politics

OTTAWA–The federal Conservatives have quietly killed a giant information registry that was used by lawyers, academics, journalists and ordinary citizens to hold government accountable.

The registry, created in 1989, is an electronic list of every request filed to all federal departments and agencies under the Access to Information Act.

Known as CAIRS, for Co-ordination of Access to Information Requests System, the database allowed ordinary citizens to identify millions of pages of once-secret documents that became public through individual freedom-of-information requests over many years…

Alasdair Roberts, a political scientist at Syracuse University in New York, built a version of the database by requesting the CAIRS electronic records through an Access to Information Act request, and updated the site monthly.

CBC journalist David McKie took over the work in 2006 using another publicly accessible website (http://www.onlinedemocracy.ca)…

[more…]

An Open Letter to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanapoulos, By Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Daily News:

Dear Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos,

It’s hard to know where to begin with this, less than an hour after you signed off from your Democratic presidential debate here in my hometown of Philadelphia, a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, “a shameful night for the U.S. media.” It’s hard because - like many other Americans - I am still angry at what I just witnesses, so angry that it’s hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking. Look, I know that “media criticism” - especially when it’s one journalist speaking to another - tends to be a genteel, colleagial thing, but there’s no genteel way to say this.

With your performance tonight - your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters - you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

You implied throughout the broadcast that you wanted to reflect the concerns of voters in Pennsylvania. Well, I’m a Pennsylvanian voter, and so are my neighbors and most of my friends and co-workers. You asked virtually nothing that reflected our everyday issues - trying to fill our gas tanks and save for college at the same time, our crumbling bridges and inadequate mass transit, or the root causes of crime here in Philadelphia. In fact, there almost isn’t enough space - and this is cyberspace, where room is unlimited - to list all the things you could have asked about but did not, from health care to climate change to alternative energy to our policy toward China to the deterioration of Afghanistan to veterans’ benefits to improving education. You ignored virtually everything that just happened in what most historians agree is one of the worst presidencies in American history, including the condoning of torture and the trashing of the Constitution, although to be fair you also ignored the policy concerns of people on the right, like immigration issues….

[more…]

I posted something on Twitter about this, but that’s a stupid place to write about something as complex as the subprime mortgage problem, so I’ll do a little run-down here. In particular, I am struck by the (lefty) media spin, which is, roughly:

The government will bail out the big banks, and leave ordinary homeowners with their pants around their ankles, suffering foreclosures etc.

Or:

Good news! The Fed has reduced interest rates, to encourage more irresponsible lending and borrowing which is what got us in this mess in the first place.

While I have no doubt that the government will protect their rich banker buddies, and leave the ordinary people out to dry, this sounds like: “if only the government would help out ‘regular homeowners’ everything would be all right…please find a way for us to keep buying expensive houses that we can’t afford.”

Basically the media is saying: “Everyone should have a house, why can’t the government fix this stupid subprime thing so that everyone can have a house again?”

And the problem with that is that the mess starts in the first place from the government fixing things so that everyone can have a house, by crafting policies that encourage banks to make bad loans to bad credit risks; which further encourages people to buy houses that are too expensive, which drives the market up, so everyone’s happy until the bottom falls out of the whole thing. It’s nice for everyone to have a house, but the irony is that this whole mess is kind of like a right-wing version of socialism, where through low-interest rate policies, bankers all got rich as sin, people got to enjoy houses they couldn’t afford … and in the long run, as with any kind of expensive social spending, the whole economy might get trashed in the process.

[Here is a great web comic that explains the surface details of subprime mess].

The past 2 decades really haven’t seen anything significant in the way of recessions (1987 was the last serious one, and the dotcom bust of 2000 hardly had any long-term impacts on the economy in general). Generally the economy has kept growing, life has appeared more prosperous for many, and inflation hasn’t been much of a bother. How was that achieved?

Policy makers usually have two economic factors they try to balance: growth (good: meaning more jobs, more profits etc), and inflation (bad: meaning less buying power). Generally interst rates, growth and inflation have a strange feedback loop: Low interest rates => high growth => high inflation => raised interest rates to curb inflation => slow growth. You need to balance the two to keep the people and businesses happy, and in the past 2 decades we’ve seen unprecedented growth, coupled with insignificant inflation.

That’s strange, because big growth is usually coupled with inflation.

So how did we manage to have lots of growth (that is, continue getting much richer) with almost no inflation? There are two answers:

1. growth was driven by tons of cheap (ie low interest rate) credit (due to a low interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve, plus the government borrowing tons of money from China). When interest rates are low, you borrow lots of money to fund businesses and to buy houses.
2. inflation was kept down by tons of cheap goods imported from elsewhere (again, primarily China).

This has meant that we’ve become accustomed to more wealth and more purchasing power than ever. Wealth seems to be increasing all the time (for the big swath of upper middle classers, at least). And as for economic activity/jobs, much of that was fueled by a red hot housing market: build build build and sell sell sell means lots of people working and getting richer.

But it’s based on a fantasy: debt that allows us to buy cheap goods from elsewhere. The debt levels (personal and governmental) are unprecedented. And the reason the debt is unprecedented is that it’s a bad idea. Fueling economic expansion with major debt whether the socialist kind (government borrowing & spending) or the right-wing kind (citizen borrowing & spending) breaks down eventually.

And then what happens?

So while the subprime mess means people will lose their homes, and that sucks, the really scary question is about how you keep the US economy going at all in the long term. Especially if we plan to keep the sort of wealth we are accustomed to. It’s not at all clear. And if we can’t keep it going, what sort of turmoil is in store?

UPDATE: If you want to get depressed, read this (though do note, it’s more or less an ad for his book).

I wonder why I am so obsessed with the torture issue in the US (and elsewhere of course). I think it’s because of how quickly mainstream US society (and I guess to a lesser degree Canadian society) just accepted the change from being a country that abhors torture as a categorical evil, to a society that thinks: “You know what? Maybe torture isn’t so bad after all, as long as the good guys are doing it, for good reasons.” It’s a remarkable moral turn-around, one unimaginable 15 years ago … but here we are. It, along with many others similar fundamental changes in official public morality (ie doctrine of preemptive war), seemed such an easy switch to flick.

And it seems to me that, given people’s conception of what is morally acceptable is so easily flipped, the more effective argument against torture is that it just doesn’t work all that well. (Which doesn’t change my moral opposition to torture). In the clip below:

Former FBI Interrogator Jack Cloonan explains that regular interrogation tactics work well on even the worst terrorists, that there’s no such thing as a “ticking timebomb” scenario, and that waterboarding has done much more harm than good.

I think from Taxi to the Darkside?

And it seems to me that shadowy terror orgs would be smart enough to make sure there is all sorts of phony information in the heads of people likely to get caught and interrogated anyway … so torture, really, is a form of punishment and terror, rather than a useful interrogation technique. I’m no expert though… Jack Cloonan seems to be.

I wonder if we could see some evidence that torture really is a good interrogation technique?

