Sunday, April 18, 2004
Tiger Force: Major media have failed to follow up the Blade’s revelations. It’s as if there’s a statute of limitations on the collective conscience. A conspiracy of silence has given way to widespread indifference, coupled, presumably, with contemporary anxieties...
Welcome and Unwelcome Attention: FBI
FBI Files on Kerry Stolen from Author's Home
Historian and biographer Gerald Nicosia has been the sudden object of both welcome and unwelcome attention lately. The SF Chronicle explains: The past two weeks have been too high-octane even for Nicosia, not unaccustomed to attention (or flak) on the Beat and political fronts. Fourteen boxes of FBI surveillance files that he battled for more than a decade to obtain have suddenly become a mother lode of information about the 1970s anti- war activities of Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry. So enticing are the contents of those files, somebody slipped into Nicosia's modest Corte Madera home on March 25 and made off with several thousand pages -- most dealing with Kerry's years in Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
· Without a permit, rising from the websites
· See Also Were you there when they spied on MEdia Dragon? How many boxes of surveillance files are there?
· See Also Battered and Bloodied Battalion: Behind the birth of Tiger Force
· See Also (Tiger Force) Blade wins Pulitzer: Series exposing Vietnam atrocities earns top honor
· See Also No-one realized that terrorists could use an airplane as a weapon, except for Tom Clancy and NORAD
· See Also Antony Loewenstein: Tools to stop them engineering your consent
· See Also A Busy Person's Guide to the Bush Press Conference
Exclusives from Iraq
This week, in only his third prime-time press conference in three-and-a-half years of presidency, George W. Bush admitted the past few weeks in Iraq have been difficult.
OpenDemocracy continues its extraordinary coverage of the spiralling crisis.
From Iraq, Ayub Nuri, a supporter of the war, watches the US military unite Shi'a, Sunni and Kurds against America.
Middle East expert, Sami Zubaida, identifies the basic cause of the trouble in Iraq: One year after the occupation and the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime the great majority of Iraqis are worse off...
Why do they do it, these whistleblowers? Why do they dare speak out? Whether in the private or public sector, often they lose their livelihoods, and the strain can damage their health, end their closest relationships and smash their friendships. Almost always they are smeared, threatened and put under intolerable psychological pressure... The balance of power is so stacked against the ethical individual that unless citizens do something to redress it, we'll run out of whistleblowers. We'll miss them when they're gone.
Axe Labor's Mates Boards: Brogden's committment to honesty blows Carr's out of the water
The NSW Opposition has promised to abolish more than 20 statutory boards including Landcom and Sydney Water, in an effort to save up to $5 million a year in directors' fees paid to Labor Mates.
· Pork O Barrel: The truth hurts... especially in SusSex Street
The political practice of dipping into the public trough to finance projects that benefit only a single legislator is so firmly established that most people yawn when they see the words pork-barrel spending. Yet every so often a project comes along with such a grotesquely negative cost-benefit ratio that even the most cynical citizen snaps awake...
· See Also Pork, Sweet and Sour [ courtesy of http://hotbuttereddeath.ubersportingpundit.com/ Personally I think they've got it all arse-backwards. The real issue is not how do you stop idiots and lunatics from voting, but how do you stop them from running for government... ]
· See Also Wife Refuses To Disclose Tax Info: Kerry claimed a wealthy candidate must release returns to prove he pays a fair share in a tax system that isn't fair and lets the super-rich get off
Oops, somehow MEdia D missed this link last week in the Sydney Morning Herald... The power of search
+ Use "" for phrase searching
+ Boolean available (and, or, andnot)
+ t: to limit to words in the title/headline of the document
+ d: to limit to words in the text of the document.
+ It's possible to combine the syntax
More Search News Tips & Topix
Open all hours
With the click of a mouse, libraries and museums are reaching a new audience.
