OOPS - I did it again!

As far as "national security threats" go, real or imagined, it's likely that few Americans lose much sleep over Wilkileaks, the website that publishes anonymously sourced documents which governments, corporations, and other private or powerful organisations would rather you not see. It would appear the US security apparatus does not feel the same way.
On Friday of last week, editor and co-founder Julian Assange posted a letter to the site detailing a laundry list of rather Keystone Kop-like instances of surveillance of himself and other members of the Wikileaks team, likely carried out at least in part by members of the US intelligence or law enforcement community:

"We have discovered half a dozen attempts at covert surveillance in Reykjavik both by native English speakers and Icelanders. On the occasions where these individuals were approached, they ran away."

Ironic if it were not so creepy, much of the observable surveillance took place while Assange and others were in Iceland advising the parliament on a groundbreaking set of laws … designed to protect investigative journalists and web service providers from spying and censorship. Assange also described being tailed on a flight en route to an investigative journalism conference in Norway, by "two individuals, recorded as brandishing diplomatic credentials ... under the name of US State Department".

So why are US tax dollars being spent spying on a bunch of volunteer journalists, human rights activists and web geeks, as appears to be the case? There are a few obvious motives, but the smoking gun might be a classified film Wikileaks claims to have in its possession that shows evidence of a US massacre of civilians. Images have power – think Abu Ghraib, think Mi Lai – and efforts at "perception management" by the department of defence will be much complicated by documentary evidence that leaves little to interpretation or "perception" of a human rights crime committed by US forces. Wikileaks plans to show the video at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on 5 April.

"In my opinion, the operation points not to the CIA, but to the US Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), which (among other things) is tasked with tracing information leaks believed to be originating from US diplomatic staff," Dr Joseph Fitsanakis tells me, founder of Intelnews.org and an expert in the politics and history of intelligence and espionage. "If the US suspected that Wikileaks acquired restricted or classified documents through a US embassy official or staff member (which Julian alludes to in his editorial), then the DSS would get involved."

As a target for surveillance Wikileaks is hardly the Kremlin – the mostly volunteer run site was temporarily shut down a few months ago due to lack of funds. Yet it has provided all manner of scoops in its short life – documented corruption in Kenya, evidence of potentially criminal bank fraud in Iceland, and classified US army documents about the treatment of Guantánamo detainees. And while its list of critics is long, openness and transparency are not chief characteristics regularly attributed to them. North Korea, China, Russia, and Zimbabwe have all blocked access to the site at one time or another in response to controversial leaks.

It's not a very heartening sign that the US government has joined such an illustrious roster. Yet in an ironic twist one of the conclusions of a report prepared by the department of defence intelligence analysis programme (DIAP), and published by Wikileaks earlier this month contains a surprising defence of the workings of a functioning, responsive democracy:

"It must be presumed that Wikileaks.org has or will receive sensitive or classified DoD documents in the future. This information will be published and analysed over time by a variety of personnel and organisations with the goal of influencing US policy."

If the video Wikileaks plans to screen at the National Press Club on April 5 does indeed include scenes of a US massacre of civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan, as is purported, perhaps the "goal of influencing US policy" becomes a little easier to identify. National security is better served by promoting a just and accountable foreign policy. For starters, stop massacring civilians in the never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and investigate and prosecute those responsible for past massacres and cover-ups when and where the burden of proof calls for it.

If the US army and the defence apparatus still need help from the muckrakers at Wikileaks to remind them of this fact, then let the leaks continue. And if you think the work that Wikileaks is doing is important, then consider leaking them some money.

Joseph Huff-Hannon @'The Guardian'

And of course you can add Australia to that illustrious list of countries...
More here.

I think...

...that there is a stoner working as a sub-editor at The Economist LOL!

John Cusack takes us down the rabbit hole (80s style)

"As you can see in this video now, watching the performance was like diving into an ocean of bad fashion and forced smiles. Dr. Pepper dancing and Mom Jeans from shore to shore... pre-Prozac in motion.... military ballet... Mandatory cheers and quasi-religious cult patriotics... the glory of the empire. A choreographed tribute to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King. A celebration of diversity, unity, and fluorescent leggings.

Meanwhile, Reagan was dumping all the mentally ill and vets out on the streets to die, as a direct result of his policies."
@'BoingBoing'

Feeling like a little kraut-blip today...

Punk & The Pistols - The London Weekend Show 1976

Unfortunately you have to put up with the truly awful Janet Street-Porter...

(Thanx Fifi for finding this one!)

Magnets mess minds, morality

Talk about messing with your mind. A new study by neuroscientist Liane Young and colleagues at Harvard University does exactly that: the researchers used magnetic signals applied to subjects’ craniums to alter their judgements of moral culpability. The magnetic stimulus made people less likely to condemn others for attempting but failing to inflict harm, they report in PNAS.

Most people make moral judgements of others’ actions based not just on their consequences but also on some view of what the intentions were. That makes us prepared to attribute diminished responsibility to children or people with severe mental illness who commit serious offences: it’s not just a matter of what they did, but how much they understood what they were doing.

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the attribution of beliefs to other people seems to involve a part of the brain called the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ). So Young and colleagues figured that, if they disrupted how well the RTPJ functions, this might alter moral judgements of someone’s action that rely on assumptions about their intention.

To do that, they applied an oscillating magnetic signal at 1 Hz to the part of the skull close to the RTPJ for 25 minutes in test subjects, and then asked them to read and respond to an account of an attempted misdemeanour. They also conducted tests while delivering the signal in regular short bursts. In one scenario, ‘Grace’ intentionally puts a white powder from a jar marked ‘toxic’ into her friend’s coffee, but the powder is in fact just sugar and the friend is fine. Was Grace acting rightly or wrongly?