[via boing]

UPDATE: 37 Short Essays about Torture, written by, among others these people (random selection):

Brigadier General Steve Cheney, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.), served nine years on the Marine Corps’ two Recruit Depots, including a tour as the commanding general at Parris Island. He was also the inspector general for the Marine Corps. Brigadier General Cheney retired in 2001; he is now the president of the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, Texas, and is on the board of directors for the American Security Project.

Kenneth M. Duberstein is chairman and CEO of the Duberstein Group, an independent strategic planning and consulting company. He was chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan. Richard Armitage is president of Armitage International and served as deputy secretary of state from 2001 to 2005. Both Duberstein and Armitage are members of the board of the American Security Project.

John Hutson is a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, attorney, and former judge advocate general of the Navy. He is the current dean and president of Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire.

William J. Perry was the nineteenth U.S. secretary of defense.

Thomas G. Wenski is the bishop of Orlando and chairman of the Committee on International Justice and Peace, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, U.S. Army (Ret.), was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. He is now the Pamela Harriman Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary.

Well worth checking out.

One Nation Under Google: Citizenship in the Technological Republic

A public talk by Professor Darin Barney
Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship, McGill University.

Friday, March 14, 2008
Arts W-215, 853 Sherbrooke Street West, McGill University
18h30, free

Does more technology equal more freedom? While the nuts and bolts of technological progress - computers, cellphones, internet access wired and wireless - become accessible to more and more people, the promise of increased civic engagement enabled by these gadgets seems to have eluded our wired society. There’s a lot more to technology, and to democracy, than wires and buttons, and it has a much deeper affect on our lives than simply being tools we can use well or badly.

In Dr. Barney’s words, “technology is, at once, irretrievably political and consistently depoliticizing. It is at the centre of this
contradiction that the prospects for citizenship in the midst of technology lie.” Presenting a range of examples from YouTube to the
hidden networks of food production and government bureaucracy, Barney contests the common notion that technology necessarily leads to enhanced freedom and improved civic engagement. One Nation Under Google examines the challenge of citizenship in a technological society, and asks whether the demands of technology are taking over the practice of democracy.

Presented in collaboration with CKUT 90.3FM

[ps, godshdarn it, ckut has a frustrating web site]

QUESTION: How can you hold the “Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship” and not have a blog?

By designing for the poorest people in the world, the One Laptop Per Child has developed a green machine with no peers. Radically lower power consumption, much less toxic crap. Here’s Mary-Lou Jepsen talking about it:

I had a conversation last night with my neighbour, who tells me that 80% of food production in the world is still done by bio power: horses, oxen, humans etc. But that there has been no innovation in tools for this kind of farming (ploughs, harrows etc) in about 100 years. Why? At least in part, because big agribiz companies want to control agriculture from seed to sale, and want as few farmers making decisions as possible. So: make farming expensive (machinery), and design farming technology (patented seeds, expensive fertilizers & pesticides) that help big companies control agriculture; not so that farming is better for farmers or people.

In a conversation two nights ago with some other friends, we were talking about the inherent conflict in the pharma business: between: the fiduciary responsibility to increase profits every year; and the public good. These are not mutually exclusive; but neither are the aligned, and making money trumps public good, by definition, in publicly traded companies. That’s how they work - to run them otherwise is actually illegal. So we were just postulating: what if a new kind of pharma “company” came along, with public good as its mandate, rather than profit?

How are all these things related? OLPC is a non-profit project that may have developed the most revolutionary advance in the technology of personal computing we’ve seen in years, and it did so in a non-profit model, by developing for the poorest.

The poorest people in the world use farm technologies no one is spending much time developing improvements to; agriculture R&D goes to: biotech, pesticides, herbicides, and probably a little bit to machinery. What happens if a non-profit effort develops around making ancient farming tools and techniques more efficient?

And for pharma, same question: why can’t we think of organizing our drug system in a way that prioritizes health, rather than profit? What would it look like? What would the results be?

Am I a crazy communist? Well, these guys are pretty good at making encyclopedia, and if you want to buy a tent, I’d send you, without a second’s hesitation, to these guys.

Kids in a school start building Legotown. Eventually, powerful Legotown figures emerge, and inequalities surface. Some kids are excluded from Legotown, some control the enterprise, some struggle against each other; trading markets develop for various pieces. Teachers get nervous. Eventually, Legotown gets destroyed by external forces, and teachers ponder what they’ve wrought, and start a number of “experiments” to see how the kids react to changing rules.

Why We Banned Legos: Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom, by Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin. A wonderful and thought-provoking essay/report.

[I should note that I am glad I was not in this class as a kid, with these somehow-creepy-social-engineering teachers]

All of it applies somehow to the “open” world of the web, in some ways I have not quite figured out yet. Here are some choice paras:

The nature of power:

During the boom days of Legotown, we’d suggested to the key Lego players that there was an unequal distribution of power giving rise to conflict and tension. Our suggestions were met with deep resistance. Children denied any explicit or unfair power, making comments like “Some-body’s got to be in charge or there would be chaos,” and “The little kids ask me because I’m good at Legos.” They viewed their power as passive leadership, benignly granted, arising from mastery and long experience with Legos, as well as from their social status in the group.

What does power look like?:

We began by inviting the children to draw pictures of power, knowing that when children represent an idea in a range of “languages” or art media, their understandings deepen and expand. “Think about power,” said Kendra. “What do you think ‘power’ means? What does power look like? Take a few minutes to make a drawing that shows what power is.”

As children finished their drawings, we gathered for a meeting to look at the drawings together. The drawings represented a range of understandings of power: a tornado, love spilling over as hearts, forceful and fierce individuals, exclusion, cartoon superheroes, political power.

On being powerless (in one of the post-Legotown trading games):

When the teaching staff met to reflect on the Lego trading game, we were struck by the ways the children had come face-to-face with the frustration, anger, and hopelessness that come with being on the outside of power and privilege. During the trading game, a couple of children simply gave up, while others waited passively for someone to give them valuable pieces. Drew said, “I stopped trading because the same people were winning. I just gave up.” In the game, the children could experience what they’d not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised — and angry, discouraged, and hurt.

On system unfairness vs. individual unfairness:

To make sense of the sting of this disenfranchisement, most of the children cast Liam and Kyla as “mean,” trying to “make people feel bad.” They were unable or unwilling to see that the rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. Playing by the rules led to a few folks winning big and most folks falling further and further behind. The game created a classic case of cognitive disequilibrium: Either the system is skewed and unfair, or the winners played unfairly. To resolve this by deciding that the system is unfair would call everything into question; young children are committed to rules and rule-making as a way to organize a community, and it is wildly unsettling to acknowledge that rules can have built-in inequities. So most of the children resolved their disequilibrium by clinging to the belief that the winners were ruthless — despite clear evidence of Liam and Kyla’s compassionate generosity.

