10 Investigative Tools You Probably Haven’t Heard Of

“Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them ..” 
~Paul Hawken

As the old Havelite saying goes though, "When one person says its raining outside and the other says it's not, your job is not to report both sides; it's to look out the window".

Laughing Shall I Die,’ by Tom Shippey | Brandywine Books:

Vikings, Shippey says, were violent. They excelled at violence and intimidated their enemies, not only through their advanced ships, but through a “death cult” ethic, one which glorified courage and trivialized death. The proper way to face it was with a quip, a laugh, a pithy exit line. Not, he says, because of faith in Valhalla, but simply because courage was the value above all others, the thing other warriors esteemed.

The Next Pandemic Will Be Arriving Shortly Foreign Policy

'Five Eyes' and tech giants closely watch Australia's spyware bill / Latitude of Guine pigs ...

The world's fisheries are in crisis. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates 90 per cent of them have collapsed and China is the major player in their demise.

China's super trawlers are stripping the ocean bare as its hunger for seafood grows

Librarians Are Becoming Tech Specialists

I have a big problem with library technology. Let’s be honest, all libraries do! Mainly, the problem is… it sucks. Most of the time our tech already doesn’t work right, somebody decides to break it, and then we don’t have the money to fix anything

Who’s in the room? Access and influence in Australian politics

Danielle Wood, Kate Griffiths,Carmela Chivers

GRATTAN INSTITUTE

Powerful and well-resourced business groups, unions and not-for-profits are influencing policy in Australia to serve their interests, sometimes at the expense of the public interest. Stronger checks and balances on policy influence are needed, to make Australian politics cleaner and fairer.

Global Investigative Journalism Network: “Investigations, the saying goes, are just regular stories with a lot more labor put in. Investigative reporters spend inordinate amounts of time sifting through documents, verifying sources and analyzing data — and that’s if they can even get the data. As an investigative reporter with way too many stories I want to do, these are the tools I use to keep up with sources, stories and leads at a rapid rate. Let’s take a look at 10 of the best new tools for unearthing, accelerating, and keeping track of investigations…”






Ex-AGD boss Wilkins to head review of identity management
ID DATA: A new government review will examine ways to better protect Australians from identity theft and recover from the impacts should they become victims. Roger Wilkins of NSW Cabinet Fame circa 1990s
◾ Roger Wilkins: get used to losing your privacy





Renewal SA boss disappears but Premier won't say why
"Two top South Australian bureaucrats have gone on leave but Steven Marshall won't say why." (ABC)

WikiLeaks names one-time spokesman as editor-in-chief
"Assange will stay on as the group’s ‘publisher’, says WikiLeaks." (AP)

Are you an ‘insecure overachiever’?
"Decades of research into elite firms identified a particular type of worker: exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, but driven by a profound belief in their own inadequacy." (BBC Capital)










Harvard Business Review – Companies want access to more and more of your personal data — from where you are to what’s in your DNA. Can they unlock its value without triggering a privacy backlash?
Leslie K. John – Marvin Bower associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School: “…Technology has advanced far beyond the browser cookies and retargeting that allow ads to follow us around the internet. Smartphones now track our physical location and proximity to other people — and, as researchers recently discovered, can even do so when we turn off location services. We can disable the tracking on our web browsers, but our digital fingerprints can still be connected across devices, enabling our identities to be sleuthed out. Home assistants like Alexa listen to our conversations and, when activated, record what we’re saying. A growing range of everyday things — from Barbie dolls to medical devices — connect to the internet and transmit information about our movements, our behavior, our preferences, and even our health. A dominant web business model today is to amass as much data on individuals as possible and then use it or sell it — to target or persuade, reward or penalize. The internet has become a surveillance economy. What’s more, the rise of data science has made the information collected much more powerful, allowing companies to build remarkably detailed profiles of individuals. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can make eerily accurate predictions about people using seemingly random data. Companies can use data analysis to deduce someone’s political affiliation or sexuality or even who has had a one-night stand. As new technologies such as facial recognition software and home DNA testing are added to the tool kit, the surveillance done by businesses may soon surpass that of the 20th century’s most invasive security states.


The New York Times – The Plot to Subvert an Election Unraveling the Russia Story So Far. “For two years, Americans have tried to absorb the details of the 2016 attack — hacked emails, social media fraud, suspected spies — and President Trump’s claims that it’s all a hoax. The Times explores what we know and what it means…For many Americans, the Trump-Russia story as it has been voluminously reported over the past two years is a confusing tangle of unfamiliar names and cyberjargon, further obscured by the shout-fest of partisan politics. What Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, may know or may yet discover is still uncertain.








MakeUseof (MUD): “Facebook was once the poster child of the social media revolution. Today, it’s a shining example of how not to run a social network. Facebook’s ongoing security and privacy issues mean young people are leaving in their droves. According to Pew Research, 44 percent of users aged 18 to 29 said they deleted the app in the last year. Given they are also the demographic who are most likely to understand Facebook’s confusing privacy settings (64 percent), this is all rather worrying…So, if you’re looking to jump ship and delete your Facebook profile, which social network should you head for next? Which Facebook alternatives won’t steal your data? Here are our top five picks….”

Property developer Michael Teplitsky claims he can't use a computer

Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry: Interim Report, 29 September 2018. In the executive summary of the report, Commissioner Hayne noted that the commission had exposed conduct by financial services firms that had attracted public condemnation. Commissioner Hayne said the key questions the commission had to answer were why such poor conduct had occurred and how to stop it happening again. He added that, in many cases, the answer to the first question was obvious. "Too often, the answer seems to be greed — the pursuit of short-term profit at the expense of basic standards of honesty," he wrote. "How else is charging continuing advice fees to the dead to be explained?" (Commissioner Hayne was obviously referring to his remarks on 29 May, “All I can hear is dead parrots Mr Dinelli.” From Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch.) However, the regulators also copped a serve from Hayne who noted that when misconduct was revealed, it either went unpunished or the consequences did not meet the seriousness of what had been done.