September 28, 2006

I have been reading a fair bit of angry, frustrated commentary about the American Torture Act that just passed both the House and Senate in the USA.

Gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands .. what will the rest of the world think of us, etc., etc.

I have been trying to be articulate over the past couple of years about what it is to be a quasi-American (Canadian, such special neighbours) and yet see things so differently, watching in rapt confusion and wonder as the USA seems bent on demonstrating how reckless and magnificently, powerfully angry it can be.

I found this comment, by another Canadian, in the comments to this post (from Digby’s Hullabaloo) which suggests that the cat is now well and truly out of the bag .. the world is indeed different now, now that America condones and has codified the use of torture combined with the effective disappearing of habeus corpus.

Thank you, anon fellow Canadian … I found your comment to be articulate about what I feel as well.

For someone living lifelong next door in Canada, the sight of the crisis you describe on the horizon has been a long long time in coming.

As children 50 years ago, my friends and I were mystified by the uniform rigidity and jingoism of visiting American students of the same age. How could this stupid authoritarian nonsense be tolerated we wondered at the time? What was wrong with these gullible kids? There followed a long series of wars of unprovoked aggression which would have killed some of us had we been born 100 miles to the south. Gratitude for borders fails to capture the feeling. Literally, I personally know of no one in my native-born age cohort who was killed in combat. Maybe a handful in UN peacekeeping operations but that’s it.

Something started to go seriously wrong for your country with Huey Long and Billy Sunday and it isn’t near finished yet. You all need a second republic with a new constitution that actually works I think. None of my business of course. But I wouldn’t bet on you getting one without a civil war.

I am remembering that the aged supporters of Gen. Franco still live in Madrid, still refusing to be civil to their erstwhile opponents on the Left. I think you are looking at decades of incivility or worse, of conflict on class lines, and maybe race and ethnic lines too. You are deep deep shit neighbours. I will wish you the best of luck with all this. We have our own neo-con dinosaurs to be rendered harmless up here. It will occupy my attention for, say, a decade or two. In the meantime, keep the embers glowing. Something will cause all this ugliness to burst into flame. Its just too grotesque to keep hidden forever.

Shame without limits, embarassment without restraint, regrets without number, apologies to the millions killed in your name, and a century of guilt to be worn and worked off. Get on with it.

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… from a "what can it do for them" point of view.

I wonder if he asked them anything about the degree to which the NSA surveils all the lefty appeasement bloggers, building up its databases on potential terrorists or terrorist enablers amongst the legions of bloggers who don’t appreciate the systematic deconstruction of the USA’s foundations of what maybe used to be a democracy ?

I doubt it .. he seems like a polite guy who would realize that this would be impolite and off-topic

This was a totally fascinating set of sessions. The CIA folks there included visionaries (e.g., Calvin Andrus), internal bloggers, the people behind Intellipedia (an in-house wikipedia), folks from the daily in-house newspaper, and some managers not yet sold on the idea of blogs and wikis and tags.

It sounds like there’s a fairly vibrant blogging community already, including some senior people. But, there’s cultural tension over, for example, whether a blog that contains any personal information means that a government employee has been misusing tax payers’ computers. It is a culture in transition, as you can imagine.

It began with an informal presentation by one of the analysts (first-name only, no email address) who took us through a typical day. He gets evaluated on the basis of the written reports he produces. There is some collegiality — more than I encountered as an academic — but the back-and-forth of commentary isn’t captured. It all comes down to the finished written document. (No document is ever finished, the panel said.)

The panel overall stressed that the issues were social, not technical. Also, we pushed for building memory by capturing more of the work-in-process and by linking linking linking. I personally would like to see the Agency get past the cult of expertise, moving instead to a view of knowledge as social. That means showing work in progress and capturing the discussion during and after publication. But that also means changing how analysts are evaluated and promoted. One of the participants said that already one’s "corridor reputation" affects one’s career. There should also be — and will also be — an e-corridor reputation that helps advance you because you’re a great commenter, a frequent contributor to the wiki, or have a blog that’s getting read.

Tags: JOHO, David weinberger, social software, collaboration, emergent intelligence

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Just noticed in passing … via the Guardian Online.

I wonder what elements or aspects of Microsoft DRM capabilities will be baked into what gets developed with the BBC ?

BBC signs web deal with Microsoft

Steve Busfield
Thursday September 28, 2006

The BBC and Microsoft have signed a "memorandum of understanding" for developing the next generation of the corporation’s internet-based services.

The BBC director general, Mark Thompson, and the director of new media, Ashley Highfield, agreed the non-exclusive deal with the Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates, in Seattle.

A BBC statement said: "The memorandum of understanding will define the framework within which the companies can explore opportunities for the delivery and consumption of BBC content and the evolution of next-generation broadcasting.

"This includes plans for its online archive, for a radically reinvented website in the web 2.0 world - a second generation of internet-based services - and for ways to share its online content in the future."

Areas of potential collaboration include search and navigation, distribution and content enablement.

Tags: Web 2.0, BBC, Microsoft, broadcasting, content sharing

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