Above: Young boys use their hands to search for raw materials like cobalt and copper in Kambove, Democratic Republic of Congo. Photographer: Doudou Kajangu

NOTE: This is a guest post from Cheryl Hotchkiss, Senior Manager of Advocacy and Public Engagement for World Vision.

It’s that wonderful time of year when many Canadians check the batteries in their flashlights and cameras before heading off on a weekend trip. As we look forward to these trips, a young boy in the Democratic Republic of Congo is heading off to his job at a mine.

Jean is that boy and he is exhausted. But he isn’t exhausted from playing or staying up late like many 8 year olds on summer holiday. Jean is exhausted from mining the cobalt that helps our batteries work.

Jean works, usually without a meal, from 6:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. each day. His job is to dig and carry heavy loads of rock to a rinsing pool where cobalt and copper can be washed and found. Jean’s mother works at the mine too.

Like 14 per cent of the population in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Jean and his mother work as artisanal miners, meaning they literally dig, wash and sort minerals by hand on unregulated sites. Their daily hazards include tunnel collapses, explosions and absorption of toxic materials like lead, uranium and mercury. At this tender age, Jean has already seen someone killed while mining.

Jean is not alone. A normal day is harsh for the 115 million children around the world in the worst forms of child labour. There’s often no playtime, no afternoon nap, no summer holidays.

Fortunately, we have the chance to be a part of ending the unjust conditions these children face.

A child works at an artisanal mining site in Kambove, Democratic Republic of Congo. Photographer: Doudou Kajangu

An education in jeopardy

As hard as Jean’s mother and father work, they don’t earn enough to cover the family’s most basic needs. Jean’s meager income not only helps the family eat but also goes towards the education he has placed his hope in. But the impact of mining work follows Jean wherever he goes, including to school.

Jean has been forced to miss many classes because he either has to work or because he is suffering from skin rashes, body pains, and eye irritation from his exposure to toxic materials. The cost of schooling may also soon be too much for Jean’s family to afford. A World Vision team found that of the 53 children at the site Jean works at, 29 had already left school because the fees were beyond their means. (See the results of World Vision’s study).

And yet hope remains. When asked if it will be possible for him to leave mining work and pursue his dreams, Jean says: “if I find someone to support me, because my parents can’t.”

This is the complex reality Jean faces.

A wider scope

Millions of children do demanding work on large fishing boats, in garment factories and on cocoa farms to help their families get by. This is not the life for a child.

While a recent World Vision study found 89 per cent of Canadians would pay more for products that are free of child labour, consumers often do not have information on whether children were exploited to provide us with a copper pipe from the hardware store, a new shirt at the store or a chocolate treat.

If we are to help children become free from dirty, dangerous and degrading work and gain the education they deserve, we need to become more responsible consumers.

Digging for solutions

We all have a role to play in ensuring children aren’t exploited to produce the products we buy. This is true for businesses, governments, and the average consumer. Knowing more about how products are produced, we can ensure that buying batteries does not contribute to keeping Jean out of school.

When Canadian businesses are transparent about each step of how their products are made, consumers can, in turn, encourage companies to enforce codes of conduct, carry out audits to see if child labour is used and improve the livelihoods of people who help make the item. For a child like Jean, this means his parents will earn enough to meet the family’s basic needs. In turn, Jean will be able to leave mining work and focus on his schooling.

You can help create a better future for children in dirty, dangerous and degrading work. Sign the petition and ask the Canadian government to help eliminate the worst forms of child labour by encouraging and supporting transparency for each step of products journey to Canada.

*Jean’s name has been changed to protect his identity.

World Vision is a Christian relief, development and advocacy organization dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice. World Vision’s Help Wanted: End Child Slavery campaign is focused on reducing the number of children who are pushed, forced or trafficked into 3D jobs dirty, dangerous and degrading.

Read more: child labor, child labour, child slavery, Children, human rights, slavery, unjust, World Vision

All images courtesy of World Vision Canada photographed by Doudou Kajangu

Lawyer: Snowden has a place to live in Russia

NATALIYA VASILYEVA 21 hours ago

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MOSCOW (AP) — National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has a place to live in Russia after being granted temporary asylum, but he still hasn't decided what he wants to do next, his lawyer said Friday. The big question may be how much choice he actually has.

Russia granted a year of asylum to Snowden on Thursday, allowing him to quietly slip out of the Moscow airport where he had been holed up for almost six weeks as he evades charges of espionage in the United States. Authorities have suggested he will have wide freedom to work, but Kremlin watchers believe his moves are likely being closely controlled by Russian intelligence.

Snowden "is in a safe place," but the location will remain secret out of concern for his security, his lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, told Russian news agencies. The systems analyst who revealed himself as the source of reports in the Guardian newspaper of a vast U.S. Internet surveillance program needs time after his ordeal in airport limbo to figure out his next steps.

He was seen only once in his weeks in the transit zone of the Sheremetyevo airport. Despite troops of photographers and reporters camped out inside and outside the airport, no one apparently saw him leaving, except for someone who snapped a photo of Kucherena talking to blurry figures who the attorney later said were Snowden and Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks staffer who has been advising him.

