A Networked World

Vin-

-dictive: Ruddock determined Hicks won't profit.

Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock says he will amend the law retrospectively if it turns out a loophole will allow Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks to profit from telling his story.

A book about Hicks's experiences, written by journalist Leigh Sales, is due to be published tomorrow by Melbourne University Press.

The Dean of Law at the University of Sydney, Ron McCallum, and Melbourne Civil Liberties lawyer Robert Richter, QC, believe the Federal Government might not be able to stop Hicks from keeping the profits from any book he writes about his involvement with the Taliban in Afghanistan and his detention by the United States at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Mr. Ruddock assiduously avoided offering an Australian citizen who had been swept up in an Afghan dragnet any of the usual support that Australians are entitled to abroad. Unlike the UK, which refused to allow its people to be tried by the Kangaroo (now THERE'S irony) court at Gitmo, Ruddock carefully looked away from the ethics, legality and methods.

Then, to rub salt into the judicial wound, he accepted that Mr Hicks could be convicted on a charge that did not exist at the time it was supposedly "committed", in the presence of an organisation that was not declared to be terrorist until 6 weeks or so after Hicks was arrested.

Now it appears that the minister has become addicted to the joys of retrospective legislation to rob David Hicks of any compensation that his sad adventure might produce.  Philly boy, you are stacking up some nasty karmic chits that you will need to redeem. And it looks like there IS some karma coming round.

More than a fifth of the approximately 385 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been cleared for release but may have to wait months or years for their freedom because U.S. officials are finding it increasingly difficult to line up places to send them, according to Bush administration officials and defense lawyers.

[...] Other prisoner advocates said the Bush administration has made its task more difficult by exaggerating the threat posed by most Guantanamo inmates -- officials repeatedly called them "the worst of the worst" -- and refusing to acknowledge mistaken detentions.

Foreign governments have also questioned why U.S. officials should expect other countries to pitch in, given that Washington won't offer asylum to detainees either.

Road warning for those who drive looking in the rear view mirror, "Sharp left Turn Ahead". Hope its not as vindictive as the right.

Seth's fans wag the Dog

One of the things I like about Seth Godin is that he gets down among the weeds and calls it a garden. Gardens don't come much weedier than Seth's Book Tour: When the funnel gets flipped.

If you don't have customers who are willing to organize this sort of event, what are you missing? It's easy to imagine doctors doing it when bringing a brain researcher to town. Or chocolate or wine fanatics welcoming a particularly talented vintner to their neighborhood.

And it doesn't have to be an in person visit. It could work just as well in sending people to a vibrant, important YouTube document on a politician, or a blog post about a new actuarial practice. It's taking the world (including me) a long time to get around the top-down, Oprah-driven mindset that comes so naturally.

[...] The takeaway for all of us is this:
1. Build a permission asset: a group of people that actually wants to hear what you're up to.
2. Create something (a product, a service, a story) that those people want to spread (not get paid to spread, but choose to spread) and get out of the way.

ESPECIALLY Get Out Of The Way. yet another example of the Long tail that wags the dog, can I call this one, "Don't weed the Garden: Garden the Weeds"?

Standing in the Way of Control

Thanks to Johnnie for the link to Matt Moore at Engineers without Fears: Standing in the Way of Control.

The truth is that whilst we are not wholly in control of our lives, no one else is either and we have the biggest stake in looking after ourselves. And the other thing to remember is that everyone else is in this position as well. So welcome to the club - treat the other members nice.

His point comes out of his discussion on  The Paradox of Control in Organizations by Philip Streatfield but its nice to have my life philosophy reinforced by someone with enough evidence to make a book about it.

My take on it is that we are all sailors in uncharted seas; we know where we think we'd like to go (so we plan) but to get there we have to tack and gybe and sometimes throw out a sea anchor and just wait. Other times we fetch up on a reef and sink, get capsized in a storm and have to swim for it (eaten by sharks, pounded to pate on the rocks or dragged up half dead on the beach with our astrolabe and watch 40 fathoms down) and, if we pay attention to the coastline, sometimes we heave to in a tranquil bay where friendly locals invite us for drinkies.

Old Media in Last Throes

All the reasons that anyone with two functioning brains cells and a synapse to fire does not, and cannot trust corporate media is in Greg Sargeant's piece today: Murdoch's New York Post Rewrites Associated Press Story.

