drank an average of 23 gallons of bottled water. By 2014, that number hit 34 gallons a person. That translates to 10.7 billion gallons for the U.S. market and sales of $13 billion last year. At the same time, consumption of soda is falling, and by 2017, bottled water sales may surpass that of soda for the first time.

But there is also indication that more eco-conscious consumers are carrying reusable bottles to refill with tap. A Harris poll in 2010 found that 23 percent of respondents switched from bottled water to tap (the number was slightly higher during 2009 recession). Reusable bottles are now chic and available in myriad designs and styles. And a Wall Street Journal story tracked recent acquisitions in the reusable bottle industry that indicate big growth as well, although probably not enough to make a dent in the earnings of bottling giants like Nestlé, Coke and Pepsi.

Why the Fight Over Bottled Water

“The single most important factor in the growth of bottled water is heightened consumer demand for healthier refreshment,” says BMC’s managing director of research Gary A. Hemphill. “Convenience of the packaging and aggressive pricing have been contributing factors.”

That convenience, though, comes with an environmental cost. The Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization, found that it took the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil to make all the plastic water bottles that thirsty Americans drank in 2006 — enough to keep a million cars chugging along the roads for a year. And this is only the energy to make the bottles, not the energy it takes to get them to the store, keep them cold or ship the empties off to recycling plants or landfills.

Of the billions of plastic water bottles sold each year, the majority don’t end up being recycled. Those single-serving bottles, also known as PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles because of the kind of resin they’re made with, are recycled at a rate of about 31 percent in the U.S. The other 69 percent end up in landfills or as litter.

And while recycling them is definitely a better option than throwing them away, it comes with a cost, too. Stiv Wilson, director of campaigns at the Story of Stuff Project, says that most PET bottles that are recycled end up, not as new plastic bottles, but as textiles, such as clothing. And when you wash synthetic clothing, micro-plastics end up going down the drain and back into waterways. These tiny plastic fragments are dangerous for wildlife, especially in oceans.

“If you start out with a bad material to begin with, recycling it is going to be an equally bad material,” says Wilson. “You’re changing its shape but its environmental implications are the same.” PET bottles are part of a growing epidemic of plastic waste that’s projected to get worse. A recent study found that by 2050, 99 percent of seabirds will be ingesting plastic.

Ingesting plastic trash is deadly for seabirds, like this unfortunate albatross. (image: USFWS)

“We notice in all the data that the amount of plastic in the environment is growing exponentially,” says Wilson. “We are exporting it to places that can’t deal with it, we’re burning it with dioxins going into the air. The whole chain of custody is bad for the environment, for animals and the humans that deal with it. The more you produce, the worse it gets. The problem grows.”

Even on land, plastic water bottles are a problem — and in some of our most beautiful natural areas, as a recent controversy over bottled water in National Parks has shown. According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), more than 20 national parks have banned the sale of plastic water bottles, reporting that plastic bottles average almost one third of the solid waste that parks must pay (with taxpayer money) to have removed.

After Zion National Park in Utah banned the sale of plastic water bottles, the park saw sales of reusable bottles jump 78 percent and kept it 60,000 bottles (or 5,000 pounds of plastic) a year out of the waste stream. The park also made a concerted effort to provide bottle refilling stations across the park so there would be ample opportunity to refill reusable bottles.

There might be more parks with bans but 200 water bottlers backed by the International Bottled Water Association have fought back to oppose measures by parks to cut down on the sale of disposable plastic water bottles. The group was not too happy when National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis wrote that parks “must be a visible exemplar of sustainability,” and said in 2011 that the more than 400 hundreds entities in the National Park Service could ban the sale of plastic bottles if they meet strict requirements for making drinking water available to visitors.

Water bottle filling stations at Grand Canyon National Park provide free spring water from the park's approved water supply located at Roaring Springs. (image: Michael Quinn/National Park Service/Flickr CC)

Park officials contend that trashcans are overflowing with bottles in some parks. The bottling industry counters that people are more apt to choose sugary drinks, like soda, if they don’t have access to bottled water. The bottled water industry alliance used its Washington muscle to add a rider to an appropriations bill in July that would have stopped parks from restricting bottled water sales. The bill didn’t pass for other reasons, but it’s likely not the last time the rider will surface in legislation.

Changing Tide

Bottlers may be making big money, but activists have also notched their own share of wins. “When we first started, really no one was out there challenging the misleading marketing that the bottled water industry was giving the public,” said John Stewart, deputy campaign director at CAI, which first began campaigning against bottled water in 2004. “You had no information available to consumers about the sources of bottling and you had communities whose water supplies were being threatened by companies like Nestlé with total impunity.”

If you buy the marketing, then it would appear that most bottled water comes from pristine mountain springs beside snow-capped peaks. But in reality, about half of all bottled water, including Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani, come from municipal sources that are then purified or treated in some way. Activists fought to have companies label the source of its water and they succeeded with two of the top three — Pepsi and Nestlé. “We also garnered national media stories that put a spotlight on the fact that bottling corporations were taking our tap water and selling it back to us at thousands of times the price,” said Stewart. “People finally began to see they were getting duped.”

When companies aren’t bottling from municipal sources, the water is mostly spring water tapped from wilderness areas, like Nestlé bottling in the San Bernardino National Forest, or rural communities. Some communities concerned about industrial withdrawals of groundwater have fought back against spring water bottlers — the biggest being Nestlé, which owns dozens of regional brands like Arrowhead, Calistoga, Deer Park, Ice Mountain and Poland Spring. Coalitions have helped back communities in victories in Maine, Michigan and California (among other areas) in fights against Nestlé.

One the biggest was in McCloud, California, which sits in the shadow of snowy Mount Shasta, and actually looks like the label on so many bottles. Residents of McCloud fought for six years against Nestlé’s plan for a water bottling facility that first intended to draw 200 million gallons of water a year from a local spring. Nestlé finally scrapped its plans and left town, but ended up heading 200 miles down the road to the city of Sacramento, where it got a sweetheart deal on the city’s municipal water supply.

CAI and FWW have also worked with college students. Close to a hundred have taken some action, says Stewart. “Not all the schools have been able to ban the sale of bottled water on campus but we’ve come up with other strategies like passing resolutions that student government funds can’t be used to purchase bottled water or increasing the availability of tap water on campus or helping to get water fountains retrofitted so you can refill your reusable bottle,” says Emily Wurth, FWW’s water program director.

In just six months, Lake Mead National Recreation Area visitors have kept more than 13,600 water bottles out of landfills by using a new hydration station. (image: National Park Service)

Changes have also come at the municipal level. In 2007, San Francisco led the charge by prohibiting the city from spending money on bottled water for its offices. At the 2010 Conference of Mayors, 72 percent of mayors said they have considered “eliminating or reducing bottled water purchases within city facilities” and nine mayors had already adopted a ban proposal. In 2015, San Francisco passed a law (to be phased in over four years) that will ban the sale of bottled water on city property.