On ownership (which, by the way, illustrates the radical and difficult departure that projects like LibriVox force us to confront, and why public domain - renouncing ownership - is so much more radical than creative commons - which just defines new rules of ownership):

In their reflections, the children articulated several shared theories about how ownership is conferred.

* If I buy it, I own it:

Sophia: “She owns the lavender balls because she makes them, but if I buy it, then it’s mine.”

* If I receive it as a gift, I own it:

Marlowe: “My mom bought this book for me because she thought it would be a good reading book for me. I know I own it because my mom bought it and she’s my mom and she gave it to me.”

* If I make it myself, I own it:

Sophie: “I sewed this pillow myself with things that my teacher gave me, like stuffing and fabric. I sewed it and it turned into my pillow because it’s something I made instead of something I got at the store.”

* If it has my name on it, I own it:

Alex: “My teacher made this pillow for me and it has my name on it.”

Kendra: “If I put my name on it, would I own it?”

Alex: “Well, Miss S. made it for me… but if your name was on it, then you would own it.”

Sophie: “Kendra, don’t put your name on it, OK?”

* If I own it, I make the rules about it:

Alejandro: “I own this computer, because my grandpa gave it to me. I lend it to my friends so that they can play with it. But I make the rules about it.”

Teachers impose the Bolshevik Revolution, to build New Legotown:

We invited the children to work in small, collaborative teams to build Pike Place Market with Legos. We set up this work to emphasize negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity. We wanted the children to practice the big ideas we’d been exploring. We wanted Lego Pike Place Market to be an experience of group effort and shared ownership: If Legotown was an embodiment of individualism, Lego Pike Place Market would be an experiment in collectivity and consensus.

Kids start sounding like zombie-versions of Newt Gingrich’s worst nightmare:

From our conversations, several themes emerged.

* Collectivity is a good thing:

“You get to build and you have a lot of fun and people get to build onto your structure with you, and it doesn’t have to be the same way as when you left it…. A house is good because it is a community house.”

* Personal expression matters:

“It’s important that the little Lego plastic person has some identity. Lego houses might be all the same except for the people. A kid should have their own Lego character to live in the house so it makes the house different.”

* Shared power is a valued goal:

“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building. And it’s important to have the same priorities.”

“Before, it was the older kids who had the power because they used Legos most. Little kids have more rights now than they used to and older kids have half the rights.”

* Moderation and equal access to resources are things to strive for:

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes…. We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces.”

Teachers get excited by the raw clay of Hobbesian childhood they have molded, through idealism and power structure management, into paragons of Rawlsian enlightenment:

As teachers, we were excited by these comments. The children gave voice to the value that collectivity is a solid, energizing way to organize a community — and that it requires power-sharing, equal access to resources, and trust in the other participants.

Paradise, built and achieved:

From this framework, the children made a number of specific proposals for rules about Legos, engaged in some collegial debate about those proposals, and worked through their differing suggestions until they reached consensus about three core agreements:

*All structures are public structures. Everyone can use all the Lego structures. But only the builder or people who have her or his permission are allowed to change a structure.
*Lego people can be saved only by a “team” of kids, not by individuals.
*All structures will be standard sizes.

With these three agreements — which distilled months of social justice exploration into a few simple tenets of community use of resources — we returned the Legos to their place of honor in the classroom.

A fascinating story, and one I need to think about more. It’s very relevant to life in places like LibriVox, I think, and I’m not sure why I am reacting with at least some negative cynicism. Maybe because one power-structures not examined is the relationship between kids and teachers? Maybe because the kids didn’t choose to participate in this experiment? Anyway, why do I not celebrate this experience, which mirrors in some ways the collectivist-do-goodness that underlies a project like LibriVox? To ponder more.

Hmm, maybe I am just having a bad day? Any thoughts on this from yon readers?

[this comes via mike migurski]

Mmmm, Danish:

[via: ernietheattorney]

This looks like a tide-turning event: National Post’s editorial on copyright reads:

For Canada to introduce DMCA-style legislation now would do nothing but encourage nuisance lawsuits. There is nothing wrong with tough rules against copyright infringement, but criminalizing behaviour that might facilitate copyright infringement only incidentally is the wrong approach. If that road had been taken when household videotape machines came onto the market - and the movie industry tried very hard in the courts to steer the law in that direction - no one would be allowed to own a VCR.

There’s more…

[via: Michael Geist]

Wired reports:

A 23-year-old student journalist in Afghanistan has been sentenced to death for downloading and distributing a report that is critical of the oppressive treatment of women in some Islamic societies.

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh (at right), who is a journalism student at Balkh University and a writer for Jahan-e Naw, was sentenced last October after downloading a report from a Farsi website that criticized Islamic fundamentalists who misrepresent statements in the Koran to justify the oppression of women. Kambaksh was arrested after someone filed a complaint against him. He is accused of blasphemy for distributing the report to other students and teachers at his school.

He was tried by a sharia court (which oversees Islamic religious law) and was not allowed legal representation, according to news reports. The Afghan Senate passed a motion this week supporting the sentence, according to the British newspaper The Independent.

Other journalists have been warned that they would be arrested if they protested in support of Kambaksh.

[via boing]

So, what I don’t get is this: if you think waterboarding should be legal, then say so. If you think it should not be legal say so. But this non-answer stuff, I find objectionable.

Here, on DemocracyNow!, is US Attorney General Michael Mukasey paddling around and around in circles, at the Senate Judiciary Committee:

> Audio (starts at 9:45)
> Reaplayer (starts at 9:45)

When I worked in New York in a financial brokerage house in 2000-2001, my colleagues (I think it was Manus, a short funny Italian from New Jersey; and Bill, my office-mate, from Texas; and probably a few others) told me that in the banking/finance business - at least their end of it - “Canadian” was a code word that actually meant “black.” I had the impression the term had been used like that for years.

I think we were at lunch, and they were all talking about someone or other, and Manus said, “Oh, he’s Canadian,” and I perked up and said, “Oh really, where is he from?…” and of course they all laughed and told me it meant black.

I guess it was so you could say nasty things about “Canadians” without anyone getting pissed off.

I totally forgot about that, till I just saw this in the Boing:

The Canadian National Post looks on with mild horror as American linguists report on the growing trend in the American south to use “Canadian” as a masking euphemism for black people, so that white racists can say socially inappropriate things without tipping listeners off about the cancer in their souls.

I would point out to Cory Doctorow, though, that (I hope) he’s got his definition of euphemism wrong. Since a euphemism is: “the substitution of a mild, indirect, or vague expression for one thought to be offensive, harsh, or blunt….”

I can buy that the term “Canadian” is mild, indirect, & vague; but I think that calling “black people” offensive, harsh or blunt … is not what Cory meant. Presumably he meant Canadian as a euphemism for more offensive words for black people (you know, like the n-one we’re not allowed to write).

But even there, it’s not really a euphemism, but rather a way to disguise direct racial insults, eg. “Oh, don’t work with him, he’s a Canadian.” Etc.