Not only did this rag completely subvert the copy they were provided, but then had the gall to credit AP and the reporter David Espo whose response is "I didn't write anything remotely like that. My name was on the story and I didn't write it anything like the way it was printed."

Fraud, probably defamatory of the reporter, propaganda, lies, these guys are really going for it. "It" being the cliff. The sooner they get there the better for us all.

Innovation - Not a Hammer

Joe Marchese at Online Spin gets its dead on with his headline Forget Innovative; Be Inspiring.

At a WSIS conference in St Petersburg in 2005 I spent an hour or so trapped inside the belly of an Oxymoron listening to a bunch of Russian bureaucrats describing their innovation strategies. But I didn't get the flash till just now, 2 years later, when I read Joe's headline.

All of the talk, most of this investment in "innovation" doesn't pass the sniff test, it looks and feels a lot like the CYA of "benchmarking" and "best practise", like the Dr who orders 1,000 tests to fend off a possible law suit for not spotting your disease in time.

Having an innovation strategy is a bureaucratic, technocratic, managerial tactic to fend off criticism as the company goes down the gurgler, "well I had the strategy in place, its not MY fault if the rest of the company can't come up with any new ideas".

Living in a Theocracy

John Howard, the secular Prime Minister of Australia, the man who will, for the next year anyway, be in charge of the decision making processes of this nation, has looked at the millennial drought that is breaking this nations' ability to feed itself and said, "nope, I got nothing, not a clue, we're stuff". Pray for rain, urges Howard.

Prime Minister John Howard has urged Australians to pray for rain as hard-hit agricultural regions face zero water allocations due to drought. Mr Howard warned last week that farmers in the Murray-Darling Basin faced having no water for the coming irrigation year unless heavy rain fell in the next six to eight weeks.

On Sunday he said he intended to meet irrigators over coming weeks to discuss the grim situation.

Meanwhile, he encouraged people to seek divine intervention. "It's very serious, it's unprecedented in my lifetime and I really feel very deeply for the people affected," Mr Howard told ABC Television. "So we should all, literally and without any irony, pray for rain over the next six to eight weeks."

This is the man whose strategy for the last decade has been to deny the evidence for global warming was evidence for anything, to deny that human activity might have anything to do with that warming and now, when his country is being prostrated by the results, is still incapable of taking responsibility, exhibiting leadership or devising anything resembling a plan.

Publicly Funded - Publicly Accessible

When the community antes up for state employees to collect and disseminate information, there is no case for the state restricting access to the information in anyway, except for prohibitive costs, and the net has solved THAT problem. So a standing ovation to the Brits as: BBC to open up treasures online.

Thousands of hours of broadcasting history, [actually over a million] some of which have never been transmitted, are to be made available to the public online as part of a plan to open up the BBC's entire archive free of charge to Britons.

The footage includes an interview with Martin Luther King filmed shortly before he was assassinated, and another with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in which the former Beatle talks candidly about the impact their relationship had on the band.

Other programmes include a 1956 episode of the nature series Zoo Quest in which a young David Attenborough captures the komodo dragon on film for the first time.

The episode has never been repeated but could soon be available online as part of the ambitious project...

[...] The BBC is now trying to clear the material so it can put it online, although the negotiations are proving more complicated than expected. Although it owns the copyright to most shows, it does not have the right to repeat many of them. Actors, agents, composers and presenters have to be contacted and that is time-consuming.

Ultimately, however, it wants to make every programme available, no matter how obscure. [YEEESSS!!! They get the long tail]

The BBC also plans to make a huge amount of supporting material available, including scripts, programme notes and letters about shows. If it can secure permission to use them, they will make up a huge database of documents that viewers can search easily and quickly. [Brilliant. Couldn't ask for more]

Although the archive would be free in Britain, it may carry advertising and charge overseas users to access the programmes. [Ads are fine, charges wont work, the realistic cost will be swamped by transaction charges and admin overhead, forget it guys]

The only other question is mashups. Its not clear what the license will be but I hope the Beeb also understands that we don't just listen, watch and download, we copy, cut, paste, edit, mashup, mess and play about with and generally take ownership of media content.

The netizens are going to do it, you either enable it, encourage it and use that permission to drive even more traffic your way, or you try to protect it, and since it is publicly owned, just who do you protect it FROM?

But that will sort itself out, in the meantime lets just thank the wisdom of the British people in creating and supporting the BBC.