Kucherena said he expects Snowden to speak to journalists soon. "As soon as he decides what he will do, I hope he will announce it himself," the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted the lawyer as saying.

Lawyer: Snowden Has a Place to Live in RussiaPlay video."

The move to grant Snowden asylum infuriated the Obama administration, which said it was "extremely disappointed" and warned that the decision could derail an upcoming summit between President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul on Friday met with Putin's foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov to discuss matters including Snowden, the U.S. Embassy said on its Twitter account. There were no further details.

The asylum decision gives Russia cover to depict itself as a defender of human rights, pointing a finger to deflect criticism of its own poor record on rights including free speech. But the secrecy that surrounded Snowden's time at the Moscow airport and his unwillingness so far to talk to the press indicates he is being controlled by Russian intelligence, Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist who co-authored a book on the Russian intelligence services said.

"Does he have independent sources of information and communication? My impression is that he has none, which means he's not his own master," Soldatov said.

He said Kucherena's statements about concerns for Snowden's safety do not hold water.

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In this still image taken on Thursday, Aug. 1, 2013 and released by Russia24 TV channel, shows Russi …

"We are all perfectly aware that Snowden, who has just received asylum, does not face any danger in Russia," Soldatov said. "American intelligence does not kidnap or assassinate people in Russia, that's a fact. This is a just a pretext."

One of the reasons for keeping Snowden isolated may be to prevent him from speaking about the people he met and what really happened to him during the 39 days he spent in the airport's transit zone, Soldatov said. For the same reason, Soldatov said he expected Russian authorities to find a job for Snowden that will prevent him from having contacts with journalists.

Putin has denied that Russia's security services have worked with Snowden, either before or after he arrived in Moscow on a flight from Hong Kong. But security experts have said that Russia's intelligence agencies would not have passed up a chance to at least question a man who is believed to hold reams of classified U.S. documents and could shed light on how the U.S. intelligence agencies collect information.

Snowden's temporary asylum allows him to work in Russia, with some restrictions, said immigration lawyer Bakhrom Ismailov.

"Snowden has the same rights for employment as a Russian citizen except that he is not allowed to work as a public servant or take a job in law enforcement agencies," said Ismailov, a managing partner at Yurinvestholding. The founder of Russia's Facebook-like social network site VKontakte, has already made what sounded like a job offer on Twitter.

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In this image taken from Associated Press Television, Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena holds a tempo …

The law on temporary asylum says a person with this status is entitled "to receive assistance" in traveling out of Russia. Ismailov said that this assistance could mean issuing a travel document, but this is not normally done for people with temporary asylum.

Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia had offered Snowden asylum and he told human rights figures during a meeting in mid-July that he wanted to visit all those countries. But Kucherena said Thursday that Snowden no longer has such plans.

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Associated Press writer Lynn Berry in Moscow contributed to this report.

By Amir Shaw, Rolling Out – July 30, 2013

http://tinyurl.com/lfx8xws

Judge Mark A. Ciavarella, 63, serves as an example of why the private prison industry can do more harm than good.

Ciavarella worked alongside owners of private juvenile facilities to ensure that the prison remained occupied. The more prisoners equated to more profits for the owners of the prison.

As a result, Ciavarella would sentence offenders with small offenses to months and, at times, years behind bars.

He once sentenced a teen to three months in jail for creating a MySpace page that mocked her school’s assistant principal. Ciavarella also sentenced another teen to 90 days in jail after a simple schoolyard fight.

But after a federal investigation, it was discovered that Ciavarella and his colleague, Judge Michael Conahan, received more than $2.6 million from privately run youth centers owned by PA Child Care.

In 2011, Ciavarella was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 28 years in prison. He was also forced to pay $1 million in restitution.

Once Ciavarella was convicted, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossed out 4,000 convictions issued by the judge.

Ciavarella appealed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia to have his 28-year sentence overturned. On July 25, the court denied his request.

Ciavarella’s attorneys may attempt to appeal the case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Verizon, BT and Vodafone Cable have given GCHQ secret unlimited access to their network of undersea cables. Photograph: composite

By James Ball, Luke Harding and Juliette Garside, The Guardian – August 2, 2013

http://tinyurl.com/ntk6vde

Some of the world’s leading telecoms firms, including BT and Vodafone, are secretly collaborating with Britain’s spy agency GCHQ, and are passing on details of their customers’ phone calls, email messages and Facebook entries, documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden show.

BT, Vodafone Cable, and the American firm Verizon Business – together with four other smaller providers – have given GCHQ secret unlimited access to their network of undersea cables. The cables carry much of the world’s phone calls and internet traffic.

In June the Guardian revealed details of GCHQ’s ambitious data-hoovering programmes, Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible.

It emerged GCHQ was able to tap into fibre-optic cables and store huge volumes of data for up to 30 days. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for 20 months.

On Friday Germany’s Süddeutsche newspaper published the most highly sensitive aspect of this operation – the names of the commercial companies working secretly with GCHQ, and giving the agency access to their customers’ private communications. The paper said it had seen a copy of an internal GCHQ powerpoint presentation from 2009 discussing Tempora.

