EU Referendum

Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts

internet[i-internet]A leader in The Australian today suggests how the debate in beginning to be shaped by the revelations on the generous Dr Pachauri, who gives all his pocket money to his own institute – without then declaring how much he gets in return.

Says the leader:

Essentially, the conference's failure to update the Kyoto Protocol leaves developing nations to do as they like. But as the long list of business interests of Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and head of India's Energy and Resources Institute, suggests, the politics of carbon are replete with vested interests.

How Dr Pachauri can remain impartial given his reported interests in fossil fuel, venture capital, alternative energy, research and motor vehicle companies is an interesting question that he is yet to answer satisfactorily.

That is indeed the question, but it was one raised exclusively on this blog a mere eight days ago and developed in subsequent posts. But it took the power of "Big Media" to project the story and give it that all-important "reach" that a small blog cannot achieve – significantly helped of course by James Delingpole and his MSM blog and influential independents such as Bishop Hill.

A point that emerges from that experience is that the MSM and the blogs are not in competition – there is a synergy between them. They can feed off each other and achieve things which alone they could not, as the message of each is spread through the net. This is a lesson some newspaper editors and proprietors – with their dog-in-the-manger attitude to links – could do well to take on board.

But the main lesson to emerge is of the power of the internet as an information tool. Here, from a tiny room in deepest West Yorkshire, without ever leaving the desk, one can reach out through the portal of the computer and conduct a world-wide search, ranging – as this one has done – from Copenhagen, New York and Washington, to India, China, Japan and all points between.

Used effectively, this gives the "citizen" unimaginable power. Searches that would have taken weeks and months, requiring resources beyond the scope of the individual, are now within the reach of anyone equipped with the internet and a laptop costing no more than a few hundred pounds, working out of a back room in a normal home – and they can be done in hours and days.

Business, government and even (or especially) social discourse now relies on the internet but, in so doing, they leave footprints which are difficult to hide. And, if they are there to find, we will find them. In a world dominated by vested interests and crooks like Pachauri, the internet is a tool for freedom.

PACHAURI THREAD

Yahoo+logo[i-Yahoo+logo]As ever, I can start this posting with the words, the British MSM may have paid little attention to it but we have written before about ….. Fill in your own story. In this case, it is the story of Yahoo in China. We have written about it on numerous occasions, most recently here and here.

News comes that Yahoo has agreed on an out of court settlement with the families of Chinese journalists, whose imprisonment they had facilitated.

Yahoo promised to pay the families' legal bills and to create a fund to "provide support to other political dissidents and their families," but the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company wouldn't disclose other details of the agreement.

Sounds fine, though there is an interesting reason as to why Yahoo has decided to negotiate a settlement and it is not just their much-vaunted belief “in the transformative power of the Internet”.

The families filed a suit in April, as we reported at the time. But what really upset those self-righteous Yahoo executives was the Congressional hearings last week.

But it was not until after congressional hearings last week that the company engaged in settlement talks, said Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, which represented the families.

"It took a tongue-lashing from Congress before these high-tech titans did the right thing and coughed up some concrete assistance for the family of a journalist who Yahoo had helped send to jail," Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Burlingame) said Tuesday. "What a disgrace."

Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Yahoo executives that "morally you are pygmies" during his committee's hearings. He said the settlement did little to ensure that Yahoo and other U.S. Internet companies would abide by international human-rights standards when they operated abroad.

Lantos said he and other lawmakers would continue to push for legislation making it a crime for Internet companies to give personal information about their users to governments that use it to suppress dissent.

Such a legislation may well come in useful here if certain Italian proposals (and here) do go through, not that we think even for one moment that they will. On a more serious note, I doubt very much whether such legislation will go through and if it does whether it, in itself, will have any effect.

The point is that internet providers, website and blog hosts know that it is not in their interest to provide information about their users to anybody. In fact, there has been a good deal of grandstanding in the past about Google and Yahoo standing up to the terrifying might of the American government, for both to fold as soon as the Chinese government started demanding serious concessions.

No amount of legislation will overcome that as each and every culprit will be able to whine about having to compete with other companies. All we can hope for is that a public tongue-lashing and a subsequent need to pay out large (as I sincerely hope) amounts of money will keep Yahoo on the straight and narrow with others like Google watching developments uneasily.

Incidentally, if you do believe in Google’s self-description as being purer than pure as far political bias is concerned, try googling some stories that Little Green Footballs or Michelle Malkin, two of the most frequently visited sites, have covered. Guess how many links you will get. A nice round number. And yet LGF has been known to break stories as has Michelle. You do get plenty of references to them from various left-wing blogs, though.

COMMENT THREAD

blogs_of_war[i-blogs_of_war]This is really a subject for my colleague who is described as being obsessive if he writes about anything except the European Union and monomaniacal if he concentrates on the latter and the Constitutional Reform Treaty. This being a family-friendly blog I shall not repeat the abuse that is heaped on me. We must both be doing something right.