Obvious? You might think differently with a magnetic oscillator fixed to your head. With the stimulation applied, subjects were more likely to judge the morality based on the outcome, as young children do (the friend was fine, so it’s OK), than on the intention (Grace believed the stuff was toxic).

That’s scary. The researchers present this as evidence of the role of the RTPJ in moral reasoning, with implications for how children do it (there is some evidence that the RTPJ is late in maturing) and for conditions such as autism that seem to involve a lack of ability to identify motives in other people. Fair enough. But to most of us it is news – and alarming news – that morality-related brain functions can be disrupted or suspended with a simple electromagnetic coil.

If ever a piece of research were destined to incite paranoid fantasies about dictators inserting chips in our heads to alter and control our behaviour, this is it.

Phillip Ball @'The Great Beyond'

Guided By Voices - AOL Session 2002

Bootsy's basic funk formula

Dr. Eddzherton's Apple Macbook vinyl decal

HERE
Other designs here and here.
(Thanx son #2!)

Wine cask inventor dead at 92

The inventor of the wine cask, South Australian Riverland grape grower Thomas Angove, has died in Renmark, aged 92.

Mr Angove revolutionised wine packaging in the 1960s when he created the resealable plastic bag in a cardboard box.

His son, managing director of Angove Wines John Angove, says his father was a great contributor to the wine industry.

"I remember dad coming home with this sort of prototype of a plastic bag inside a cardboard box and I remember thinking to myself and I probably said it to dad 'That's crazy, nobody will buy wine in a plastic bag stuck inside a cardboard box', but in his usual manner he persisted," he said.

"He thought he was onto a good thing and history certainly indicates that he was.

"His commitment and involvement in industry matters and industry bodies and the welfare of the industry overall, as opposed to just Angove family winemakers, was very significant and I think reflects his very broad vision of what the world and life was all about."

@'ABC'

Thomas Angrove - I raise a glass of fruity lexia in your honour...(hic!)

Policing for profit!

Whatever you do, make sure not to hurt the dog.

Worst case of being at the wrong spot at the wrong time. And you know, I live in a rowdy street, so I know about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But at least, if something happened to me here, it's very unlikely I'd be the victim of our local police since they deserted my area some years back. It was a sad story when I read about it last year, and it's sadder still today.

This Thursday a year will have passed since Ian Tomlinson died after being assaulted by a policeman at the G20 protests. No charges have been brought; no one has been punished. Despite 300 official complaints about the policing of the protests on April 1st, and plenty of video and photographic evidence, no officer has faced serious disciplinary proceedings(1,2). Those who removed their identification numbers, beat up peaceful protesters and bystanders, then repeatedly lied about what had happened remain untroubled, either by the law or their superior officers. There has been no apology to Tomlinson’s family. 

Contrast this with another case, in which a Nottinghamshire police officer caused two deaths in June. As soon as it happened, the police reported themselves to the Independent Police Complaints Commission and launched their own investigation. A chief superintendent told the press that “we will certainly take any lessons we can get from this process and make sure we put them in place so this sort of thing never happens again. It has caused immense sadness and immense shock.”(3) The papers carried pictures of officers paying tribute, saluting the flowers left outside police headquarters(4). There was no cover up, no botched post-mortem, no lies about the victims or their families. The officer responsible was quickly charged and, though his victims died as a result of neglect not assault, last month he was convicted over the deaths(5).

There’s a significant difference between the two cases: the Nottinghamshire victims were dogs. The officer had left two police dogs in his car and forgot about them while he completed some paperwork. Judging by their response to these two tragedies, both police and prosecutors appear to care more about dogs than human beings.

George Monbiot @'Monbiot.com'

Hmmm!

Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling for First Time

Russia to open massive WWII archive

Russia plans to open the world's largest WWII archive, the size of which will "comply with the contribution of our country to the Victory."  (The Russians have always insisted that they won World War II, not us.  The real answer is that we all won it.)  This archive project will apparently entail building new buildings to house the holding which will be brought in from numerous archives around the country.  The project will also include a major digitization effort and will apparently include some sort of commercial database dealing with Soviet casualties.  The article hints that similar efforts may be undertaken to assess German and Hungarian losses on the Eastern Front.

There are significant practicality issues associated with this project.  Furthermore, the desirability of taking war records out of existing archives and putting them into a purpose-built archive designed around an event as opposed to something that organically grew as out of an agency or other organization, is eminently debatable.  (For an excellent discussion of these issues, see the fine post at The Russian Front.)  On the other hand, many archives in Russia are in lamentable condition, so if the price of survival for these records is some disorganization, perhaps that is a price worth paying.  In addition, the digitization component of the project is certainly a good thing, though one does wonder what if any political criteria will be applied to select the documents and files that will be digitized.

Interestingly, Andrei Artizov, the head of the Russian Federal Archive Agency (Federal'naia arkhivnaia sluzhba Rossii aka Rosarkhiv) says that the new archive should include substantial German records "like those of Hitler's chancellery, the Reich's Security Services and others. In compliance with the existing legislation, they are part of Russia's property."  Meanwhile, a so-far very modest U.S. Government effort to do something similar with copies of analogous Iraqi records captured in 2003 generates accusation of malfeasance.

In any case, this will be an interesting story to follow.

@'On War & Words'

New blog

Started by a very good friend of mine and dedicated only to the music and productions of the man above...

HERE

Don't forget that if you like reggae then keep an eye 

HERE