PG&E, California’s Largest Utility, Under Scrutiny After Its Equipment Allegedly Caused 17 Wildfires Last Year

As investigators seek to determine the cause of the deadliest wildfire in California history, the culprit that fire officials have linked to more than a dozen fires that ravaged large swaths of Northern California last year is again in the hot seat.

The suspect is not some deranged serial arsonist — it’s California’s largest public utility: Pacific Gas & Electric, or PG&E.

The company, of course, is not suspected of intentionally causing any fires. Rather, it’s under scrutiny for how it maintains its sprawling infrastructure that delivers electricity to some 16 million Californians — much of it via above-ground power lines running through heavily forested public land. read more »

Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us

We knew that being connected had a price – our data. But we didn’t care. Then it turned out that Google’s main clients included the military and intelligence agencies.

The internet surrounds us. It mediates modern life, like a giant, unseen blob that engulfs the modern world. There is no escape, and, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin so astutely understood when they launched Google in 1998, everything that people do online leaves a trail of data. If saved and used correctly, these traces make up a goldmine of information full of insights into people on a personal level as well as a valuable read on larger cultural, economic and political trends.

Uber, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, Foursquare, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds – if you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, you can see that, taken together, these companies have turned our computers and phones into bugs that are plugged in to a vast corporate-owned surveillance net-work. Where we go, what we do, what we talk about, who we talk to, and who we see – everything is recorded and, at some point, leveraged for value. read more »

Justice Department Investigating Migrant Shelter Provider

The Justice Department is investigating possible misuse of federal money by Southwest Key Programs, the nation’s largest operator of shelters for migrant children, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The inquiry comes after a New York Times report this month detailing possible financial improprieties by Southwest Key, which has collected $1.7 billion in federal grants in the past decade, including $626 million in the last year alone. read more »