These victories, say activists, are part of a much bigger fight — larger than the bottled water industry itself. “We are shifting to fight the wholesale privatization of water a little more,” says Stewart. He says supporters who have joined coalitions to fight bottled water “deeply understand the problematic nature of water for profit and the co-modification of water” that transcends from bottled water to private control of municipal power and sewer systems.

Currently the vast majority (90 percent) of water systems in the U.S. are publicly run, but cash-strapped cities and towns are also targets of multinational water companies, says Stewart. The situation is made more dire by massive shortfalls in federal funding that used to help support municipal water and now is usually cut during federal budget crunches.

“Cities are so desperate that they don’t think about long-term implications of job cuts, rate hikes, loss of control over the quality of the water and any kind of accountability when it comes to how the system is managed,” says Stewart. “We need to turn all eyes to our public water systems and aging infrastructure and our public services in general that are threatened by privatization.”

Trump duped or worse in fundraiser speech to fake veterans group

Rachel Maddow reviews the background of the man behind Veterans for a Strong America, the beneficiary of a Donald Trump fundraiser speech on the USS Iowa, which does not appear to have any membership outside of chairman Joel Arends, and which today had its non-profit status revoked by the IRS.

Plutocrat Pete And Tea Party Tim In 'The Breakup'

The 5 Times America Elected Donald Trump

By Josh Harkinson

If you can't believe that Donald Trump is still the GOP front-runner, then consider this: America has elected the likes of The Donald before. There are, deep in our history, plenty of men who brazenly exploited nativist sentiments to win the White House or strengthen their grip on the office. Here are five US presidents who, if they lived today, might, in Trump's words, "make America great again."

John Adams

Adams was no Trump. America's "big deal" 18th century legal scholar and Founding Father would have been worth, in today's dollars, only $19 million. And he never even mastered the comb-over. But when it comes to making BOLD political moves while socking it to our enemies abroad, the second president puts Trump to shame. Determined to quash the immigrant vote, which mainly benefited Jeffersonian Republicans, Adams and his Federalist allies in Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The bills lengthened the period of residency required for citizenship from 5 to 14 years and authorized the president to deport foreigners considered dangerous. One bill, the Alien Enemies Act, would later serve as the legal basis for detaining Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Theodore Roosevelt

Nativists weren't always the kind of people who attended tea party rallies and watched Fox News. In the early 1900s, some of the strongest opposition to immigration came from the labor unions that helped usher Theodore Roosevelt into the White House. In his first Congressional address, Roosevelt called for requiring immigrants to meet a "certain standard of economic fitness" and pass a literacy test—a measure that would effectively exclude many Southern and Eastern Europeans. After meeting stiff congressional resistance, Roosevelt brokered a compromise that established an immigrant head tax of $4 and created the Dillingham Commission, an investigative panel stacked with nativist legislators. Its reports accused Southern and Eastern European immigrants of displacing native workers, living in crowded and unclean housing, and performing poorly in school. Unlike Trump, however, Roosevelt never signed a GOP loyalty pledge. Instead, he left the Republican Party in 1912 and formed his own.

Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson never had the guts to accuse immigrants of being rapists, but he did call them low energy. His History of the American People, published in 1901, complained that most immigrants to the United States no longer came from "the sturdy stocks of the North of Europe," but rather from places like southern Italy, Hungary, and Poland, where "there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence." But when those comments became an issue during his 1912 presidential race, Wilson backpedaled and earnestly courted immigrant groups—or the European ones, anyway. Like most other national candidates at the time, he remained staunchly opposed to immigration from Japan and China. "We cannot make a homogenous population out of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race," he said. "Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson."

Warren Harding

Before "Make America Great Again," there was "America First!"—the slogan that in 1920 swept Harding and his fellow Republicans to power on a platform of curtailing a tide of immigrants from politically unstable parts of Europe. Harding signed the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, effectively cutting in half the number of immigrants admitted into the United States. The act also favored immigrant groups from Northern European countries while steeply limiting immigration from other parts of the world. "I don't know much about Americanism," Harding later said, "but it's a damn good word with which to carry an election."

Herbert Hoover

Hoover proved that rich guys with no experience in elected office can become president and that America can be for Americans. At the dawn of the Great Depression, he issued an executive order calling for the "strict enforcement" of a clause of the Immigration Act that barred the admission of immigrants who were "likely to become a public charge." Turning away virtually all working-class immigrants, his administration slashed legal immigration from 242,000 people in 1931 to 36,000 the following year. And Hoover stepped up raids on the homes and workplaces of undocumented immigrants, causing more than 121,000 people, most of them from Mexico, to leave the United States. Hoover touted his record on immigration during the 1932 election, but it ultimately wasn't enough to keep him from getting thrown out of office by a bunch of LOSERS who had been FIRED.

Chipotle Says It Dropped GMO's. Now A Court Will Decide If That’s Bullshit.

Turns out, proving that your food is GMO-free is pretty difficult.

—By Tim McDonnell

su-lin/Flickr

What should have been an easy public-relations win for Chipotle is turning into a major headache—but one that could have interesting repercussions in the public debate about genetically modified organisms.

Back in April, the fast-casual burrito chain announced that it would stop serving food prepared with genetically engineered ingredients. At the time it didn't seem like a huge change, since only a few ingredients—notably the soybean oil used for frying—contained GMO's. (More than 90 percent of the soy grown in the United States is genetically engineered.) But as critics in the media were quick to point out, there was an obvious hole in Chipotle's messaging: The pigs, chickens, and cows that produce the restaurant's meat and dairy offerings are raised on feed made with GMO corn. (In fact, 70-90 percent of all GMO crops are used to feed livestock.) And don't forget the soda fountain, serving up GMO corn syrup by the cup.

 

This is the first lawsuit to challenge the veracity of an anti-GMO marketing campaign.

Last week, Chipotle got officially called out, when a California woman filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for allegedly misleading consumers about its much-publicized campaign to cut genetically modified organisms from its menu.

"As Chipotle told consumers it was G-M-Over it, the opposite was true," the complaint reads. "In fact, Chipotle's menu has never been at any time free of GMO's."

Chipotle has never denied that its soda, meat, and dairy contain, or are produced with, GMOs. A spokesman, Chris Arnold, said the suit "has no merit and we plan to contest it." Still, the case raises an unprecedented set of questions about how food companies market products at a time when fewer than 40 percent of Americans think GMOs are safe to eat (they are) and a majority of them think foods made with GMO's should be labeled.