Through Tim Worstall’s blog I was led to an article in the Guardian that informed the world of the MoD’s latest wonderful decision: ban servicemen and women from taking part in any discussion of what might perhaps be going wrong in various theatres of war, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan.

I understand from the article and from my colleague, who will write about this in greater detail as soon as he finishes his day jobbing, that ARRSE, the army rumour service, that is exchange of information, is up in arms about this, if I may use such a hackneyed expression.

As the Guardian puts it:

Soldiers, sailors and airforce personnel will not be able to blog, take part in surveys, speak in public, post on bulletin boards, play in multi-player computer games or send text messages or photographs without the permission of a superior if the information they use concerns matters of defence.

They also cannot release video, still images or audio - material which has previously led to investigations into the abuse of Iraqis. Instead, the guidelines state that "all such communication must help to maintain and, where possible, enhance the reputation of defence".

The reason given is the row about the former Iranian hostages being paid for their stories (and seriously pathetic those stories were, too). Furthermore, the question of security is being raised.
I think we can be certain that neither of those reasons is the right one. The episode with HMS Cornwall, Iranian hostage-taking and Mr Bean’s iPod is not really something on which blanket bans can be based. Stories in newspapers would always have to be cleared as, indeed, they were. If memory serves it was the MoD’s press office and senior officers in the Royal Navy who thought concentrating on the human side of the whole mess would detract attention from the fact that it was a mess.

Nor is security a problem. It is easy enough to make sure that no information about forthcoming engagements be released. Nothing of that kind has been alleged at any time. The only problem was with the BBC who at one point asked for photos or films of troop movements in Iraq in their “Were you there?” section. This has now been removed so I cannot link.

It is, of course, criticism of the higher command or MoD decisions that is being banned and my colleague will have plenty to say about that.

I shall make a few very general points. Firstly, this has not always been true about the British military. Books that criticized severely the conduct of the Boer War, for instance, were published by serving officers at the time. Nowadays, they would have had to go through the whole military and PR hierarchy to ensure that nothing but the most anodyne stuff was produced.

Secondly, this plays into the hands of the enemy, who does put out a great deal of information on the internet, including pictures and videos of their attacks. Given the general ignorance in this country of what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and the media’s campaign of disinformation, it is not surprising that all one hears from supposedly well-informed people is that it is all a mess, a failure, the surge is not working etc etc.

Well, I have news for this people. The surge is working. It is very successful and slowly, very slowly, control is being established in Iraq. How do I know this? Ah well, you see there is this thing called the blogosphere, which has been highly successful in the United States in undermining the stranglehold of the drive-by media on information. And among the blogosphere there are the milbloggers, the soldiers and officers who blog from the theatre of war, giving accounts of what had happened and what they had gone through.

Whenever I have mentioned milbloggers to former or present military people in Britain, they have thrown their hands up in horror. Allowing soldiers to voice opinions, to communicate? But that might undermine security. There is no understanding of the fact that we are fighting a war on two fronts – military and propaganda. If we do not win the propaganda war we shall lose the military one as well.

When a little while ago the Pentagon, which is no better than our own MoD, tried to shut down the milbloggers there was uproar on the American blogosphere, which spread to the MSM. The Pentagon backed down almost immediately. We shall see whether our own servicemen and women and their supporters will display the same gutsy attitude. In a way this is a test of the British blogosphere as well.

COMMENT THREAD

By and large I tend to be easygoing about media appearances. If they ask and I have time I do it, if I have no time or it is inconvenient, I do not. Similarly, I spend little time worrying about how the programme may have gone, having learnt a long time ago that nobody every remembers what they heard on radio or seen on TV (or their internet provider) even if they react to a face they recognize. That, I fear, is life. All one can hope for is that one or two points one has made were picked up by somebody somewhere.

Recently, though, I came out of a 30 minute discussion about Gordon Brown's foreign policy demanding the return of the previous hour of my life. A discussion of foreign policy with people whose ideas were culled almost exclusively from headlines is not my idea of fun or of usefulness.

I do recall starting a sentence - mostly to prevent one of my co-panellists from rabbiting on about global warming and policies needed to ... well, I am not sure to do what - with the words: "If Gordon Brown were to ask me for advice on foreign aid .... ". I reckon I was pretty safe on that.

As it happens, I was going to suggest that he stopped talking to rock stars and NGOs like Oxfam who have a vested interest in not changing the situation too much or, even, at all but set up meetings with African analysts, writers, and economists. I can give him e-mail addresses if he wants some.

Except that I do not have to. Because the International Policy Network (IPN) has set up and extremely useful website, called Critical Opinion, which is full of the most useful and interesting articles on subjects such as trade and aid, environment and health. None of them seem to have much time for NGOs and, I suspect, that means that our tranzi-loving Prime Minister will not read them. Nor will he ask me for advice.

Yahoo%2Blogo[i-Yahoo%2Blogo]Some time ago we reported that the Chinese dissident, Wang Xiaoning, who is serving a 10-year sentence in a Chinese prison as a result of Yahoo HK activity and his wife, Yu Ling, were suing the company under the Alien Torts Claim Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act.

