Braced for Impact

Pentagon Creating Student Database

Link: Pentagon Creating Student Database.

From the Washington Post --

The program is provoking a furor among privacy advocates. The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying.

How does a newly empowered, distributed populace respond to this? Does it require a defensive response?

Wiki Reviews Guantanamo Docs

Link: Wired News: Wiki Reviews Guantanamo Docs.

There's a new project that uses a wiki (a dynamic website that any user can edit) for the review and analysis of documents produced in response to a FOIA request regarding treatment of prisoners at Gitmo.

This is the first time I have seen a wiki used for document review -- it is a stupendous use of the technology. Distributed litigation is about to hit the big time.

While reviewing 4,000 pages might not sound like the kind of undertaking that requires dozens of volunteers, organizers say the documents frequently contain the kind of minutiae that require advanced degrees to understand and which take a great deal of time to peruse.

"I think the project is important because there is this huge amount of documentation and it's not clear how thoroughly it's being looked at," said George Phillies, one of the project's leaders. "I think it's important to the American people because it's not clear what is being done in their name."

The advantages of using a wiki for this type of project come out clearly:

Befitting a project that was born on a technologically innovative website, Hu and Phillies and their team are employing wikis -- web pages that can be edited by anyone -- to process the results of their document reviews. The wiki displays each document's review status, and ensures that participants are on the same page, can see each others' progress and can be certain work is not unintentionally duplicated.

Again the FOIA:Detention Practices Project is here.

Chaos at the Door

Link: TV News in a Postmodern World, Part XLIV.

This well-written observation doesn't apply only to journalists --

"Henry James . . . wrote "Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit," and this is a great lesson for us as we confront, once again, the pain of change. Chaos is stirring, and new ideas are bubbling up from the bottom, while the ordered, top-down culture we've created is hanging on for dear life. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of journalism, where mid-career workers are beginning to share Adams' gut-wrenching revelation."

I can't think of a single current "industry" that is not the site of such gut-wrenching revelations. The author also observes that "in the time it will take to re-equip everybody, new business models will already be thriving in the hands of people who do possess the knowledge."

Merely saying that "change is the only constant" doesn't get you to the gut-wrenching state, but for a mid-career professional, living amongst the "students" for a few days certainly will.

Lawyers would be well advised to heed the observations too --

So let's take a moment to examine what's happening at street level, where the personal media revolution is taking place. Web and politics pioneer, Joe Trippi, made an important observation about it last year:

If information is power, then the Internet, which distributes information democratically to anyone who has access to it, is no longer distributing just information — it's distributing power. And in a top-down society, it's empowering the bottom. Put more simply—in America, it's empowering the American people.

And the paradox of power is that discontent increases with opportunities for acting on it. The more the bottom is given the tools to make and distribute their own media, the greater their power; the greater their power, the greater their discontent and, along with it, the opportunity for acting on that discontent. This bubbling caldron of energy is profoundly anti-elitist and anti-institution, because the more the bottom surveys the landscape these days, the more they realize that our culture has failed them, and this energy is palpable in the halls of power.

WIPO Docs for 2nd IIM

Link: WIPO Docs for 2nd IIM.

An attendee has photographed (imaged?) some of the documents of the WIPO conference and posted them. An example of the power of opening up processes that were previously carried out behind closed doors.