The California statute applied in the lawsuit deals with false advertising: Allegedly, the "Defendant knowingly misrepresented the character, ingredients, uses, and benefits of the ingredients in its Food Products." The suit then provides a cornucopia of Chipotle marketing materials, such as the image to the left, which implies that that taco has no GMOs in it—even though, if it contains meat, cheese, or sour cream, then GMOs were almost certainly used at some stage of the process. The suit goes on to detail how Chipotle stands to gain financially from this anti-GMO messaging. The upshot is that, according to the complaint, Chipotle knew its stuff was made from GMOs, lied about it, and duped unsuspecting, GMO-averse customers like Colleen Gallagher (the plaintiff) into eating there. (Gallagher is being represented by Kaplan Fox, a law firm that specializes in consumer protection suits. The firm didn't respond to a request for comment.)

It will be up to the court to decide whether Gallagher's claims have any merit. But there's a big stumbling block right at the beginning: There's no agreed-upon legal standard for what qualifies a food as being "non-GMO," and thus no obvious legal test for whether Chipotle's ad campaign is legit. In fact, several food lawyers I spoke to said this is the first suit to legally challenge the veracity of that specific claim, which means it could set a precedent (in California, at least) for how other companies deal with the issue in the future. That sets it apart from deceptive marketing suits related to use of the word "organic," for example, for which there is a lengthy legal standard enforced by the US Department of Agriculture. (Organic food, by the way, is not allowed to contain GMO's.)

"There are many definitions of what constitutes non-GMO that are marketing-based definitions," said Greg Jaffe, biotechnology director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "But nothing like [the federal standard for organic labeling] exists for GMOs at the moment."

In the context of this lawsuit, that lack of clarity may work to Chipotle's advantage, said Laurie Beyranevand, a food and ag law professor at Vermont Law School. Without specific guidelines to adhere to, Chipotle could basically be free to make "non-GMO" mean whatever the company wants it to mean (more on that in a minute). The question before the court is about the gap, such as it exists, between Chipotle's understanding of that term and its customers' understanding of it, when it comes to the meat, dairy, and soda at the heart of the suit.

Beyranevand said the soda could be a weak point for Chipotle. Even though the company's website is clear that its soda is made with GMO corn syrup, customers could still be misled by the advertising into thinking it isn't.

 

Even if a chicken has been stuffed full of genetically modified corn its whole life, it's no more a GMO than I would be if I ate the same corn.

Meat and dairy are a different story, and there's a bit of existing law that makes Chipotle's rhetoric seem more defensible. In Vermont, the only state to have passed mandatory GMO labeling laws, meat and dairy products are exempted. And that makes some sense: Even if a chicken has been stuffed full of genetically modified corn its whole life, it's no more a GMO than I would be if I ate the same corn.

"Chipotle is just sort of riding on the coattails of that state legislation," Beyranevand said. In other words, Chipotle could have pretty good grounds to argue that a reasonable person wouldn't confuse its advertising with the notion that livestock aren't fed GMO's.

Of course, not everyone agrees with Vermont's approach. That includes the Non-GMO Project, an independent nonprofit that has endorsed nearly 30,000 food products as being non-GMO over the past five years. The group won't give its stamp of approval to meat products that have been fed GMOs. According to Arnold, Chipotle "would love to source meat and dairy from animals that are raised without GMO feed, [but] that simply isn't possible today."

Let's zoom out to the broader issue: Why isn't there a standard definition for what makes a food product count as "non-GMO"?

The closest thing is a bit of draft language the Food and Drug Administration published in 2001 that was meant as a nonbinding blueprint for companies that want to voluntarily label their foods as non-GMO. Turns out, that simple-sounding phrase is loaded with pitfalls. As "GMO" has gone from a specialized term used by biochemists to describe seeds, to broadly used slang for the products of commercial agriculture, its meaning has gotten pretty garbled. That makes it hard to come up with a legal definition that is both scientifically accurate and makes sense to consumers, and it leaves companies like Chipotle with considerable linguistic latitude.

First of all, there's the "O" in GMO. A burrito, no matter what's in it, isn't really an "organism," the FDA points out: "It would likely be misleading to suggest that a food that ordinarily would not contain entire 'organisms' is 'organism-free.'" Then there's the "GM": Essentially all food crops are genetically modified from their original version, either through conventional breeding or through biotechnology. Even if most consumers use "GMO" as a synonym for biotech, the FDA says, it may not be truly accurate to call an intensively bred corn variety "not genetically modified."

Finally, there's the "non": It might not actually be possible to say with certainty that a product contains zero traces of genetically engineered ingredients, given the factory conditions under which items such as soy oil are produced. Moreover, chemists have found that vegetables get so mangled when they're turned into oil that it's incredibly difficult to extract any recognizable DNA from the end product that could be used to test for genetic modification. So it would be hard, if not impossible, for an agency like the FDA to snag your tacos and deliver a verdict on whether they are really GMO-free.

 

"It would likely be misleading to suggest that a food that ordinarily would not contain entire 'organisms' is 'organism-free.'"

The point is that Chipotle likely isn't bound to any particular definition of the non-GMO label, and that we just have to take their word that the ingredients they say are non-GMO are, in fact, non-GMO. Lawmakers are attempting to clear up some of this ambiguity: House Republicans, led by Mike Pompeo (Kan.), succeeded in July in passing a bill that would block states from passing mandatory GMO labeling laws similar to Vermont's. The bill is now stalled in the Senate, but it contains a provision that would require the USDA to come up with a voluntary certification for companies like Chipotle that want to flaunt their GMO-less-ness.

Until then, another solution would is to seek non-GMO certification from the Non-GMO Project, though the group would likely reject Chipotle's meat products. In any case, Arnold said, neither Chipotle nor its suppliers are certified through the project, and they don't intend to pursue that option.
"We are dealing with relatively niche suppliers for many of the ingredients we use," Arnold said. "By adhering to a single certification standard, we can really cut into available supply of ingredients that are, in some cases, already in short supply."

With all this in mind, here's a final caveat: When Chipotle has its day in court, how we actually define what is or isn't a GMO product might not matter too much, explained Emily Leib, deputy director of Harvard's Center for Health Law. That's because the California laws in question here are as much about what customers think a term means, as what it actually does mean.

"The court will ask, 'Is there a definition [of non-GMO] or not?" Leib said. "They'll say, 'No,' and then they'll ask, 'Is this misleading?' How does this use compare to what people think it means?"
That's what makes this case interesting, since the truth is that most of the burrito-eating public knows very little about GMOs. Does that make it illegal for Chipotle to leverage peoples' ambiguous (and mostly unfounded) fears to sell more barbacoa? We'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, probably don't eat too much Chipotle, anyway.

Tim McDonnell

Climate Desk Associate Producer

Tim McDonnell is Climate Desk's associate producer. For more of his stories, click here. Follow him on Twitter or send him an email at tmcdonnell [at] motherjones [dot] com. RSS |

Huckabee Goons Block Ted Cruz From Entering Kim Davis Event

Republican presidential candidates have been flocking to Kim Davis’s side to show how devout they are, but some are find it literally difficult to get by her side. Ted Cruz recently tried to get near her, but was blocked by an aide of GOP rival Mike Huckabee. Ana Kasparian (The Point), and John Iadarola (Think Tank), hosts of the The Young Turks, break it down. 