It was Umberto Eco who said libraries had always been humanity's way of preserving its collective wisdom, a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten. Now, thanks to the internet, Australians are peering beyond the bricks and mortar, seeing libraries and museums for what they always wanted to be - citadels of ideas, repositories of human knowledge.
· Ironically, the web's flaws are what now help people appreciate the integrity of the information issued by libraries and institutions such as the Sydney Morning Herald [ via Best Stack & Library in the World]
· See Also Special librarians are information 'detectives'
· See Also On the seventh day Cold River rested: eBook of the Month
· See Also And now, the good word by email - and that's gospel
· See Also Print-on-demand
· See Also Sifry's Alerts: BoingBoing adds Technorati support - you can too!
To what extent might (bloggers) contribute to the spread of disinformation, and to tyrannies of misinformed majorities?
Rebecca MacKinnon
BloggerCon: On the lowered barrier of entry...
Jay Rosen is moderating a discussion at BloggerCon on Saturday of the questions, What is Journalism And What Can Weblogs Do About It? I am reading through his background essay and the associated comments to get a feel for what it will be like.
Right up front, Jay hits me over the head with insight in making sure that journalism is not defined as a profession, but an act...
Dave Winer: I think the best journalists around today are bloggers, not professionals, and I'm not saying that to be argumentative, I really believe it, and could and would debate it, except this is not the topic of this session.
· My advice to bloggers seeking traffic is to entirely ignore anything said by bubble-blowers [Link Poached from makeoutcity.com: all you need are kisses to start a makeout party]
· See Also Michele Catalano Of A Small Victory Gives Up Political Blogging
· See Also Virtual Opinion
· See Also Fascinating article on domain names: Get Out of My Namespace
· See Also The perils of NexGen Librarian
Saturday, April 17, 2004
Left & Right Join to Voice Concerns Over Patriot Act
In April , Senator Orrin Hatch's Senate Judiciary Committee field hearing on the USA Patriot Act in Salt Lake City made for strange bedfellows, as liberals, libertarians, and conservatives joined together to voice their concerns over a half-dozen provisions in the Patriot Act, as reported in the Salt Lake Tribune. One such provision is Section 215, which gives law enforcement officials broad authority to demand that libraries or bookstores turn over books, records, papers, and documents.
· A new politics and the culture of fear
· See Also Iraq: Regardless of ones political persuasion it must be seen at the very least as a humanitarian catastrophe
If Australia's public servants tell the Government only what it wants to hear, then politicians have an escape hatch when things go wrong - in Timor, Iraq or anywhere else...
· See Also Speak no Evil [Southerly Buster: All that's happening is that the Man of Steel is repeating his usual pattern of cherry-picking reports to make himself and his policies look good (16/04/2004)]
· See Also Lance Collins: The man they couldn't silence
[Quiggin: It's been a long time since I took on trust anything coming out of policy departments like Treasury and the Productivity Commission. Under the present government, we've already learned we can't trust statements from the armed forces, the Defence Department or the Electoral Commission. But until now, I've never seen any serious evidence of political interference with ABS. This letter suggests that the process has begun]
· See Also Price of Mistakes
· Colonel Richard Tracey is, in fact, Dick Tracey, QC [Link Poached from Backpages]
· Militants free Czech hostages
· See Also 'I'll show you how an Italian dies': hero hostage
· See Also Links to the full text of CRS reports covering homeland security, intelligence, Iraq, national defense, national security threats & issues, NATO and terrorism [Congressional-Research-Service Reports Links to Reports
As seen somewhere on the Mittel Earth Web:Just can't be stopped from blogging, no matter how little financial reward they find in it...
This blog complies with a paperwork reduction act...
Off the Beaten Path: The Speech Nobody Heard
We lost forty years in the refrigerator of the Cold War, [which resulted in] the postponement of urgently needed reforms," he said. "The fall of communism did not assure the triumph of social justice.
The global economy, like Morava River, is there. It is not going to move; the question is how not to drown in it.
