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.

Study suggests huge no-fishing zones

Although this study looks at the UK, the seas of North America are in a similarly sorry state.

Link: News.

The seabed has been destroyed over vast areas in the North Sea and other seas, and the myriad organisms that live there wiped out by beam-trawling, in which heavy gear is dragged along the bottom. Substantial marine nature reserves, off-limits to fishing boats, must now be the way out, the commission says.

The media routinely classifies issues like this as "environmentalists v. people trying to make a living." Which is wrong. And stupid. And counterproductive.

43Folders Seeks to Unmask BzzAgents

BzzAgents are paid to be cool, hang out, and generate word-of-mouth buzz for products. Sort of a more insidious version of the college kids that were getting paid to tattoo corporate logos on their foreheads awhile back. I hope that anyone with enough cool that people care what they think would run screaming from the BzzAgent recruiters.

Merlin Mann posts this on his del.icio.us bookmarks:

Link: del.icio.us/merlinmann.

This link points to the referring page from which the shadow ambassadors of BzzAgent Campaign #1205082918 are visiting 43 Folders. ::Waves:: Any cutting-edge hymenoptera have the Blzz to 'fess up what the queen has asked you to pimp here?

The BzzAgent thing started a bit of a buzz over at William Gibson's blog too --

Being William Gibson, he wrote about this kind of thing long ago. Says Mr. Gibson:

Let me get this straight: Because I imagined, without knowing that BzzAgent existed, that this sort of thing not only could but would be done, the fact that BzzAgent exists makes me "paranoid"? Or is it merely the imagining that makes me "paranoid"?

Pattern Recognition isn't "about a future", of course, and the present reality, judging by this piece, is one in which corporations have become so powerful that they can *recruit unpaid volunteers* to infiltrate your life and talk up products -- a twist I evidently wasn't quite paranoid enough to imagine.

So what do BzzAgents get for remuneration? It clearly is not the love and esteem of their peer groups.

David Rees tells the story of "Me and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"

Rees is the the guy who created Get Your War On. Not to mention My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable and My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable. Who knew he was a philosopher too?

Amazon.com : Me and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a little essay about his tussle with Wittgenstein when he "studied philosophy in England."

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus reads like a calculator's weblog about C-3PO's honors thesis, or an instruction manual for meaning itself translated from the algebra by Data from Star Trek Voyager. The book's skeleton is a septet of underwhelming statements: "The world is all that is the case;" "A thought is a proposition with a sense." The intellectual savagery of this book lies in what spins out of these nodes, furious and brilliant. Each initial statement is broken out into sub-statements which are numbered according to Wittgenstein's secret taxonomy. For example, paragraph 3.33 ("In logical syntax the meaning of a sign should never play a role…") is elaborated by paragraph 3.331 ("From this observation we turn to Russell's 'theory of types'. It can be seen that Russell must be wrong." [Oh SNAP!!! How much did Bertrand Russell hate reading paragraph #3.331 in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus?])

Litigation cost allocation: new twist

A California appellate court has ruled that litigants who demand expensive electronic data discovery have to pay for it. This is a bit of variation on the general rule that litigants bear the cost of their own document production. It appears that the ruling is based on a provision of the California Code of Civil Procedure, but I would expect to see this same approach start to emerge in federal courts, as well as in other states.

While the present context is -- as usual -- high stake commercial litigation, this ruling could have serious repurcussions for individuals or public interest groups. For example, a voting rights case that seeks information from the company that made or programmed the voting machines. Or file-sharing, agricultural IP, the Vioxx litigation, environmental cases, etc. etc.

"This is landmark in the world of day-to-day litigation," said Jacobs, a partner at Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco. "The statute means the demanding party has to pay for discovery.

"We're talking often about hundreds of thousands in discovery documents, and if the demanding party has to pay, there will always be negotiation about the scope of discovery," he said.

He said the ruling "should shield litigants from excessively burdensome demands" for the production of backup tapes.

While cost has always been a factor in discovery, now we can expect a request for documents to which a litigant is indisputably entitled will become a negotiation based not on the merits of the request, but how much information you can afford to ask for. As a general rule, the producing party will have the primary say in how much it will cost. Expect access to justice to start costing a lot more.

Link: law.com - Article.

I categorize this as a 3rd Wave conflict, because I see it as part of the overall power struggle for a place at the table for people who are neither corporate nor state-sponsored. The gap widens . . .

Bill Moyers -- The One Resignation That Matters

The Left Coaster has a nice long piece on the resignation of Bill Moyers from television work.   Moyers has produced an extensive body of work -- and hopefully will continue add to it.

In all the breathless coverage over cabinet resignations and the retirement of overrated network television news readers, it is more than a little disappointing that so few journalists are taking note of the upcoming retirement of one of the very best of their own. While the media whoops and hollers over knaves like Tom Ridge, discarded facades like Colin Powell, pusillanimous media moguls such as Tom Brokaw, mediocrities on the order of Ron Paige, and outright despots like John Ashcroft, the retirement of  Bill Moyers from the Public Broadcasting Corporation stands out as the only resignation event of the season that will clearly diminish America and leave it poorer for his going.

During the recent Series of Unfortunate Events (of which the presidential election was only one) there were two TV journalists that I thought actually spoke truth, and also treated the people they interviewed with respect and courtesy: Bill Moyers and Jon Stewart. (I know it's weird that, given the overall timbre of the media, a satire show would be "courteous." But when Stewart called Tucker Carlson a dick, it was on Crossfire, not The Daily Show.)

I remember Huntley, Brinkley, Cronkite etc. when I was a young kid, but when I started really paying attention and wanting to understand the world -- sometime around the Watergate hearings -- I remember Moyers. Always with his mild southern drawl, his glasses, and authentic questions. More documentary than "news." And always delving into things that no other journalists seemed to be covering, but which people cared about -- the Left Coaster post describes his body of TV work. There is a lot of it.

Two things Moyers did recently really impressed me: first, he gave a speech that conveyed a real sense of outrage over the current state of the republic, as well as insights on analogous periods in our history; and second, he conducted interviews with people from all over the political spectrum at the height of the campaign that sounded remarkably like "civil discourse." People with radically different points of view gave thougtful answers to thoughtful questions.  There were no "gotchas." Just good questions. (I can't really envision Moyers calling Tucker Carlson a dick, no matter how much Carlson needs to be told.)

Moyers will continue to write, make documentaries, and, I assume, speak truth to power. The "conversation of democracy" will be greatly diminished by his absence.

Link: The Left Coaster: The One Resignation That Matters.

The Nuclear-Hydrogen Economy?

I've got some good news, and some bad news . . .

One of the crucial limiting factors for converting to hydrogen-powered energy now is the (primarily energy) cost of producing hydrogen. The good news is there seems to be a way to do it effieciently using current technology. The bad news is, it involves nuclear powerplants.

Link: Green Car Congress: Milestone for H2 Production by High-Temperature Electrolysis.