"The rally Tuesday had been scheduled before it was known whether Ms. Davis would be released. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, also a Republican presidential contender, made an appearance, but it was Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, who grabbed the political spotlight. When Senator Cruz exited the jail a throng of journalists beckoned him toward their microphones, but an aide to Mr. Huckabee blocked the path of Mr. Cruz, who appeared incredulous.”*

Republican Lawrence Wilkerson on Dick Cheney: 'This is a man who's lost his mind'

Chris Hayes included a Fox News clip where Chris Wallace reminded a willful history revising Dick Cheney that during the Bush/Cheney administration Iran went from 0 to 5,000 centrifuges. Wallace suggested that Cheney left a mess for the Obama administration.

Republican Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State General Colin Powell, was introduced. (Colin Powell endorsed the Iran Nuclear agreement this weekend.) Chris Hayes asked Wilkerson about Cheney's apocalyptic warning about the Iran deal. Lawrence Wilkerson did not mince words.

"I have been searching for a single word that would describe Dick Cheney," Wilkerson said. "And I am afraid the only one that I can think of is 'insanity'. It's a deliberate, it's a methodical, it's a lucid, often lucid insanity. But it is insanity nonetheless. He can't recognize reality. He can't recognize the truth. The good thing Chris, for this country is that Independents, Republicans, and Democrats wish he would just go away now. He has almost no influence. You saw the influence he has virtually by numbers. Those at the AEI today that listened to his speech, that's about it."

Dick Cheney's speech at AEI was interrupted by a Code Pink protester.

Lawrence Wilkerson pointed out that Dick Cheney was once a brilliant strategist. He said Cheney changed after nine eleven. "All of a sudden he's turned into this person who cannot recognize reality," Wilkerson said. "I can't explain it. Maybe its physiological. Maybe it's biological. Maybe 9/11 did something to him. ... He is simply devoid of reason and he doesn't recognize reality anymore."

Wilkerson went on to make the point that Dick Cheney was using the same fear-mongering technique used by Joseph McCarty. At the end Wilkerson makes the Defense Industrial Complex / Dick Cheney association.

"Cheney is a millionaire now," Wilkerson said. "So maybe I am assuming his insanity and maybe I am wrong. Maybe he sees this as a way, as a route to success and it turned out to be profitable. His personal finances now are quite well established. He is a multi-millionaire. This is a man who in 1998, Chris, said most forcefully as CEO of Halliburton, that sanctions were not working, that they wouldn't work unless they were comprehensive and international. And he wanted to do deals with Iran. And so he was bashing sanctions up one wall and down the other. This is a man who's lost his mind."

Any more questions about Dick Cheney or his motives?

The Glox Market

Republicans Fear Trump Is Giving Party A Racist Image

By Taegan Goddard

“Republicans are growing increasingly concerned that Donald Trump’s inflammatory language is damaging the party, fearing that his remarks are hardening the tone of other candidates on racial issues in ways that could repel the voters they need to take back the White House,” the New York Times reports.

“Some party leaders worry that the favorable response Mr. Trump has received from the Republican electorate is luring other candidates to adopt or echo his remarks. It is a pattern, they say, that could tarnish the party’s image among minority voters.”

Man Is Arrested For Drinking Soda In Public

By Matt Agorist

New York, NY — Shawn Thomas films the police. He does so because it’s his right and he’s also great at fending off and exposing their rampant corruption.

Many of those who choose to film the police are polite and cordial, even when they are disrespected.

However, Thomas is not afraid to answer back to police who attempt to violate his rights, and he does so with an eloquent knack for profanity.

If you visit Thomas’ YouTube Channel, you will see that he is no stranger to these interactions.

Officer Kevin McAlister, badge number 17304, was the latest tyrant to violate this man for doing nothing wrong.

As Thomas was minding his own business, he was approached by McAlister for drinking a non-alcoholic malta soft drink. As he proceeded to violate this man’s rights, McAlister wrongfully claimed that Thomas had a Sam Adams beer.

Thomas stood his ground and refused to bow down and be harassed, illegally. Even if he would have had a beer, the response from police in this instance is utterly ridiculous. Five officers were called to the scene because a man had a soft drink in paper bag.

 

Thomas was forcefully handcuffed, and his cellphone, wallet, and ID were confiscated. Illegally.

After assaulting him and depriving Thomas of his freedom, the officers realized that they had no justification for the stop and they were forced to let him go.

In the land of the free, this is what protecting and serving has become.

How The Egg Lobby Paid Food Blogs And Targeted Chef To Crush A Vegan Startup

Internal emails reveal coordinated attack by American Egg Board to quash the rise of Hampton Creek’s egg alternative in possible breach of federal regulations

By Sam Thielman

A government-controlled industry group targeted popular food bloggers, major publications and a celebrity chef as part of its sweeping effort to combat a perceived threat from an egg-replacement startup backed by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, the Guardian can reveal.

The lobbyists’ media counterattack, in possible violation of US department of agriculture rules, was coordinated by a marketing arm of the egg industry called the American Egg Board (AEB). It arose after AEB chief executive Joanne Ivy identified the fledgling technology startup Hampton Creek as a “crisis and major threat to the future” of the $5.5 billion-a-year egg market.

A detailed review of emails, sent from inside the AEB and obtained by the Guardian, shows that the lobbyist’s anti-Hampton Creek campaign sought to:

• Pay food bloggers as much as $2,500 a post to write online recipes and stories about the virtue of eggs that repeated the egg lobby group’s “key messages”
• Confront Andrew Zimmern, who had featured Hampton Creek on his popular Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods and praised the company in a blog post characterized by top egg board executives as a “love letter”
• Target publications including Forbes and Buzzfeed that had written broadly positive articles about a Silicon Valley darling
• Unsuccessfully tried to recruit both the animal rights and autism activist Temple Grandin and the bestselling author and blogger Ree Drummond to publicly support the egg industry
• Buy Google advertisements to show AEB-sponsored content when people searched for Hampton Creek or its founder Josh Tetrick

The scale of the campaign – dubbed “Beyond Eggs” after Hampton Creek’s original company name – shows the lengths to which a federally-appointed, industry-funded marketing group will go to squash a relatively small Silicon Valley startup, from enlisting a high-powered public relations firm to buying off unwitting bloggers.

One leading public health attorney, asked to review the internal communications, said the egg marketing group was in breach of a US department of agriculture (USDA) regulation that specifically prohibited “any advertising (including press releases) deemed disparaging to another commodity”.

Tetrick called for the USDA to clamp down on the food lobby, as thousands of petitioners called on the White House to to investigate the USDA itself for “deceptive endorsements”.

“This is a product that has been around for a very long time,” the Hampton Creek founder said. “They are not used to competition and they don’t know how to deal with it.”

