Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Tania, Nique Irena on mEdia dRagon

 On 25 November 2022, the Hon Virginia Bell AC delivered the report of her Inquiry into the Appointment of the Former Prime Minister to Administer Multiple Departments to the Prime Minister, the Hon Anthony Albanese MP.


Former High Court justice Virginia Bell described as “improbable” and “difficult to reconcile” some of Scott Morrison’s versions of the secrecy around his multiple ministries as she sought and failed to get a face-to-face meeting with the former prime minister.

A press conference and two Facebook posts by Morrison formed the bulk of his assistance to the inquiry despite Bell offering him a three-week window in which to talk directly to her, either in Sydney or his Canberra office.

Former High Court judge Virginia Bell sought to hear directly from Scott Morrison about the secret ministries affair.

Former High Court judge Virginia Bell sought to hear directly from Scott Morrison about the secret ministries affair.CREDIT:GILLIANNE TEDDER

Instead, Morrison relied on a solicitor to respond to Bell’s queries, including through a letter this week that warned Bell she would be unable to make any “inferences or conclusions” around national security issues because she would have to rely on incomplete information.

The review by Bell was ordered by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese after it was revealed in August that Morrison had himself secretly sworn in to administer the departments of treasury, home affairs, health, finance, and industry, science, energy and resources during his last term in government.


Bell’s inquiry shows the extent to which she went to hear from Morrison.

Bell wrote to Morrison on September 19 to “seek his assistance” with the inquiry. She proposed a meeting to hear directly his “account of the facts and circumstances” of his ministerial appointments, saying she could meet him on any date in the three weeks from September 26…

Former PM’s accounts of his decisions ‘difficult to reconcile’: Bell


 Analysis: Did the royal commission fix banking or are banks back to behaving badly?


Ex-MP Daryl Maguire charged with criminal conspiracy over visa scheme



France, investigation into illicit financing of Emmanuel Macron’s electoral campaign: his assignments at the McKinsey company are in the sights (Google Translate) Il Fatto Quotidiano (DJG). Imagine that!

“Researchers, governments, and civil society must come together to help. This paper explores how CERN can serve as a model for developing the Institute for Research on the Information Environment (IRIE).
By connecting disciplines and providing shared engineering resources and capacity-building across the world’s democracies, IRIE will scale up applied research to enable evidence-based policymaking and implementation. Where CERN “exists to understand the mystery of nature for the benefit of humankind,” IRIE will exist to understand the mystery of the information environment for the benefit of democracies and their citizens. 
While the laws of physics change slowly, the conditions within the information environment are little understood and changing rapidly through the addition of new technology. Additionally, studying the information environment will require analysis of personal and at times sensitive data of internet users, increasing the need for international collaboration. As CERN did by inventing new collaboration tools, IRIE will leverage those same technologies to unlock the collective genius of researchers and practitioners from a variety of fields to strengthen democracy, alongside interested citizens who contribute their own data and expertise. While there are obvious differences between the field of physics and those emerging to study the information environment, aspects of CERN’s development can guide the creation of IRIE, an institution that can uniquely address the growing needs of researchers.”


EFF: “This week, EFF’s Atlas of Surveillanceproject hit a bittersweet milestone. With this project, we are creating a searchable and mappable repository of which law enforcement agencies in the U.S. use surveillance technologies such as body-worn cameras, drones, automated license plate readers, and face recognition. It’s one of the most ambitious projects we’ve ever attempted.