· Terra Nostra: (KISS Keep It Strong and Spanish) [ courtesy of The Cold War Book Nobody Read: tip of the iceberg of frozen memories]
· See Also Mexican author Carlos Fuentes
· Myth and Reality for Immigrants in New York and Amsterdam [link first seen at Szirine Magazine]
Since you left me at eight I have always been lonely
· I'll be damned, You're a poet. Welcome to hell
I am almost 61, live in Sydney, Australia and am retired from professional life. As I grow older, I grow more intolerant of bullshit, especially in political circles: The blog of John Boase
Blogs: Here to stay
They're hip. Influential. Out there. By one estimate, there are 2 million of them posted on the Internet around the world talking about everything from knitting patterns to the war in Iraq. But as blogs - or personal weblogs - move into the limelight, they're also coming under closer scrutiny. And the conclusions are in some ways sobering.
Take politics. David Winer says weblogs are going to play a huge role in politics. But all the buzz about politicians using them is overblown. The blog of Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean was just a "gimmick," says Mr. Winer, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and a pioneer blogger. And any blogs produced this year by President Bush or John Kerry will be "basically run by the ad agencies" - not the kind of honest, even intimate conversations that blogs can represent.
Here's his vision of how real "blogging" by a politician could work. A candidate for city council, for example, would write an ongoing blog to his potential constituents explaining his positions on issues. They could read his pitch and offer feedback, creating a kind of political dialogue that would be based on substance more than sound bites.
· Sound bites [ via CS Monitor]
Is Amazon a media site or a retailer? The answer is BOTH
Amazon's much discussed skunk works search project goes live thisweek, so we can finally write about it. On first blush it's a very, very good service, and an intriguing move by Amazon. It raises a clear question: How will Google - and more broadly, the entire search-driven world - react?
Like Google, Amazon understands audience management, user-contributed content, and user-driven recommendation systems better than any "media site" today. They're focused on knowing their audience, building that audience independently of traditional media, and delivering offers to that audience -- on behalf of other "partner" retailers as well as themselves.
· In essence, Amazon seems to be making a play for Google's customers [Link Poached from Battlemedia]
· See Also http://a9.com/
Friday, April 16, 2004
A lack of public support is responsible for a dearth of overt fearless principle in the public service ...
Presidential Advisers' Testimony Before Congressional Committees: A Brief Overview
Congress has a constitutionally rooted right of access to the information it needs to perform its Article I legislative and oversight functions. Generally, a congressional committee with jurisdiction over the subject matter, which is conducting an authorized investigation for legislative or oversight purposes, has a right to information held by the executive branch in the absence of either a valid claim of constitutional privilege by the executive or a statutory provision whereby Congress has limited its constitutional right to information.
· Be Advised contains PDF File [Link Poached from Google]
· See Also Jock Given: Flaws in the electronic pork barrel that was supposed to network this nation [ via Australian Policy Online ]
· See Also (PDF Format) Rebecca Kippen & David Lucas: The story of past populations... historical demography helps inform us why populations are the way they are, and allows us some insight into population futures
· See Also (PDF Format) Conde: The long eye of the law: closed circuit television, crime prevention and civil liberties
According to thoughtful Alan of Southerly Buster fame, X is unthinkable is not an especially new strategy in politics or in war-making. (11/04/2004) May God have mercy on our souls...
A National ID Card Wouldn't Make Us Safer
As a security technologist, I regularly encounter people who say the United States should adopt a national ID card. How could such a program not make us more secure, they ask?
The suggestion, when it's made by a thoughtful civic-minded person like Nicholas Kristof (Star-Tribune, March 18), often takes on a tone that is regretful and ambivalent: Yes, indeed, the card would be a minor invasion of our privacy, and undoubtedly it would add to the growing list of interruptions and delays we encounter every day; but we live in dangerous times, we live in a new world ... .