In statements, AEB’s Ivy and a USDA official denied any wrongdoing. An agriculture department official said that it “does not condone any efforts to limit competing products in commerce”.

The AEB contracted Edelman, the world’s largest public relations company, to coordinate the attack. One passage within the email tranche suggests that AEB amended its contract with Edelman to include a section called “Beyond EggsConsumer Research”.

“Conduct qualitative/quantitative consumer research to pinpoint and prioritize areas of focus. For example, research will, ideally, provide actionable intelligence on what attacks are gaining traction with consumers and which are not so as to help industry calibrate level of communications response (if any) to ensure a consistent response strategy moving forward,” the passage reads.

“Ads considered disparaging are those that depict other commodities in a negative or unpleasant light via either video, photography or statements,” said attorney Michele Simon, of the law firm Foscolo and Handel, after reviewing the AEB emails. “The entire contract [amendment] with Edelman violates this rule.”

Some of the web’s biggest food blogs were unwittingly paid from the “Beyond Eggs” budget to write supportively about eggs as AEB executives privately expressed mounting frustration about Hampton Creek, whose high-profile backers include the Facebook backer Peter Thiel, billionaire investor Vinod Khosla and other Silicon Valley luminaries.

When one Edelman executive, Jamie Singer, advised that the board wait on “an eventual and organic balancing of the media narrative”, Kevin Burkum, AEB’s senior vice-president of marketing, shot back: “Help us understand why the recommended course of action seems to always be sit back and do nothing?”

More recently, Hampton Creek has in fact faced its own PR woes with allegations of suspect science and hazardous work environments. And last month the US Food and Drug Administration warned the California startup that the name of its flagship product, Just Mayo, was misleading and and should be renamed, insisting an egg-less product should not be described as mayonnaise.

The emails reveal how AEB executives had grown increasingly frustrated about coverage of Hampton Creek, hailing the company as providing a high-tech and sustainable alternative to factory-farmed eggs.

In an email an AEB executive noted a blogpost by Zimmern – an influential TV celebrity – that complimented Hampton Creek and described caged-chicken egg production as “the poster child for everything farming and food systems shouldn’t be”.

The AEB executive complained Zimmern’s post was “a new love letter” to Hampton Creek and suggested sending the TV chef a study underwritten by the AEB to contradict his take. A long exchange discussed whether or not to respond to Zimmern’s offer to host a bake-off between Beyond Eggs and hen eggs.

On behalf of the egg group, Edelman contacted high-profile food blogger and Food Network star Drummond, author of several top-selling cookbooks. Drummond did not agree to work on the campaign, the emails indicate. The group also sought out Grandin, another famous figure whose endorsement would have been valuable. Grandin, too, appears to have declined.

In 2013, Google bought ads against Hampton Creek’s name and other search terms including Tetrick’s name and his chief product, Just Mayo, so that links to egg board-sponsored talking points about industrial farming would pop up alongside links to Hampton Creek. The AEB emailed about how to deal with Buzzfeed’s Rachel Sanders, who reported on the ads, and others who followed up on the campaign, in the emails.

The AEB retained at least five bloggers and contacted many more during the period covered by the emails. The bloggers disclosed the egg group’s advertising on their sites. The two bloggers who responded to the Guardian for this article said they were completely unaware that the sponsorships were part of a concerted effort against Hampton Foods.

Hemi Weingarten, author of the popular food blog Fooducate and an occasional columnist for the Huffington Post, published a post marked as sponsored by the AEB entitled “10 Reasons to Love Eggs” that including this sentence: “At just $0.15 each, eggs are the least expensive source of high-quality protein per serving.” This language is consistent with one of the American Egg Board’s most regularly used talking points.

Weingarten said he knew nothing of the campaign against Hampton Creek and pointed out that his blog had published positive coverage of the company. “As part of our ad sales activities we reach out to healthy brands and commodity boards to spend their ad dollars to reach our audience,” Weingarten told the Guardian.

Lori Lange, of the popular blog Recipe Girl, is listed by Edelman as receiving a fee of $2,500 for a bagel quiche recipe. Lange disclosed the post was sponsored. The Guardian emailed Lange for comment; she did not respond but did remove an AEB infographic that read in part: “Today’s hens are producing more eggs and living longer due to better health, nutrition and living space.”

Blogger Gaby Dalkin was paid $2,000 to include the AEB’s “Incredible Eggs” talking points in a recipe for breakfast burritos, and Susan Whetzel of Doughmesstic included the language in her in her Italian Egg Frittata recipe, according to the emails. Both disclosed the posts were sponsored.

Whetzel said she, too, was unaware that the blog post was considered part of a campaign against Hampton Creek by the AEB, and that she had adhered to the Federal Trade Commission’s advertising guidelines by including a disclosure notice. “It’s obvious it’s a sponsored post,” she wrote in an email to the Guardian.

Dalkin did not respond but an email bounce back said she was out of the country.

The cache of 600 pages of AEB emails, first reported last week, was obtained by Ryan Shapiro, a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Washington DC-based Foia specialist attorney Jeffrey Light.

The messages show Ivy, who is set to leave the AEB at year’s end after being named the industry’s 2015 Egg Person of the Year, received many messages from egg producers and processors who make up the board’s constituent members, are required by law to supply its budget and were evidently unnerved over the rise of Hampton Creek.

Ivy expressed a desire to push back at the positive media coverage the company would start to receive, from the pages of Forbes magazine to Buzzfeed and beyond.

“We know that shell egg producers are [...] feeling threatened by the introduction of this product,” she wrote in a September 2013 email.

In a statement to the Guardian, Ivy said the AEB’s efforts to “balance existing media efforts” were “common” practice and “part of a larger business strategy”.

“While egg replacers have been around for many years, we recognize that the interest in this category has increased recently,” she said. “In response, we bolstered our efforts to increase the demand for eggs and egg products through research, education and promotional activities.

“These activities, which are common within the consumer products industry, include continuing to work with industry thought-leaders, conducting a paid social media strategy to balance existing media efforts and liaising with partner organizations.”

However it is the process of targeting a perceived rival that could prove most controversial for the AEB, a statutory body paid for by industry but partly appointed by the US agriculture secretary.

Paid-for or “sponsored” blog posts are not uncommon, but the notion that a quasi-governmental body funded a campaign to undercut a Silicon Valley food startup could raise eyebrows.

Tetrick, the Hampton Creek founder, called for a congressional inquiry on Thursday, saying that the agriculture department should be held responsible for the AEB’s actions.

“They have gone way beyond what they are allowed to do,” Tetrick said of the egg lobbying group.
He said the scale of the egg lobby’s retaliation against his company’s rise was “hard to wrap your head around”.

“They play the same game over and over again,” he told the Guardian on Friday. “They say they are doing it to promote eggs, but it’s got nothing to do with competition.”

