Ben Snaith

🌱🌿 we published this personal reflection piece last week on the tensions when we introduce data and technology to the natural world medium.com/odi-research/w…

about as clear sighted analysis as you could possible get

The militarization of the cloud (or the cloud-ification of the military) mean data centers can be legitimate and fully legal targets during war theintercept.com/2026/03/20/ai-…

There’s an office in London that contains something critical to the security of the global internet — a bunch of swinging pendulums. ianvisits.co.uk/articles/insid…

This is a very timely and important piece It highlights precisely how the integration of large language models into targeting is muddying accountability and ensuring militaries can shirk demands for transparency, particularly when it comes to the unlawful killing of civilians

Just got this from Planet Labs, they are delaying posting imagery from specific areas in the Middle East 96 hours due to operational security concerns: Reads in part: As part of Planet’s commitment to responsible data practices and the safety of personnel on the ground, we are implementing temporary adjustments to imagery access for a Designated Area of Interest (AOI) across the Middle East. All new imagery collected over the Gulf States, Iraq, Kuwait, and adjacent conflict zones will be subject to a mandatory 96-hour delay before it is made available in our archive. This change applies to both high (SkySat and Pelican) and medium (PlanetScope) resolution data sets. This measure is intended to prevent adversarial actors from using recent data for immediate Battle Damage Assessment (BDA) and is rooted in our commitment to ensuring the safety of allied and NATO-partner personnel and civilians on the ground. As the conflict evolves, the area impacted may change. What this means for your workflow: Effective immediately, customers will experience a 96-hour delay on all data in the Planet Archive over the Gulf States, Iraq, Kuwait, and adjacent conflict zones. This delay applies to customer-tasked data as well. Tasking and Archive data access over Iran will remain unchanged and continue to publish immediately, for the time being. We recognize that timely data is critical to your operations. We are actively monitoring the situation and intend to resume standard service cadences as soon as safety conditions permit. ... Thank you for your partnership and understanding. Best regards,

Iran hits Amazon data centres in jolt to Gulf AI drive ft.trib.al/1BLuiop

Fascinating graphic in my latest piece for @_TheLondoner It shows how London's telecommunication cables and the construction of the Elizabeth Line has formed a belt of data centres across the city - interactive graphic in the piece below!

The UK government actively participated in the genocide. It is now trying to impose a McCarthyite climate of fear and censorship to stop the solidarity movement from becoming a force for societal change. Presided by a morally bankrupt, intellectually mediocre Prime Minister.

The UK hunger strikers are now writing their wills

A beyond bleak day

"only my brand of snake oil will save your beloved institution"

The first library to be rescued during the genocide. My dream is for it to become a big library.

@ZackPolanski I’m begging you Zack

British.

I came back today. I thought I had known despair before, but what I saw today is beyond despair. It is not grief, nor horror, nor pain. It is something colder, a stillness where even God seems to have withdrawn His hand. The sky was impossibly blue. The kind of blue that mocks you, that makes you wonder whether beauty itself is a crime. I walked through streets that no longer exist, streets that were my childhood. They are now a wilderness of stone, wire, and dust. A man stood on a heap, a neighbor, I think. He pointed and said, “It’s here.” I asked him how far. He looked down. And I understood: my house was beneath his feet. I lifted my phone, as if the machine could recognize what I could not. The screen glowed; there was nothing to see. The earth had swallowed the distances. Even the smell of home was gone. It was as if the thread connecting me to life itself had been cut. I dug with my hands. The dust burned. My palms bled. My mother had told me: “Search for anything we can save.” And so I obeyed her like a son obeys the last voice that still believes there is meaning in obedience. From a house that once cost my father one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, a lifetime of labor, of hope, of decency, I found two things: a knife, and a pillow. Two relics of civilization. One for necessity, one for illusion. That is what remains of man. I sat in the ruins, the blue of my shirt turned gray with ash, and I thought: this is the end not of a city, but of meaning itself. I thought of my parents, their hands, their faith in honest work. How will they bear this? How will any man bear seeing his father’s roof turned into dust by a stranger’s hands, hands that will never know the names of those they destroyed? But what tears me apart more than ruin is silence. No one speaks to us. No one tells us where to go, who will rebuild, or who is responsible. The politicians talk of victories, the generals of strategy, the world of peace and progress. But none of them live here among the ashes. None of them stand where I stand, sifting through their own dead. And those who claim to represent us, where are they? Where is the money they collected in our name, the promises they made before the cameras, the slogans they wrote while we buried our children? Who among them will come to this ruin and say: Forgive us, we failed you? Not one. They sit in offices with clean shirts, counting our corpses as figures on paper. They say “reconstruction,” “aid,” “negotiations,” as though the vocabulary of power could fill the emptiness of a mother’s bed. I tell you the truth: there is no crime greater than indifference. The murderer at least acknowledges the victim. But those who look away, they kill the soul itself. I brushed the dust from my shirt, though I knew it was useless. I wanted to see if there was still color left in the world. There wasn’t. The blue had become the color of mourning. I looked at my hands. They were shaking, not from fear, but from the unbearable realization that we have become expendable to the world. Our suffering is entertainment, our death a policy, our endurance a statistic. I wept then, openly, shamelessly. I, who once believed in the dignity of suffering, now see that dignity itself has been annihilated. There is nothing noble in being forgotten. If you are reading this, do not admire the style or the language. Lower your head, and weep. Because this dust, this silence, this cry, is what remains of us.

This is grim & dangerous over reach. This is a government that have lost the moral argument & are still selling arms to Israel. Now further cracking down on dissent. Absolutely the opposite of what they should be doing - so of course this is what the Labour Government choose.

Wondering why more women & children are being killed at our border? Earlier this month Government cancelled Refugee family reunion. 56% of grants for RFR were children & 37% were women. So the number of women & children crossing, and dying, will continue to rise.

The Starmer ID card thing is his ‘leadership style’ all over: Petty authoritarianism, instantly unites all against him, no natural base of support, reheated New Labour, incoherent, not part of any wider vision or idea, hobbled from the beginning by association with him.

Microsoft announced it is blocking Israel’s access to technology which allowed the mass surveillance of Palestinian civilians, following an investigation we wrote. The first time that a major US tech company sanctions the Israeli military for violating Palestinian rights >

get em