Anyway funny when little quirks of language pop up 8 years later in the newspaper as “new” linguistic habits. Funny in a sickening sort of way.

Parag Khannan has a compelling piece in New York Times Magazine about the passing of America’s sole superpower moment, and the new multipolar order, with China and the US vying for a share of the global pie, with EU playing both off against each other in the middle, and cashing the checks:

Robert Kagan famously said that America hails from Mars and Europe from Venus, but in reality, Europe is more like Mercury — carrying a big wallet. The E.U.’s market is the world’s largest, European technologies more and more set the global standard and European countries give the most development assistance. And if America and China fight, the world’s money will be safely invested in European banks. Many Americans scoffed at the introduction of the euro, claiming it was an overreach that would bring the collapse of the European project. Yet today, Persian Gulf oil exporters are diversifying their currency holdings into euros, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has proposed that OPEC no longer price its oil in “worthless” dollars. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela went on to suggest euros. It doesn’t help that Congress revealed its true protectionist colors by essentially blocking the Dubai ports deal in 2006. With London taking over (again) as the world’s financial capital for stock listing, it’s no surprise that China’s new state investment fund intends to locate its main Western offices there instead of New York. Meanwhile, America’s share of global exchange reserves has dropped to 65 percent. Gisele Bündchen demands to be paid in euros, while Jay-Z drowns in 500 euro notes in a recent video. American soft power seems on the wane even at home.

and …

And Europe’s influence grows at America’s expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream. Africa wants a real African Union like the E.U.; we offer no equivalent. Activists in the Middle East want parliamentary democracy like Europe’s, not American-style presidential strongman rule. Many of the foreign students we shunned after 9/11 are now in London and Berlin: twice as many Chinese study in Europe as in the U.S. We didn’t educate them, so we have no claims on their brains or loyalties as we have in decades past. More broadly, America controls legacy institutions few seem to want — like the International Monetary Fund — while Europe excels at building new and sophisticated ones modeled on itself. The U.S. has a hard time getting its way even when it dominates summit meetings — consider the ill-fated Free Trade Area of the Americas — let alone when it’s not even invited, as with the new East Asian Community, the region’s answer to America’s Apec.

and…

America’s global dominance: our military spending, our share of the global economy and the like. But there are statistics, and there are trends. To really understand how quickly American power is in decline around the world, I’ve spent the past two years traveling in some 40 countries in the five most strategic regions of the planet — the countries of the second world. They are not in the first-world core of the global economy, nor in its third-world periphery. Lying alongside and between the Big Three, second-world countries are the swing states that will determine which of the superpowers has the upper hand for the next generation of geopolitics. From Venezuela to Vietnam and Morocco to Malaysia, the new reality of global affairs is that there is not one way to win allies and influence countries but three: America’s coalition (as in “coalition of the willing”), Europe’s consensus and China’s consultative styles. The geopolitical marketplace will decide which will lead the 21st century.

[More…]

So, what’s Canada going to do? Should we lobby to join the EU? I don’t know if that’s a good idea, but I bet Quebec would get behind that project!

Heh.

[via Patrick]

It’s funny, I was thinking more or less this, sorta subconsciously when I heard that great speech. It was under the surface, but it was there:

am I now the only person left on the planet who finds Barack Obama a little bit dull? Every time I listen to him, I start off thinking I’m about to wet my pants, but a minute-and-a-half later find my mind wandering, asking itself things like: ‘What does “the challenge of hope” mean?’

Yet I turn and look around and everyone is shouting and screaming. Obama chants: ‘Something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it’ and there’s a collective swoon from grown pundits and hardened reporters, all of them tearing off their shirts and pleading for Obama to sign their chests with indelible marker pen.

[read more from the Guardian …]

He might be inspiring, but he doesn’t really say anything, does he? He just says it really well. More from Armando Iannucci:

It can make anything, even, for example, a simple chair, seem magnificent. Why vote for someone who says: ‘See that chair. You can sit on it’ when you can have someone like Obama say: ‘This chair can take your weight. This chair can hold your buttocks, 15 inches in the air. This chair, this wooden chair, can support the ass of the white man or the crack of the black man, take the downward pressure of a Jewish girl’s behind or the butt of a Buddhist adolescent, it can provide comfort for Muslim buns or Mormon backsides, the withered rump of an unemployed man in Nevada struggling to get his kids through high school and needful of a place to sit and think, the plump can of a single mum in Florida desperately struggling to make ends meet but who can no longer face standing, this chair, made from wood felled from the tallest redwood in Chicago, this chair, if only we believed in it, could sustain America’s huddled arse.’

Which I guess is Hillary Clinton’s point about him.

[heh funny, one has to be careful writing about Obama & Clinton. First black man; first woman running for pres … tricky].

I doubt if I’d like most of Ron Paul’s fiscal policies, but he sure as hell talks a good line. Check out his response when a very smarmy-looking debate moderator asks him about his: “electability … do you have any, sir?” (which spurred laughter from his opponents). In the video he gets a huge cheer from the crowd for a neat bit about borrowing money from China in order to finance a dictator in Pakistan so that we can bring democracy to Iraq. I keep thinking that it’s the right that needs to be asking questions of Republicans, not the left. And Ron Paul claims (with some basis) that he is the most conservative candidate in the running:

Blogger & podcaster BarakBarack Obama wins the democratic caucus nomination in Iowa, with 38% of the vote, beating out #2 John Edwards (30%), and #3 (!) Hillary Clinton (29%).

Video of his victory speech. Text of his speech.

Meanwhile, Chuck Norris fan, and creationist (from a non-pastafarian sect), Mike Huckabee took the Republican nomination with 34% (Guiliani got trounced, with just 4%). Video of speech. Text.

This was good, even if I didn’t recognize 50% of the people. As Patrick notes, the best of the most loathsome was … us:

9. You

Charges: You believe in freedom of speech, until someone says something that offends you. You suddenly give a damn about border integrity, because the automated voice system at your pharmacy asked you to press 9 for Spanish. You cling to every scrap of bullshit you can find to support your ludicrous belief system, and reject all empirical evidence to the contrary. You know the difference between patriotism and nationalism — it’s nationalism when foreigners do it. You hate anyone who seems smarter than you. You care more about zygotes than actual people. You love to blame people for their misfortunes, even if it means screwing yourself over. You still think Republicans favor limited government. Your knowledge of politics and government are dwarfed by your concern for Britney Spears’ children. You think buying Chinese goods stimulates our economy. You think you’re going to get universal health care. You tolerate the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques.” You think the government is actually trying to improve education. You think watching CNN makes you smarter. You think two parties is enough. You can’t spell. You think $9 trillion in debt is manageable. You believe in an afterlife for the sole reason that you don’t want to die. You think lowering taxes raises revenue. You think the economy’s doing well. You’re an idiot.

Exhibit A: You couldn’t get enough Anna Nicole Smith coverage.

Sentence: A gradual decline into abject poverty as you continue to vote against your own self-interest. Death by an easily treated disorder that your health insurance doesn’t cover. You deserve it, chump.