As MSNBC Makes Big Changes, Only One Scenario Remains for Brian Williams

By Joe Concha

As you may have heard, MSNBC has seen some big (and warranted) changes in 2015. Add it all up, and every program that existed from 1:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT as recently as six months ago no long exists.

The alterations are swift: A national correspondent (Kate Snow) and a political director (Chuck Todd) will be joining and rejoining, respectively, the 19 year old cable network. Morning Blow will occupy 25 percent of live (or plausibly live) programming per day. Opinion-based programming––at least after the morning show and before prime time––has been cleared away as a more traditional news focus takes it place.

But of all the moves made by NBC President Andy Lack over the past six months, the most significant is Al Sharpton‘s move to Sunday mornings, thereby vacating the 6:00 PM time slot on weekdays. And with most of the chess pieces now in place, the elephant in the room (See: Williams, Brian) appears to finally have a home: 6:00 PM, Monday through Friday.

In the end, it only makes sense to give Williams his own program instead of simply having him on standby for breaking news stories, a la Shep Smith at Fox. Because while Shep will jump into the network’s opinion programming at 5:00 PM (The Five) or in prime time (particularly when Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity are in tape) when warranted, he still owns his own hour at 3:00 PM with Shepard Smith Reporting.

Know this: You don’t reportedly pay someone in the $10M/year range to only work a few times per month. And in the case of Williams per a must-read piece by the Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple back in June (Title: Will Brian Williams have anything to do at MSNBC?), the highly-compensated anchor would likely only be called upon (maybe) a handful of times per month. And with seasoned pros like Snow coming on board and more-than-capable anchors like Tamron Hall, Thomas Roberts, and Jose Diaz Balart already there, it’s doubtful they would be preempted to make way for Williams, as such a scenario would not only be somewhat insulting to them, but an awkward date for viewers at home.

Instead, all signs point to Williams serving as a bridge between Todd (5:00 PM) and Chris Matthews (7:00 PM) at 6 in the east. Prime time––particularly the vulnerable 8:00 PM slot––has been offered up in some media circles as a possible home for Williams, which he occupied on MSNBC in the pre-Olbermann days up until 2002 with The News with Brian Williams. But that was a different time… a time when a good chuck of the audience didn’t already get their news on their phones, computers and tablets during the day in the dominant way they do now.

And by the time 8:00 PM rolls around and the network and local newscasts complete, most folks know the basic meat of big stories of the day (who, what, when, where)… what many are looking for is perspective and analysis on those stories, particularly when the tremendous (and often ridiculous) theatre that is the race for the White House dominates the news cycle.

In the end, it appears the only true home–and true value–for Brian Williams at MSNBC is at 6:00 PM EDT.

Big changes with some fairly big NBC names in Kate Snow and Chuck Todd are coming. But the biggest name of them all still needs to be assigned.

Brian Williams, solely a breaking news anchor sitting around in a bullpen waiting to be called to the mound? Don’t think so.

Host of an hour-long traditional news program to set the table for the network’s editorial page in prime?

By all appearances, this is the only scenario left that makes sense.

Here's What the Earth Will Look Like After All the Ice Melts

By Ben Dreyfuss

Remember a few years ago when National Geographic came out with a map showing what the world would look like after sea levels rose 216 feet from all the ice melting? Well, it happened. (There was also some pushback that the data was too optimistic) Anyway, the guys over at Business Insider just put together this nifty video exploring our would-be watery world.

It would take a very long time indeed for all the ice on Earth to melt. I don't know how long. But long. Like a thousand years? Point is it's not like this is going to happen on Tuesday or even a thousand Tuesdays from now, but the arc of history is long and our descendants will never "sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings," if there is no longer any ground for them to sit on.



Global warming is bad, and every day we don't do anything about it we should feel bad.

5 Chinese ships seen off Alaska coast, Pentagon says

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34131429

Trump Could Ensure Democratic Dominance For Years

By Taegan Goddard

Politico: “Donald Trump knows the United States will never deport eleven million undocumented immigrants or do away with birthright citizenship. But what if we did—what would be the political impact if Trump and other angry nativists in the GOP actually achieved most or all the changes they desire, cutting immigration back sharply?”

“We already know, because something very similar happened once before in American history.

Ninety years ago, two Republican presidents—Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge—and a Congress dominated by Republicans enacted equally harsh policies against immigrants. Their success helped usher in the longest period of one-party rule in the 20th century.

But it was the Democrats, not the GOP, who benefited, in one of the most whopping instances of unintentional consequences in American political history.”

Unrelated strangers look like identical twins

By Mark Frauenfelder 

Ambra, 23, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Jennifer, 33, of Spring, Texas were brought together as part of the Twin Strangers project. "I did not want to take my eyes off her," said Ambra.

The Simulacron

Sarah Palin Interviews Donald Trump In A Weird Meeting Of Simpleton Political Minds

Palin manages to squeak out 15 more minutes of relevancy as she jumps on the Trump bandwagon.

 

By Adam Johnson

 

What the hell just happened?

Right-wing darling Sarah Palin evidently has a talk show, and she used this talk show to interview Donald Trump Friday night. The 10 minute segment aired on something called the One America News Network, a network that is hard to find, and whose production values are a cross between an ISIS propaganda video and a generic newscast you would see on an under-produced crime drama.

The segment started out with a crude montage about how terrible things are (of course, Obama), complete with populist filler involving infrastructure crumbling, stock video of unemployment, and, "millions of people flowing through our southern border."

Sarah Palin goes on to lob Trump a series of softballs about his recent experiences purging critical journalists and defending him from "gotcha questions" like "what's your favorite bible verse?" a question so tough its answer can easily be found in the crowd at any given football game.

"Since the day he made the sacrifice to hit the campaign trail," Palin sycophantically began, "voters crave the anti-establishment politician. They want results, they want a fighter. They want someone to fire all those politically correct police."

It's unclear if Trump has the authority to fire the "politically correct police" if such a thing even exists (it doesn't), but the rest of the bizarre interview went on like that: An unlettered Palin, giddy with praise, and an on-message Trump exchanging talking points and praising each other in a creepy dance of populist glee.

Watch the clip below, if you can manage:

Chris Christie Proposes Tracking Immigrants the Way FedEx Tracks Packages

Posted by timothy

 PolygamousRanchKid submits the news that New Jersey governor (and Republican presidential candidate) Chris Christie said yesterday that he would, if elected president, create a system to track foreign visitors the way FedEx tracks packages.

The NYT writes:

 Mr. Christie, who is far back in the pack of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, said at a campaign event in New Hampshire that he would ask the chief executive of FedEx, Frederick W. Smith, to devise the tracking system."At any moment, FedEx can tell you where that package is. It's on the truck. It's at the station. It's on the airplane," Mr. Christie told the crowd in Laconia, N.H. "Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them." He added: "We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in."

Adds the submitter: "I'm sure foreign tourist will be amused when getting a bar code sticker slapped on their arm."