The document identified for the first time which telecoms companies are working with GCHQ’s “special source” team. It gives top secret codenames for each firm, with BT (“Remedy”), Verizon Business (“Dacron”), and Vodafone Cable (“Gerontic”).

The other firms include Global Crossing (“Pinnage”), Level 3 (“Little”), Viatel (“Vitreous”) and Interoute (“Streetcar”). The companies refused to comment on any specifics relating to Tempora, but several noted they were obliged to comply with UK and EU law.

The revelations are likely to dismay GCHQ and Downing Street, who are fearful that BT and the other firms will suffer a backlash from customers furious that their private data and intimate emails have been secretly passed to a government spy agency.

In June a source with knowledge of intelligence said the companies had no choice but to co-operate in this operation. They are forbidden from revealing the existence of warrants compelling them to allow GCHQ access to the cables.

Together, these seven companies operate a huge share of the high-capacity undersea fibre-optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet’s architecture. GCHQ’s mass tapping operation has been built up over the past five years by attaching intercept probes to the transatlantic cables where they land on British shores.

GCHQ’s station in Bude, north Cornwall, plays a role. The cables carry data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America.

This allows GCHQ and NSA analysts to search vast amounts of data on the activity of millions of internet users. Metadata – the sites users visit, whom they email, and similar information – is stored for up to 30 days, while the content of communications is typically stored for three days.

GCHQ has the ability to tap cables carrying both internet data and phone calls. By last year GCHQ was handling 600m “telephone events” each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.

Each of the cables carries data at a rate of 10 gigabits per second, so the tapped cables had the capacity, in theory, to deliver more than 21 petabytes a day – equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours.

This operation is carried out under clandestine agreements with the seven companies, described in one document as “intercept partners”. The companies are paid for logistical and technical assistance.

The identity of the companies allowing GCHQ to tap their cables was regarded as extremely sensitive within the agency. Though the Tempora programme itself was classified as top secret, the identities of the cable companies was even more secret, referred to as “exceptionally controlled information”, with the company names replaced with the codewords, such as “GERONTIC”, “REMEDY” and “PINNAGE”.

However, some documents made it clear which codenames referred to which companies. GCHQ also assigned the firms “sensitive relationship teams”. One document warns that if the names emerged it could cause “high-level political fallout”.

Germans have been enraged by the revelations of spying by the National Security Agency and GCHQ after it emerged that both agencies were hoovering up German data as well. On Friday the Süddeutsche said it was now clear that private telecoms firms were far more deeply complicit in US-UK spying activities than had been previously thought.

The source familiar with intelligence maintained in June that GCHQ was “not looking at every piece of straw” but was sifting a “vast haystack of data” for what he called “needles”.

He added: “If you had the impression we are reading millions of emails, we are not. There is no intention in this whole programme to use it for looking at UK domestic traffic – British people talking to each other.”

The source said analysts used four criteria for determining what was examined: security, terror, organised crime and Britain’s economic wellbeing.”The vast majority of the data is discarded without being looked at … we simply don’t have the resources.”

Nonetheless, the agency repeatedly referred to plans to expand this collection ability still further in the future.

Once it is collected, analysts are able to search the information for emails, online chats and browsing histories using an interface called XKeyscore, uncovered in the Guardian on Wednesday. By May 2012, 300 analysts from GCHQ and 250 NSA analysts had direct access to search and sift through the data collected under the Tempora program.

Documents seen by the Guardian suggest some telecoms companies allowed GCHQ to access cables which they did not themselves own or operate, but only operated a landing station for. Such practices could raise alarm among other cable providers who do not co-operate with GCHQ programmes that their facilities are being used by the intelligence agency.

Telecoms providers can be compelled to co-operate with requests from the government, relayed through ministers, under the 1984 Telecommunications Act, but privacy advocates have raised concerns that the firms are not doing enough to challenge orders enabling large-scale surveillance, or are co-operating to a degree beyond that required by law.

“We urgently need clarity on how close the relationship is between companies assisting with intelligence gathering and government,” said Eric King, head of research for Privacy International. “Were the companies strong-armed, or are they voluntary intercept partners?”

Vodafone said it complied with the laws of all the countries in which its cables operate. “Media reports on these matters have demonstrated a misunderstanding of the basic facts of European, German and UK legislation and of the legal obligations set out within every telecommunications operator’s licence … Vodafone complies with the law in all of our countries of operation,” said a spokesman.

“Vodafone does not disclose any customer data in any jurisdiction unless legally required to do so. Questions related to national security are a matter for governments not telecommunications operators.”

A spokeswoman for Interoute said: “As with all communication providers in Europe we are required to comply with European and local laws including those on data protection and retention. From time to time we are presented with requests from authorities. When we receive such requests, they are processed by our legal and security teams and if valid, acted upon.”

A spokeswoman for Verizon said: “Verizon continually takes steps to safeguard our customers’ privacy. Verizon also complies with the law in every country in which we operate.”

BT declined to comment.