News comes that a Chinese reporter, Shi Tao, also in Chinese prison, is suing Yahoo.Inc.

Shi, a former writer for the financial publication Contemporary Business News, was jailed for providing state secrets to foreigners. His conviction stemmed from an e-mail he sent containing his notes on a government circular that spelled out restrictions on the media.

Yahoo has acknowledged turning over data on Shi at the request of the Chinese government, saying company employees face civil and criminal sanctions if they ignore local laws. It denies Yahoo Hong Kong was involved.

Shi's legal challenge is part of a law suit filed by the World Organization for Human Rights USA, " which is suing Yahoo, its subsidiary in Hong Kong, and Alibaba.com Inc., a Yahoo partner that runs Yahoo China".

As we said before, we shall be watching developments carefully.

COMMENT THREAD

Yahoo+logo[i-Yahoo+logo]Not that I would ever dream of dismissing the dangers to free speech (and already existing controls) that we face in this part of the world, having written many thousands of words about the latest piece of legislation on racism and xenophobia to come from Brussels. But other people in other parts of the world are facing far worse problems and it is our duty to highlight them and to show support for the very brave people who face imprisonment and worse for doing what we take for granted.

Our readers will recall the scandalous development whereby Yahoo HK, a wholly owned Yahoo subsidiary based in Hong Kong helped the Chinese police to identify several bloggers and posters on the internet, who were voicing criticism of the government and the system.

As Jim Cullinan, a spokesman for Yahoo puts it:

Companies doing business in China are forced to comply with Chinese law.

Obeying the law is one thing, one might say, and needless officiousness that results in the imprisonment of bloggers and journalists is something else.

According to this morning’s International Herald Tribune, one of those imprisoned together with his wife who is in California, has decided to sue Yahoo.

A Chinese political prisoner and his wife have sued Yahoo in a U.S. court, accusing the company of abetting acts of torture by helping Chinese authorities identify political dissidents who were later beaten and imprisoned.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act, may be the first of its kind against an Internet company for its activities in China.

Wang Xiaoning, who is serving a 10-year prison sentence in China, according to the lawsuit; his wife, Yu Ling; and other unidentified plaintiffs seek damages and an injunction barring Yahoo from identifying dissidents to Chinese authorities.

We shall watch this potentially important precedent with great interest.

COMMENT THREAD

Computer+3[i-Computer+3]Well, I guess that is not a particularly accurate wish. We were first in something not so long ago. The United Kingdom is proud to announce that it was first in having a TV programme, now world-famous and, unlike the NHS, imitated by many other countries. It was called Big Brother. Some of our readers might recall it.

What I would like to see is for Britain to be first or, at least, close second in something important and advanced in the modern world. For instance, we have blogs but do they play any serious part in the country’s politics?

I am sure Iain Dale (who is a friend, as I had better admit, while my colleague is otherwise occupied) and Tim Montgomerie, whom I also know, would tell me that their blogs play a very important part in Conservative Party politics and that may well be true, though I have yet to see David Cameron take any of their ideas on board.

There are similar blogs on the Labour and Lib-Dim sides and, no doubt, they have some influence within the parties. The problem concerns the wider field of politics, which is more likely to be of import and interest to the people of this country.

The assumption that the blogosphere has an existence and growing importance of its own, so widely recognized in the United States, is almost completely missing in this country. Newspaper readership may be going down, TV viewing is certainly not growing and, as far as the BBC is concerned, actually going down but they are still the measure of all things.

Even on the forum that is attached to this blog we get periodic comments about the need for us to try and get into the MSM or to be nice to journalists. Of course, if the blogosphere were taken seriously in Britain, the MSM would want to publish what this blog puts up often ahead of them. (The Daily Telegraph has finally managed to notice that Germany is proposing EU-wide legislation to make the denial of genocide carried out with racist and xenophobic motives illegal. Duh!)

Instead, our journalists run their own p**s-poor blogs in which they assure the world that the real, independent blogs never have an original story. And the readers nod their heads, the definition of a story being something published in a newspaper, no matter how late in the day.

Going back to the United States, I note that a number of bloggers formed a Media Bloggers Association and this organization has been "credentialed" to cover the Libby trial. As a result, a number of them, from different parts of the political spectrum, are live-blogging. To be fair, it took two years for the Association to negotiate this but they have made it.

Both the Republican and Democrat Conventions last year gave bloggers accreditation. And no, that is not the same as choosing one favoured blogger, as our parties do, and letting him or her produce an official version of what is going on. (On the other hand, party conferences in this country are so dull that live-blogging becomes an oxymoron.)

One of the recent developments on the blogosphere has been the growth of what my colleague calls "clogs", that is corporate blogs. Then there are the various blogs and blogger communities that are being created by news and media outlets. What they are trying to do is to institutionalize and, thus, control this so far unpredictable phenomenon.

As it happens, I do not think that can happen. The essence of the Internet and the blogosphere is anarchy and it has empowered, to use that seriously overused word, more people faster than anything has done since the invention of printing.

Only then England was ahead in the game.

COMMENT THREAD