Trump Is A Racist And His Supporters Are Nuts

By Susie Madrak

So Chris Hayes invited Rep. Alan Grayson, who's running for the Florida senate seat left open by Marco Rubio's run for the Republican nomination, as someone "several people" have called "Trump of the Left."

Which is a pretty stupid premise, since Grayson actually gets things done and has a consistent political worldview, and Trump seems to be an utter anarchist, but hey. Whatever it takes to get the ratings up, right, Chris?

So it was fun watching Grayson grab the wheel and steer it where he wanted the conversation to go.



“People say about Trump that he’s saying what they’re thinking and nobody else is saying. They’re nuts," Grayson said.

"So that’s a pretty fundamental difference. Recognize how narrow his support base really is. Only 4 percent of the public votes in a Republican primary. He’s got 30 percent of 4 percent. We’re looking at the worst 1.2 percent in America.”

“He’s thrown away the dog whistle. It used to be you had to speak in metaphors, now you can just come right out and be racist. You know who likes that? The racists like that.”

Behind the Trump-stone split

Tonight on The Big Picture, Thom talks with Mark Ames, Senior Editor at Pando Daily about the Donald Trump and Roger Stone split. Mark breaks down the relationship between the two and reveals interesting points about the Trump campaign. Then lawyer and host of Ring of Fire Radio, Mike Papantonio joins Thom to talk about former KKK leader David Duke’s support for Trump. Is Trump the candidate for white supremacists?

And state and county officials in Kansas are blocking the release of voting machine logs to Wichita State University. Mathematician Beth Clarkson, who has requested these records under the Kansas Open Records Act, talks to Thom about this case and what could be wrong with voting machines in Kansas. In tonight’s Green Report, Patty Lovera talks to Thom about the use of pesticides and filmmaker Monica Ord tells us about her new film, “Chloe & Theo,” which highlights the story of Theo Ikummaq, who travels from his home in the Arctic to speak to world leaders about the impact of climate change.

The Labor Ruling McDonald's Has Been Dreading Just Became A Reality

By Dave Jamieson

WASHINGTON - McDonald's, Burger King and every other company that relies on a franchise business model just suffered the legal setback they've been fearing for years.

 The National Labor Relations Board ruled on Thursday that Browning Ferris Industries, a waste management company, qualifies as a "joint employer" alongside one of its subcontractors. The decision effectively loosens the standards for who can be considered a worker's boss under labor law, and its impact will be felt in any industry that relies on franchising or outsourcing work. McDonald's, for instance, could now find itself forced to sit at the bargaining table with workers employed by a franchisee managing one of its restaurants.  

That's a big deal. In the case of McDonald's, roughly 90 percent of its locations are actually run by franchisees, who are typically considered the workers' employers. One of the main reasons companies choose to franchise or to outsource work to staffing agencies is to shift workplace responsibilities onto someone else. But if a fast-food brand or a hotel chain can be deemed a "joint employer" along with the smaller company, it can be dragged into labor disputes and negotiations that it conveniently wouldn't have to worry about otherwise. In theory, such a precedent could even make it easier for workers to unionize as employees under the larger parent company.

The Democratic-majority board, whose members were appointed by President Barack Obama, ruled 3-2 along partisan lines, with the two Republicans dissenting.

© Bloomberg via Getty Images A McDonald's Corp. sign is illuminated at a restaurant in Shelbyville, Kentucky, U.S., on Friday, Jan. 23, 2015. 

Labor unions and worker advocacy groups have been hoping for just such a decision. In their view, since companies like McDonald's influence the working conditions in their franchised stores, they should be legally accountable to the workers who wear their logos, even if it's a franchisee that's technically signing the paychecks. Bringing companies at the top of the contracting chain to the table will help restore corporate responsibility in a "fissured" economy, advocates say.

The franchise lobby, meanwhile, has been warning for months that a ruling like this one would doom the business model. Franchisers argue that naming parent companies as joint employers would force them to take more control from their franchisees to contend with new liabilities. The lobby has worked hard to paint the "joint employer" standard as something that will hurt small business owners, not fast-food giants and other name brands.

The Browning Ferris case grew out of an organizing effort by the Teamsters. The union sought to have the waste management company named as a joint employer for workers employed by the staffing firm Leadpoint Business Services, a subcontractor for Browning Ferris. If Browning Ferris were deemed a joint employer, it would have to join Leadpoint in bargaining with the Teamsters. Such a determination could also make it easier for the Teamsters to organize workers at other staffing agencies that do work for Browning Ferris.

A regional director for the NLRB ruled that Browning Ferris did not exert enough control over Leadpoint workers to be considered a joint employer under current standards, but the Teamsters appealed that ruling to the federal board. Thursday's ruling will change those standards for future cases.

The decision will no doubt agitate some powerful business lobbies and Republicans on Capitol Hill. The ruling will likely spur congressional Republicans to renew their calls to defund an independent agency they view as having been too friendly to labor unions in the Obama era.

McDonald's and other franchisers have been bracing for a ruling like this for years. The board's general counsel, who functions as a kind of prosecutor, has already named McDonald's as a joint employer alongside some of its franchisees in several cases involving alleged unfair labor practices. Many observers took that move as a sign that the board would soon revise its standards for what makes a company a joint employer.

Who Hacked Ashley Madison?

By  Brian Krebs

AshleyMadison.com, a site that helps married people cheat and whose slogan is “Life is Short, have an Affair,” recently put up a half million (Canadian) dollar bounty for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the Impact Team — the name chosen by the hacker(s) who recently leaked data on more than 30 million Ashley Madison users. Here is the first of likely several posts examining individuals who appear to be closely connected to this attack.



It was just past midnight on July 20, a few hours after I’d published an exclusive story about hackers breaking into AshleyMadison.com. I was getting ready to turn in for the evening when I spotted a re-tweet from a Twitter user named Thadeus Zu (@deuszu) who’d just posted a link to the same cache of data that had been confidentially shared with me by the Impact Team via the contact form on my site just hours earlier: It was a link to the proprietary source code for Ashley Madison’s service.
Initially, that tweet startled me because I couldn’t find any other sites online that were actually linking to that source code cache. I began looking through his past tweets and noticed some interesting messages, but soon enough other news events took precedence and I forgot about the tweet.

I revisited Zu’s tweet stream again this week after watching a press conference held by the Toronto Police (where Avid Life Media, the parent company of Ashley Madison, is based). The Toronto cops mostly recapped the timeline of known events in the hack, but they did add one new wrinkle: They said Avid Life employees first learned about the breach on July 12 (seven days before my initial story) when they came into work, turned on their computers and saw a threatening message from the Impact Team accompanied by the anthem “Thunderstruck” by Australian rock band AC/DC playing in the background.