· It all sounds so reasonable, but there's a lot to disagree with in such an attitude [ via Bruce Schneier is security guru: national ID card doesn't even belong on a scale]
· See Also SENATORS COLLINS, LIEBERMAN ASK Agency to Explain Why It Requested Sensitive Data From Airlines
· See Also Come on in, the water's fine: Why the temperature doesn't hold water [ via RoadToSurfdom]
· See Also Welcome to the inaugural (Virgin) issue of Econ Journal Watch: editor@econjournalwatch.org [Link Poached from Coming Soon; According to Jason]
· See Also Cyborg Democracy: Future Hi - Celebrating the Rebirth of Psychedelic Futurism; Agents of the Culture
I Thought the Reader Was Always Right
.-- but not in the news business: At a time when public distrust of the news media appears to be at a dangerously high level, there is evidence of a deep and fundamental disagreement between those who produce news and those who consume it.
· Public's cynicism about media has become a pressing concern
Baby dragons born in May are most likely to think themselves lucky, and October newborns the least...
Luckiest Dragons in the World
We now come to one of my favorite times of year (in the United States at least), which is the federal income tax deadline. Why is this one of my favorite times? Well for one thing, a lot of people do receive tax returns at this time of year, which they immediately use to buy a lot of ebooks, which is what you should be doing with this years tax return.
By the same token, if youve had to pay (dont you hate that?), you probably wont want to go out and buy a big expensive paper book, when you can satisfy your reading addiction for a whole lot less by buying refreshing, entertaining, exceptional ebooks from Double Dragon.
If youre looking for another good reason to support Double Dragon, last year, when the IRS tried to collect taxes on my treasure hoard, I ate the auditor.
Not as tasty as a virgin, by any means, but it could be considerd a useful public service. One less tax collector to go around and I think my treasures are secure for the next year or two, though after that who can tell, for you humans have such short memories.
· We have added a bunch of new features to our DDP website: the ability to score a purchased title to receive up to 50% off selected titles [ courtesy of Double Dragon]
You'll pull that drainplug from the wish fountain because I do not happen to be a 'Somebody:' I am Nobody...
Know-How Dragon: 10 Rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis
Time capsule of conventional wisdom...
Recognizing that this is an emerging area, here are 10 rules for using blogs and wikis to achieve your branding goals. Brands are about trust, and authenticity is the foundation of trust. Blogs should be written as if close friends were sharing observations over a Czech beer.
Note: In addition, there is a link to an excellent presentation (pdf, 52 pages and all free),
· 1. Be authentic [Link Poached from Marketingprofs.com]
· See Also Gopher: Back in 1992, when yahoo was something cowboys yelled and ebay was just pig Latin...
· See Also Sneak Peeks at Tomorrow's Office
· See Also Boing Boing add Technorati support
· See Also Lawish Hall-Of-Fame 2004: 60 Sites in 60 Minutes
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Oh... currently Iraq (Detailed Iraq Chronology 1980-2004) and Australia are listed among the top 10 searches on Daypop.
Is this chillingly prescient? As when seven years ago Russ Travers of the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote an article for Studies in Intelligence, a journal published by the CIA's Center about the ways intelligence analysis would become dangerously fragmented by 21st century... From the vantage point of 2001, intelligence failure is inevitable.
There's a hindsight article that is worth reading to help put the kerfuffle over pre-Sept. 11 intelligence into perspective. Blogger Gregg Easterbrook of the New Republic imagines an alternative history ...
AN ALTERNATIVE ONLINE HISTORY
Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.
· Hague: This guy isn't exactly Winston Churchill, is he? [Link Poached from Will the 2004 Election Be Called Off? Buzzflash]
· See Also Three prominent Czech journalists have disappeared in Iraq
· See Also Lt Col Collins wrote to Prime Minister John Howard calling for the royal commission, outlining how Australia's spy agencies had failed Australia many times ... > [Link Poached from The code of silence]
· See Also First off, (Non nuclear) heads should roll: Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT) chairs the House Committee on Government Reform's National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations Subcommittee
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