I’m batting around this idea, maybe you can help articulate it better. Here’s the basic idea:

The (monetary) value of something is defined by what you can’t do with it; not by what you can do with it.

I’m thinking of this particularly wrt to digital media, and the music biz. The “value” of LP records was defined not by what you could do with it (ie play music), but what you couldn’t do with it: copy it instantly and share it with all your friends. The LP is valuable because it’s scarce: you’ve got one, I don’t … hence it has value. Ditto tapes and CDs.

Thought experiment #1: imagine that in 1888 someone invented a cheap little device that recorded sounds and that also broadcasted sounds to the world; anyone who had such a device could catch those other sound broadcasts and record them … and the device also had infinite storage. If that were the case, how do you think the music “business” would have evolved?

Thought experiment #2: what if our memories were so good that we could hear a song and remember it exactly, and replay it in our minds exactly as we heard it the first time? would musicians go out of their way to try to prevent individuals from hearing their music?

With audiohijack pro I can copy any sound that passes thru my computer, if I so choose. Regardless of any DRM or whatever else you try to stick on your media. Further, I consume 90% of my media on my computer. So if you want me to hear it, I will be able to record it.

I know this is all old news, but I am reminded of my discussions at PodCamp boston with the founder of Select Records (one of the first indie hip hop labels). He was a good guy, an indie trench warrior who worked for many years trying to get little bands popular. But like many record execs sees P2P etc as “illegal downloading.”

But the point is, it doesn’t matter what he thinks. Ditto for Sony and all the rest. (Same for people who complain about Wikipedia… it doesn’t matter if you think Wikipedia is a bad idea, because it’s what people actually use).

It’s just too easy for me or anyone else to copy music. There’s nothing that can be done, it’s over.

Speaking of which, Galacticast did a great little DMCA.ca vid.

Question: Do you want it to be legal for you to copy your cd into mp3 format, and put it on your ipod? Or should that result in fines, jail time, beheadding?

If you do wish to copy CDs to mp3 to stick em on your computer/player then tell your government that you will be pissed if they pass legislation that turns you into a criminal. See some more info here.

If no, then you will be happy to hear that the RIAA in the USA is suing people for doing just that.

Also: check the Galacticast DMCA.ca video.

From Boing:

The Washington Post reports today that the FBI is launching a $1 billion project to build the world’s largest database of individuals’ physical characteristics. The effort would give the American government unprecedented abilities to ID people here and overseas.

[more …]

from BaghdadBrian in the twittersphere:

Alive in Baghdad correspondent Ali Shafeya was killed on December 14th, details are still coming in. He was 24, survived by mom and sister.

and:

but is that worth even one human’s life? We are still not 100% sure its not the assignment we gave that killed him.

and:

We’ve raised $90, can anyone else help Ali’s family pay for the funeral? his brothers and father are all dead. survived by one sis & mother

and:

you can make a donation to suport his family to smallworldnews@gmail.com via paypal, please note that it is for Ali’s family.

for more details, see:
* alive in baghdad

UPDATE: Following brian’s posts on twitter over the past 18 hours or so has been pretty intense. Blow-by-blow of a guy both updating as the info comes in, and struggling with the hard reality of death all around the amazing citizen journalism project that he started in a war zone. Further, he’s been wondering whether the investigative assignment that Ali was on may have been the cause of his death (he was shot 31 times by the Iraqi National Guard). He’s considering closing the project down.

I can’t even imagine. I keep thinking about the safe little projects I work on, imagining what it would be like to have a web project where people started dying. It’s so easy to start good web projects. But it takes so much courage to continue in the face of reality this bloody.

I met Brian briefly at Podcamp Boston. I wish I had met him sooner - I was just leaving. I would have loved to talk more with him - of all the projects at that conference, his is - to me - by far the most important. AiB is exactly why the web changes things - even if it has been mostly ignored.

Jesus these Conservatives are a little over the top on their performance at the Climate talks in Bali, no?

Canada hosted an event called “Turning the Corner on Climate Change” apparently about Canada’s climate plan, with Environment Minister John Baird speaking. Instead, a number of Canadian companies spoke about their products. Baird apparently poked his head into the room, in his flip flops, and then left. He didn’t speak at all.

Whatever you think of Climate, that’s not very classy.

If you’d like to know what I think about climate change, here are a couple of things I’ve written:

* Climate Change & Blogging
* Climate: Point-Counterpoint

Oh and if you feel like signing a petition, here’s one.

Finally, why not send a note to Environment Minister John Baird to tell him what you think:

John Baird, Minister of Environment
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0A6

Telephone: (613) 996-0984
EMail: BairdJ@parl.gc.ca
Web Site: www.johnbaird.com/

Michael Geist reports that the Canadian copytright bill is expected to rise from the dead:

There are rumours in Ottawa this evening that Industry Minister Jim Prentice has decided to forge ahead with the Canadian DMCA with the bill to be introduced tomorrow morning.

I have two model letters that you could send (along with addresses):

* The short letter.
* The long letter.

Report is just playing on CBC radio news.

Boing Boing reports that Industry Minister Jim Prentice is having an open house about copyright tomorrow (Saturday). If you are in calgary, head on over, if you are not in Calgary, then why not send an email that says this:

Dear Minister Prentice:
I don’t like your copyright legislation. You are making a big mistake.
Best regards.

Send this, or similar messages to:
Prentice.J@parl.gc.ca

Tracey posted this over at Datalibre.ca …:

There is an excellent article in the Toronto Star about why we have little understanding about the social demographic situation in Canada! Bref! No one can afford the research! In the article Truth carries a painful user fee; Carol Goar tells it like it is right now in Canada when it comes to access to our public data:

The United Way of Greater Toronto had to pay the agency $28,000 for government data showing that family poverty deepened in Toronto between 2000 and 2005, while low-income households made modest gains everywhere else.

It had to spend its donors’ money to prove that Toronto has the lowest median income of any major urban centre in the country.

It had to dip into its charitable givings to marshal evidence – already collected at taxpayers’ expense – that a one-size-fits-all poverty strategy won’t work for Toronto.

Sent, via email (letter is better, but what can you do?), to a number of people, including Jim Prentice, the Minister of Industry, responsible for the Copyright Act in Canada, and my MP - Thomas Mulcair NDP - Outremont. Please feel free to use, adapt, copy etc this letter and do with it what you would like. I hereby renounce all copyrights on this text.

Dear Minister Prentice:

I am disturbed by the Government’s announcement that a new copyright bill will be tabled in December, without any public consultation. Copyright is a crucial issue for Canadian competitiveness - in education, science, business, and culture. All indications are that overly restrictive copyright laws stifle innovation, yet this is exactly what the Government appears to be tabling. A restrictive copyright bill could have disastrous effects on the future of the country.