After writing up a piece on the bounty offer, I went back and downloaded all five years’ worth of tweets from Thadeus Zu, a massively prolific Twitter user who typically tweets hundreds if not thousands of messages per month. Zu’s early years on Twitter are a catalog of simple hacks — commandeering unsecured routers, wireless cameras and printers — as well as many, many Web site defacements.

On the defacement front, Zu focused heavily on government Web sites in Asia, Europe and the United States, and in several cases even taunted his targets. On Aug. 4, 2012, he tweeted to KPN-CERT, a computer security incident response team in the Netherlands, to alert the group that he’d hacked their site. “Next time, it will be Thunderstruck. #ACDC” Zu wrote.

The day before, he’d compromised the Web site for the Australian Parliament, taunting lawmakers there with the tweet: “Parliament of Australia bit.ly/NPQdsP Oi! Oi! Oi!….T.N.T. Dynamite! Listen to ACDC here.”

I began to get very curious about whether there were any signs on or before July 19, 2015 that Zu was tweeting about ACDC in relation to the Ashley Madison hack. Sure enough: At 9:40 a.m., July 19, 2015 — nearly 12 hours before I would first be contacted by the Impact Team — we can see Zu is feverishly tweeting to several people about setting up “replication servers” to “get the show started.” Can you spot what’s interesting in the tabs on his browser in the screenshot he tweeted that morning?

Twitter user ThadeusZu tweets about setting up replication servers. Did you spot the Youtube video he’s playing when he took this screenshot?

Ten points if you noticed the Youtube.com tab showing that he’s listening to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.”

A week ago, the news media pounced on the Ashley Madison story once again, roughly 24 hours after the hackers made good on their threat to release the Ashley Madison user database. I went back and examined Zu’s tweet stream around that time and found he beat Wired.com, ArsTechnica.com and every other news media outlet by more than 24 hours with the Aug. 17 tweet, “Times up,” which linked to the Impact Team’s now infamous post listing the sites where anyone could download the stolen Ashley Madison user database.

ThadeusZu tweeted about the downloadable Ashley Madison data more than 24 hours before news outlets picked up on the cache.

WHO IS THADEUS ZU?

As with the social networking profiles of others who’ve been tied to high-profile cybercrimes, Zu’s online utterings appear to be filled with kernels of truth surrounded by complete malarkey– thus making it challenging to separate fact from fiction. Hence, all of this could be just one big joke by Zu and his buddies. In any case, here are a few key observations about the who, what and where of Thadeus Zu based on information he’s provided (again, take that for what it’s worth).

Zu’s Facebook profile wants visitors to think he lives in Hawaii; indeed, the time zone set on several of his social media counts is the same as Hawaii. There are a few third-party Facebook accounts of people demonstrably living in Hawaii who tag him in their personal photos of events on Hawaii (see this cached photo, for example), but for the most part Zu’s Facebook account consists of pictures taken from stock image collections and do not appear to be personal photos of any kind.

A few tweets from Zu — if truthful and not simply premeditated misdirection — indicate that he lived in Canada for at least a year, although it’s unclear when this visit occurred.

Zu’s various Twitter and Facebook pictures all feature hulking, athletic, and apparently black male models (e.g. he’s appropriated two profile photos of male model Rob Evans). But Zu’s real-life identity remains murky at best. The lone exception I found was an image that appears to be a genuine group photo taken of a Facebook user tagged as Thadeus Zu, along with an unnamed man posing in front of a tattoo store with popular Australian (and very inked) model/nightclub DJ Ruby Rose.

That photo is no longer listed in Rose’s Facebook profile, but a cached version of it is available here.

Rose’s tour schedule indicates that she was in New York City when that photo was taken, or at least posted, on Feb. 6, 2014. Zu is tagged in another Ruby Rose Facebook post five days later on Valentine’s Day. Update, 2:56 p.m.: As several readers have pointed out, the two people beside Rose  in that cached photo appear to be Franz Dremah and Kick Gurry, co-stars in the movie Edge of Tomorrow).

Other clues in his tweet stream and social media accounts put Zu in Australia. Zu has a Twitter account under the Twitter nick @ThadeusZu, which has a whopping 11 tweets, but seems rather to have been used as a news feed. In that account Zu is following some 35 Twitter accounts, and the majority of them are various Australian news organizations. That account also is following several Australian lawmakers that govern states in south Australia.

Then again, Twitter auto-suggests popular accounts for new users to follow, and usually does so in part based on the Internet address of the user. As such, @ThadeusZu may have only been using an Australian Web proxy or a Tor node in Australia when he set up that account (several of his self-published screen shots indicate that he regularly uses Tor to obfuscate his Internet address).

Even so, many of Zu’s tweets going back several years place him in Australia as well, although this may also be intentional misdirection. He continuously references his “Oz girl,” (“Oz” is another word for Australia) uses the greeting “cheers” quite a bit, and even talks about people visiting him in Oz.
Interestingly, for someone apparently so caught up in exposing hypocrisy and so close to the Ashley Madison hack, Zu appears to have himself courted a married woman — at least according to his own tweets. On January 5, 2014, Zu ‏tweeted:

“Everything is cool. Getting married this year. I am just waiting for my girl to divorce her husband. #seachange

A month later, on Feb. 7, 2014, Zu offered this tidbit of info:

“My ex. We were supposed to get married 8 years ago but she was taken away from me. Cancer. Hence, my downward spiral into mayhem.”

To say that Zu tweets to others is a bit of a misstatement. I have never seen anyone tweet the way Zu does; He sends hundreds of tweets each day, and while most of them appear to be directed at nobody, it does seem that they are in response to (if not in “reply” to) tweets that others have sent him or made about his work. Consequently, his tweet stream appears to the casual observer to be nothing more than an endless soliloquy.

But there may something else going on here. It is possible that Zu’s approach to tweeting — that is, responding to or addressing other Twitter users without invoking the intended recipient’s Twitter handle — is something of a security precaution. After all, he had to know and even expect that security researchers would try to reconstruct his conversations after the fact. But this is far more difficult to do when the Twitter user in question never actually participates in threaded conversations.

People who engage in this way of tweeting also do not readily reveal the Twitter identities of the people with whom they chat most.

Thadeus Zu — whoever and wherever he is in real life — may not have been directly involved in the Ashley Madison hack; he claims in several tweets that he was not part of the hack, but then in countless tweets he uses the royal “We” when discussing the actions and motivations of the Impact Team. I attempted to engage Zu in private conversations without success; he has yet to respond to my invitations.

It is possible that Zu is instead a white hat security researcher or confidential informant who has infiltrated the Impact Team and is merely riding on their coattails or acting as their mouthpiece. But one thing is clear: If Zu wasn’t involved in the hack, he almost certainly knows who was.

KrebsOnSecurity is grateful to several researchers, including Nick Weaver, for their assistance and time spent indexing, mining and making sense of tweets and social media accounts mentioned in this post. Others who helped have asked to remain anonymous. Weaver has published some additional thoughts on this post over at Medium.