Politicians Raise Funds for Bloggers

I've been doing a piece on the development of eGovernment, especially from a political perspective, and been struggling to finish it because so much keeps changing so fast (here's the summary doc) But this really does take the cake: Feingold to Headline YearlyKos Fundraiser Tonight.

Senator Russ Feingold will join netroots luminaries Rep. Brad Miller, Rep. John Hall, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, and Rep. Jerry McNerney at a fundraiser tonight in D.C. to eat, drink, and talk politics with all comers.

But wait, there's more! DKos community hero Gina Cooper will be there, too. The event benefits this year's YearlyKos convention, August 2-5 in Chicago.

The Netroots asserted its power by raising funds for politicians of whom it approved, but I would bet that its close to unprecedented that any group of politicians anywhere has ever volunteered their time to raise funds for one of their own support organisations.

The Right to Lie in the "News"

If ever we needed to know why the biggest media consumers in the world are so badly informed, this pretty well tells it all. The Media Can Legally Lie.

According to Akre and Wilson, the station was initially very excited about the series. But within a week, Fox executives and their attorneys wanted the reporters to use statements from Monsanto representatives that the reporters knew were false and to make other revisions to the story that were in direct conflict with the facts.

Fox editors then tried to force Akre and Wilson to continue to produce the distorted story. When they refused and threatened to report Fox's actions to the FCC, they were both fired.

Akre and Wilson sued the Fox station and on August 18, 2000, a Florida jury unanimously decided that Akre was wrongfully fired by Fox Television when she refused to broadcast (in the jury's words) “a false, distorted or slanted story” about the widespread use of BGH in dairy cows.

[...] FOX appealed the case, and on February 14, 2003 the Florida Second District Court of Appeals unanimously overturned the settlement awarded to Akre. The Court held that Akre’s threat to report the station’s actions to the FCC did not deserve protection under Florida’s whistle blower statute, because Florida’s whistle blower law states that an employer must violate an adopted “law, rule, or regulation."

In a stunningly narrow interpretation of FCC rules, the Florida Appeals court claimed that the FCC policy against falsification of the news does not rise to the level of a "law, rule, or regulation," it was simply a "policy." Therefore, it is up to the station whether or not it wants to report honestly.

During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves.

Fox attorneys did not dispute Akre’s claim that they pressured her to broadcast a false story, they simply maintained that it was their right to do so.

OK, pick your jaw up off the floor. That some court thinks they CAN is bad enough, that these people assert their right to do so pretty well kicks it all down the hole. And these guys wonder why their credibility is in the toilet and the net is burning them left right and centre.

Oh, and February 2003, 30 days before Iraq.

Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

Lee Iacocca unfurls a righteous rant at Borders that demands an answer to the question we should all be asking: Where Have All the Leaders Gone?.

Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo? We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.

Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm. Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn't happen again. Now, that's just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you're going to do the next time.

Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when "the Big Three" referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen—and more important, what are we going to do about it?

Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem.

The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.

I have news for the gang in Congress. We didn't elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity.

What is everybody so afraid of? That some bobblehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change?

Amen brother.

But I have news for Lee, its not just America, it is most of the world, and yes, much of it is because the world follows the most powerful economy, and military, because that's what weaker people have to do to survive. So when the CEO of the World Bank boosts his girlfriend to an atmospheric salary, without review, to a job that doesn't even exist there is a bit of throat clearing and shoe inspection but so far, no action and no outrage because what he did was perfectly normal corporate culture and that culture now governs the world.

And onto that corporate bandwagon has jumped every slug, carpetbagger, crook and inconvenient son in every country for good reason; it pays really well and, with just a little luck you can NEVER be held responsible for your screw-ups. In fact, with a little luck, you fail upwards and what could be more attractive than that?

Whether you are the failing CEO of GM, or Goerge W Bush, or Tony Blair and John Howard, you can get it wrong again and again, you can recommend that the failed policy be repeated with more force until it succeeds and you will get a standing ovation plus a bonus.

And Lee Iacocca is not innocent in this. He wasn't satisfied with running a business, he pretended to be able to tell other people how they too, could become bigshot bosses. And some of the very people he rants about took what he wrote and used it to their own ends and used HIM as the authority.

Like teaching and juggling and sculpture, you can learn to be more competent with your natural skill level, but if you ain't a born teacher or juggler or artist, or CEO or politician you will never be a leader in that field.

Instead you cope, or in modern parlance, you manage and right now, as we front up to the most radical changes any human generation has ever had to deal with, we are in the hands of copers. No wonder Mr I is having a fit.