The most important problem is that the Government is tabling a bill without consultations with Canadians, so that a full range of voices has not been heard. This means that the best decision cannot be made, and instead narrow interests of those who *do* have the Government’s ear are likely to trump what is good for the future of the country.

The bill, apparently, is likely to include anti-circumvention provisions (digital locks on machines so that using the things Canadians buy, the way they wish to use them will be illegal). These provisions have proved to create significant harm to education, privacy protection, security, research, free speech, and consumer interests.

The bill does not address crucial issues such as protecting parody, time shifting, device shifting, and the making of backup copies. Further, it does not address outdated and innovation-stifling crown copyright, or restrict statutory damages awards to cases of commercial infringement.

The government last consulted Canadians on digital copyright issues in 2001. The Internet and technology use have changed dramatically since then, yet the Government has done little - that I am aware of - to find out what implications these changes have on Canadians. On businesses, on teachers, on regular people.

As a small web business owner, I am shocked that the Government would charge ahead on such important legislation without doing the work required to understand the implications properly, without doing the work required to find out how it will impact Canadians, and what it is that Canadians actually want.

Please reconsider this dangerous approach.

Best regards,
etc.

If you want to send something to him:

Jim Prentice Constituency Office
Suite 105
1318 Centre St NE
Calgary, Alberta T2E 2R7
403 216-7777
Fax 403 230-4368
Prentice.J@parl.gc.ca

And if you’d like to find your MP, to send to him/her, plug your postal code in here.

Check out the comment section of CBC’s Search Engine show on the Feds’ expected copyright proposal.

Michael Geist writes a worrying article about how the web is starting to look more and more like cable.

Until recently, the Internet was precisely the opposite [of cable], offering unlimited user choice, continuous interactivity, and technological capabilities to copy and remix content. That is gradually changing as broadcasters seek to re-assert greater geographic control over their content, ISPs experiment with cable-like models for prioritized content delivery, and some creator groups lobby the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission to adapt Canadian content regulations to the Internet.

one thing that’s starting to happen more and more is geographical blocking:

…NBC and Fox recently unveiled Hulu.com to some critical acclaim, while Comedy Central created a new site for the popular Daily Show that features a complete archive of eight years of programming.

Canadians, alas, are generally locked out of these sites due to licensing restrictions. Canadian broadcasters have been scrambling to buy the Internet rights to U.S. programming, both to protect their local broadcasts and to beef up their online presence. U.S. broadcasters may eventually decide it is more profitable to stream their content on a worldwide basis and to remove longstanding geographic restrictions, however, for the moment they are parceling up the Internet as they would a broadcast destined for multiple cable markets. This geographic bordering extends beyond just blocking streamed content. The new Daily Show site is off-limits for Canadians since the U.S.-based Comedy Central recently took the unprecedented step of redirecting Canadian visitors to the CTV-owned Comedy Network site.

I don’t like the sound of all that. But what’s even *worse* is that cultural groups - in the name of “protecting Canadian culture” are thinking along the same lines. If commercial broadcasters in collusion with ISPs (who sometimes are commercial broadcasters) can shove their content at us, and keep us away from other content, then can’t we make sure that “Canadian culture” (chosen by us) gets precedence too … that is, can’t we start deciding what you watch and read again, all the better to *improve* our bottom line and country?

Uck.

And in other news youtube launches a Canadian version, Youtube.ca (which redirects to ca.Youtube.com)… Oilman has some complaints, for instance about this sentence from their blog: “In developing territory-specific YouTube sites, we wanted to bring YouTube to you, in your language, while making local talent more visible and getting closer to our users around the world.”

The rest of the complaints there seem to miss the point, ie he wants Youtube Canada to be more representative of Canada - bigger flag etc. Why? Why would you want Youtube Canada any more than … oh … say Sympatico Video (shudder). What’s wrong with just leaving the Internet as it is, (mostly) borderless?

[Incidentally, why do Canadians have to be such a bunch of insecure whiners? See the comments on Oilman’s post].

From one end, Youtube.ca doesn’t make much sense, as good content on youtube should win the good old fashioned way, because it gets linked to and people like it. Youtube.ca probably makes it harder to find good stuff, tho maybe all these geo-youtubes will feed into the main youtube.com site? Hope so.

But putting Geist’s article together with Youtube.ca - it’s obvious that they want to do more geographically-targeted advertising. Just like TV!

I already find it annoying that google searches search differently on different computers - depending on, for instance, where you are and what language your browser is set to. I don’t want Google to filter searches “just for me” based on where I am etc… I want to know what’s at the top of the listing.

But now it looks like the rest of the web is shifting in this direction too.

Security Guard: What is in this tube?
Me: Prescription skin cream.
SG: What is it for?
Me: ?
SG: What is it for?
Me: … Um… a skin condition.
SG: Did a doctor prescribe this?
Me: Yes.
SG: Do you have a note from the doctor?
Me: The prescription label is on the tube. Right there [pointing].
SG: So you don’t have a note from the doctor?
Me: The doctor’s name is on the prescription label.
SG: [reading] …
Me: [waiting] …
SG: Do you need this cream?
Me: Yes.
SG: So you are saying you need this cream?
Me: Yes.
SG: But the prescription label says: “Apply to affected areas twice a day *if* needed.”
Me: [silence]
SG: It says, “If needed.”
Me: Yes.
SG: So do you need it or not?
Me: Yes.
SG: You need it?
Me: Yes.
SG: OK, but next time get a note from a doctor.

Press conference question:

Q: What’s your definition of the word “torture.”
The President: Of what?
Q: The word “torture.” What’s your definition?
The President: That’s defined in U.S. law and we don’t torture.
Q: Can you give me your version of it, sir?
The President: Whatever the law says.

Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113C, Section 2340, of the U.S. Code says:

(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under
the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical
or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering
incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his
custody or physical control;
(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged
mental harm caused by or resulting from -
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of
severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened
administration or application, of mind-altering substances or
other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly
the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be
subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the
administration or application of mind-altering substances or
other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly
the senses or personality;

(see NYTimes)

Somehow this doesn’t seem right:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been working on a secret project to build a $2-million government-controlled media centre, a newspaper reported Monday…

The new briefing centre would supplant the 47-year-old National Press Theatre, a venue where government news conferences are moderated by the executive members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery Association, a group of newspapers, broadcasters and other media outlets who report on Parliament Hill…

Not knowing much about press on Parliament Hill, I wondered, “what could the reason for this be?” One answer:

One document obtained by the Star stated that the new centre is part of efforts to “put in place robust physical and information security measures to protect the prime minister and cabinet.” …

Paranoid, but, OK, maybe reasonable. (Then again, what exactly is “information security” as it relates to the PM’s press briefings?) More:

According to documents, the new centre could give the government control over which journalists attend news conferences.

Ah. Now that, it seems to me, should be illegal. It’s certainly undemocratic.

The government would also have the ability to do its own filming at the events, and could provide the footage to journalists, instead of letting them film the events themselves, the Star reported….

They could even do their own interviews!

Also reported in the article, Harper “has only made one appearance at the National Press Theatre, on Oct. 3.”

Interesting.

[via publicbroadcasting.ca]

The Green Party, reports Michael Geist, put out it’s policy document.

Have not looked thru it yet, but there’s support for network neutrality:

Supporting the free flow of information

The Internet has become an essential tool in knowledge storage and the free flow of information between citizens. It is playing a critical role in democratizing communications and society as a whole. There are corporations that want to control the content of information on the internet and alter the free flow of information by giving preferential treatment to those who pay extra for faster service.

Our Vision

The Green Party of Canada is committed to the original design principle of the internet - network neutrality: the idea that a maximally useful public information network treats all content, sites, and platforms equally, thus allowing the network to carry every form of information and support every kind of application.

Green Solutions

Green Party MPs will:

* Pass legislation granting the Internet in Canada the status of Common Carrier – prohibiting Internet Service Providers from discriminating due to content while freeing them from liability for content transmitted through their systems.

and free/open source software:

Open source computer software

As computer hardware improves, it is important that software programs are readily modifiable by the people who buy and use them. Developing alongside the proprietary software sector is Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). This software is generally available at little or no cost, making it very popular in the developing world. It can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed with little or no restriction. Businesses can adapt the software to their specific needs.

Under the free software business model, vendors may charge a fee for distribution and offer paid support and customization services. Free software gives users the ability to work together enhancing and refining the programs they use. It is a pure public good rather than a private good.

Our Vision

The Green Party supports the goals and ideals of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and believes that Canada’s competitiveness in global information technology (IT) will be greatly enhanced by strongly supporting FLOSS.

Green Solutions

Green Party MPs will:

* Ensure that all new software developed for or by government is based on open standards and encourage and support a nationwide transition to FLOSS in all critical government IT systems. This will make Canada’s IT infrastructure more secure and robust, lower administration and licensing costs and develop IT skills.
* Support the transition to FLOSS throughout the educational system

I’d say it would be worth asking them what they think of civic access to canadian government data.

This is why multiple sources for news is important … then again, who you gonna believe?

• As British Leave, Basra Deteriorates: Violence Rises in Shiite City Once Called a Success Story
  Washinton Post, August 7, 2007
• Basra violence increasing as British leave
  UPI, August 7
• British exit from Basra has led to drop in violence, says General David Patraeus
  Times (UK), September 19, 2007
• Surge in Basra killings may force British back to city
  Independent (UK), September 26
• Iraqis say Basra quieter after British troop pullout
  Reuters, October 1, 2007

Here’s an interesting description of Europe (which I guess you could say of Canada too), from the Washington Post:

Europe is more of a “workfare state” than a welfare state. As one British political analyst said to me recently: “Europe doesn’t so much have a welfare society as a comprehensive system of institutions geared toward keeping everyone healthy and working.” Properly understood, Europe’s economy and social system are two halves of a well-designed “social capitalism” - an ingenious framework in which the economy finances the social system to support families and employees in an age of globalized capitalism that threatens to turn us all into internationally disposable workers. Europeans’ social system contributes to their prosperity, rather than detracting from it, and even the continent’s conservative political leaders agree that it is the best way.

[link…]

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been thinking lately about conservatives and progressives, and the problems of our current climate of political debate, heightened exponentially by cable news pundits in the USA. I have a trip to Saskatoon coming up, and I was thinking of contacting a few Sask bloggers, and Small Dead Animals comes pretty high in the search. It’s well-known right-leaning mostly-political blog from a woman in Saskatchewan, and a couple of the posts I read were … well they really turned me off. They seemed so pointlessly hostile to the “left.” And I landed on a couple of other Sask blogs, and had the same reaction (later I found some more comfortably lefty-like Sask blogs).

And yet much of the stuff on the lefty blogs is the same sort of thing (here too, probably): juvenile name-calling etc. But it steams us when we disagree; when we agree, it’s usually pretty funny stuff.

And further, I betcha if I met Kate of SDA, we’d probably get along fine, even if I don’t like her politics, and she doesn’t like mine, she’d probably not an idiot* (see below), and we’d probably have a fine discussion about healthcare or terrorism without wanting to punch each other.

We have some friends, Bruce and Michelle. Bruce is about as far at the other end of the spectrum of my political beliefs as you can get - and every time I read his political blog posts, I get all red-eared. Yet when we meet, and even when we talk about politics, I realize how close we are about our various frustrations with the state of the universe. We just have different explanations, often, for why things are messed up (I blame evil corporations; he blames corrupt governments; I blame the Conservatives, he blames the Liberals … we’re both right and we’re both wrong).

And I’ll bet you that most of us, lefties and righties - the non-idiots, at least - want more or less the same thing: a healthy country/planet, where we can leave things better for our kids, and where everyone gets a fair shot at having a decent life, where the rivers run clean and everyone’s got a job that lets them get the stuff they need; where the chances of getting killed by SARS or cancer or car crashes or corrupt police or terrorists or nuclear explosions are minimized.

On just about any issue (health care, security, environment etc), most non-idiot lefties and righties want the same sorts of outcomes.

And the real problem is not so much that we all want different things for the planet, but rather that we have some fundamental disagreements about how to get there, and what sort of impacts the different decisions about our course of action will have. Which are, sort of, testable differences: that is, some of them work and some of them don’t, and over time reasonable people should be able to look at policies, and outcomes, and decide based on the outcomes (rather than the philosophies behind them) whether they’re good or not.

Oh, one other thing I find strange about the political left-right split is that a belief about one subject is often directly correlated to a belief about another totally unrelated subject, eg. War on Terrorism, and Climate Change … and the other strange thing about those two threats in particular is that both sides use the same logic to argue one, and discount the other: climate change is a significant risk, therefore we must do extraordinary things to protect ourselves; terrorism is a significant risk, therefore we must do extraordinary things to protect ourselves. Yet no one on the right *wants* climate disaster, they just don’t believe we can or ought to do what’s being proposed; and no one on the left *wants* the “terrorists to win,” they just don’t believe what we are doing is the right strategy to deal with the threat.

Anyway, I think there are a couple of big problems: righties and lefties don’t talk much together about what they do want for the world, and the reasons they think actions A are better than actions B to get there. And further, the discussion between left and right is mediated - more in the US than here, but here too - by people who *are* idiots, and are paid to be idiots, because that makes people mad, and that sells advertising.

*All this brought to you by a quote from Marjane Satrapi (via Matt):

‘The only real divide in this world is between the idiots and non-idiots.’

Amen.

Interesting story about bin Laden, the net, and a bungle.

Apparently, a private US security company, SITE Intelligence Group, breached Al-Qaeda’s internet system a couple of years ago. And in September they intercepted that video of bin Laden (before it was public)…and passed it along to US intelligence services, with the warning: don’t make it public till the video comes out, or the breach will be found.

But the video was leaked to press, and George Bush was talking it up in speeches. Perhaps coincidentally, General David Petraeus was about to give testimony to Congress about things were going in Iraq (”well,” he reported).

Al-Qaeda apparently shut down the breached internet channels immediately afterwards, realizing that there were security holes in their system.

From the New York Sun:

But the disclosure from ABC and later other news organizations tipped off Qaeda’s internal security division that the organization’s Internet communications system, known among American intelligence analysts as Obelisk, was compromised. This network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda’s production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world.

While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda.

One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America’s Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda’s internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America’s intelligence community saw. “We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak,” the official said. “We lost an important keyhole into the enemy.”

See details: washington post, attytood.com, New York Sun.

[cross-posted at datalibre.ca]

The Guardian UK Tech Section has an ongoing campaign to free UK government data, with an associated blog: freeourdata.org.uk/blog.

Their campaign inspired a response from the Ordnance Survey titled:
These maps cost us £110m. We can’t give them away for free. The response argues that the maps cost money, that the OS needs money to operate, and that by charging for the maps they can continue to provide a valuable service. Among other things:

It cost Ordnance Survey £110m to collect, maintain and supply our data last year, but we are not “paid for by taxes”, as the campaign often claims. Instead, we depend entirely on receipts from licensing and direct sales to customers for our income - we receive no tax funding at all.

If we are successful, we can cover our costs, encourage widespread licensing through partners, and stay focused on providing value for users. Under licence, there are many examples where our data is free at the point of use. This does not mean there is zero cost.

[Interesting to note that the OS’s clients, much like statscan clients, are “users,” not citizens].

The Free Our Data people responded to response in their blog, noting the key reason for their campaign:

We believe [making OS data and maps free] would set off an explosion in private-sector use of the data, and lead to more companies which would create more jobs and generate more taxes. That would offset any extra taxation required to fund OS. Making the data free would also get rid of onerous and inefficient licensing schemes that tangle up central and local government departments, which wonder if they can reuse something or even display it on the web. (Search this blog for NEPHO.)

And that was followed by further response from Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo, the authors of the Power of Information, who say:

The key issue about charging is whether the UK would benefit more in net terms from the more vibrant information market that more open information would bring than it would lose through having to find an additional £60m per year. This is a serious question that the Treasury is currently looking into, having accepted the recommendation in the independent review we co-authored for the government earlier this year.

[link to complete letter].

Which garnered some further feedback from the Free Our Data.

And in the end this is a compelling case, perhaps the compelling case: a case that ought to convince you whatever your political leanings, right or left or circular. There are moral and social and philosophical reasons to support free government data. But the one that’s most likely to win converts is the case that free data makes for more innovation. The innovation can be commercial, social, socioeconomic - touching on health, environment, planning, equality etc, but also just good old-fashioned economic vitality.

But all of it, we’d argue, will “make Canada a better country” not just morally, but in our ability to solve important problems, and, yes, make some people more money in the mean time. Which means, in the end, more tax receipts, which means that it should offset any lost revenues Statscan and other Canadian agencies now receive for excluding all but big companies and institutions from their datasets.

A campaign to raise funds for cash-strapped Canadian cities has been contemptuously sabotaged by the federal government, who are demanding thousands of dollars in royalties for use of the “copyrighted” image of a Canadian penny and the phrase “one cent.”

[link from the Boing]

UPDATE:

The Royal Canadian Mint, a corporation of the federal government, has now demanded that the City of Toronto pay $47,680 for the public education campaign. Included in this amount is a request for $10,000 for the use of the words “one cent” in the campaign website address (www.onecentnow.ca) and the campaign email address (onecentnow@toronto.ca), and an additional $10,000 for the use of the words “one cent” in the campaign phone number (416-ONECENT). The remaining $27,680 has been assessed against the City for the use of the image of the Canadian penny in printed materials such as pins and posters. (The Mint has come to this amount by taking the total number of materials printed divided by the approximate population of Toronto, and then using a percentage of that number to arrive at a dollar figure.)

[link from tmcnet]

Web sites:

• onecentnow.ca
• royal canadian mint

UPDATE: IP lawyer Howard Knopf writes in Excess Copyright that:
a) the design for the current Canadian penny was done in 1937, by G.E. Kruger Gray, who died in 1943. In Canada, copyright expires 50 years after death of creator, meaning the penny is public domain as of 1993.
b) claiming copyright on the words “one cent” is absurd.

A court in the US has ordered a woman to pay $222,000 (£109,000) in damages for illegally file-sharing music.

The jury ordered Jammie Thomas, 32, from Minnesota, to pay for offering to share 24 specific songs online - a cost of $9,250 per song.

[link…]

UPDATE: Here is the playlist:

* Guns N Roses “Welcome to the Jungle”; “November Rain”
* Vanessa Williams “Save the Best for Last”
* Janet Jackson “Let’s What Awhile”
* Gloria Estefan “Here We Are”; “Coming Out of the Heart”; “Rhythm is Gonna Get You”
* Goo Goo Dolls “Iris”
* Journey “Faithfully”; “Don’t Stop Believing”
* Sara McLachlan “Possession”; “Building a Mystery”
* Aerosmith “Cryin’”
* Linkin Park “One Step Closer
* Def Leppard “Pour Some Sugar on Me”
* Reba McEntire “One Honest Heart”
* Bryan Adams “Somebody”
* No Doubt “Bathwater”; “Hella Good”; “Different People”
* Sheryl Crow “Run Baby Run”
* Richard Marx “Now and Forever”
* Destiny’s Child “Bills, Bills, Bills”
* Green Day “Basket Case”

I hope all these artists are ashamed of the companies they work for, and it would be nice if some of them said so publicly.

Just reading about Alive in Baghdad’s funding woes (a project of Small World News). They are a news video service, that gets close to issues no one one in big media cares about: for instance, how car bombs actually affect Iraqi families and individuals.

So why is it so hard to get funding for good projects? We’re having a similar problem with the Atwater Digital Literacy Project.

There are a number of micro-pay philanthropy sites now, and alive in baghdad, for instance has paypal subscription buttons … to try to get people like you and me to support them.

But it’s not really taking.

What could we do to make this easier for those of us who want to pay, and those in need of financial support?

I’ve often though about something like my Internet Support Bank Account - with an easy button. So I put in, say, $250 at the beginning of the year to my “micropay account”, and as I surf the web, finding projects I like, I drop, $5, 10, 25 or whatever to the cause. Until I run out of money.

In order to make this work there would have to be some kind of standardized payment system - that could work for instance on different platforms. I guess paypal works something like that - but I want something more dedicated to this idea, less corporate.

Probably there has to be some fun component too? I’m not sure.

I pay a couple of bucks a day for coffee, and i’ll buy a pint of beer without thinking twice. Why so hard to support projects I care about I wonder?

[tipped off by twitter Julien]

Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker article about plans for military strikes against Iran is up on their site, dealing with various intelligence opinions about what Iran’s up to in Iraq, and US Administration plans.

You can find it here:
Shifting Targets: New Plans for Iran.