In troubled times and under pressure from a government with powerful social networking analysis capabilities, the mere preliminary act of searching for co-conspirators and linking with them carries a lot of risk. Care in maintaining a anonymity reduces that risk, but the proper use of secure online communication tools is cumbersome, their use itself hints at subversive activity and the anonymous procurement of devices and mobile telephony accounts is yet another drag on the enthusiastic would-be clandestine operator.

In summary, proper risk mitigation techniques are beyond the casual level acceptable for fomenting mass action. As a result, frustrated citizens rising up fall back on existing social networks that were not designed for that purpose. The use of family relationships is the archetypal example though a dangerous one: even  if your government does not emulate Stalin by deporting your entire family after suspecting a single member, it makes tracing very easy using genealogy software as was the case during the USian occupation of Iraq. What is needed is an organization which is more distributed and capable of achieving critical mass fast.

This week, Algeria’s Football Federation has called off a planned friendly with neighbours Tunisia under the rather difficult to believe pretext that “the only two stadiums capable of hosting the match are both unavailable”. The real reason is actually the wave of massive protests that is currently rocking the Middle East. But what does football have to do with it ?

Paul Woodward reports an interview by the prominent Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah on Al Jazeera in which he made the interesting observation that the uprising’s most effective organizational strength comes from a quarter that has been ignored by most of the media: soccer fans known as ultras :

“The ultras — the football fan associations — have played a more significant role than any political group on the ground at this moment,” Alaa said. “Maybe we should get the ultras to rule the country,” he joked.

Cited by Paul Woodward, James M. Dorsey, an expert on soccer in the Middle East, writes:

Established in 2007, the ultras—modelled on Italy’s autonomous, often violent fan clubs—have proven their mettle in confrontations with the Egyptian police, who charge that criminals and terrorists populate their ranks.

“There is no competition in politics, so competition moved to the soccer pitch. We do what we have to do against the rules and regulations when we think they are wrong,” said an El Ahly ultra last year after his group overran a police barricade trying to prevent it from bringing flares, fireworks and banners into the stadium. “You don’t change things in Egypt talking about politics. We’re not political, the government knows that and has to deal with us,” he adds.

The involvement of organized soccer fans in Egypt’s anti-government protests constitutes every Arab government’s worst nightmare. Soccer, alongside Islam, offers a rare platform in the Middle East, a region populated by authoritarian regimes that control all public spaces, for the venting of pent-up anger and frustration.

This has not escaped Libya either, as this Google Translation excerpt of an Al Jazeera article mentioned by Zero Hedge attests : among other measures that are part of the state of emergency and security alert imposed since the outbreak of the revolution in Tunisia, the Libyan government abolished the league matches of Libyan Football Association which was to be organized during the following month.

When political organizations are crushed and political life driven underground and dispersed, only apolitical organizations remain – and they end up being politically involved because in the end, everything is political.

Bruce Sterling just wrote a wonderful melancholic essay on cypherpunks, Wikileaks, Julian Assange and the human society that forms their milieu. It may be the best piece so far to capture the character of Julian Assange.

Glancing over the comments, I stopped on this one – here is an extract:

[..] the people that run the governments of the world don’t get it at all. As the old guard “nationalists” die off there will be less and less reaction to this kind of thing to the point where it’s happening so much most things are just lost in the noise. I’m younger than Bruce, but not by much, however I know this much that he doesn’t seem to, in a world where the population has grown up with Facebook/MySpace/etc there is not even the expectation of privacy or secrets. Get over it. People will again have to start actually being polite to one another, or they’ll be exposed for all to see.

Personally, I do not believe that information which is solely classified because it’s embarrassing to a government should be. I also believe that people that work for the government should be honor bound to report when crimes are being committed, and that supersedes ALL other directives. Until we reach that state we will not have grown into adults as a society. Right now governments behave as children without adults behave. Read Lord of the Flies.

I disagree with him about expectations of privacy from the Facebook generation, but the rest rings true to me. But what hit me as I read it is his remark that “Ppople will again have to start actually being polite to one another, or they’ll be exposed for all to see” : this immediately reminded me of this Heinlein quote:

“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life” – Robert A. Heinlein

One may not agree with Heinlein about whether citizens bearing arms is a good idea, but the fact is that the balance of power that was previously wholly on the side of the governments has just been slightly tipped back toward the citizens.

Will that make governments more polite toward their citizens ?

Yesterday, @telecomix mentioned a statement by Trotsky about the publication of secret treaties. A few extracts :

“Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level”.

“The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents”.

“The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy”.

Sure, it is Leon Trotsky and you will discount his opinion because he carries the stigma of Communism – or Trotskyism to be more exact. So what about someone more moderate ?

What about a President of the United States ? If that could help convince you, here is Woodrow Wilson : @AymericPM dug out his Fourteen Points and guess what the first one is ?

“Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view”.

Amen bro !

Secret diplomacy sucks – ACTA is a recent prime example of why it does. Popular reaction to the Cablegate publications shows that popular awareness of that issue is growing.

I’m sure that we can find other prominent  political thinkers who have something to say about it… We have two and I’m sure it is only the beginning of a consensus.

About the Cablegate, Defense Secretary and former director of central intelligence  Robert M. Gates declared : “Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest”. Let’s contradict him : we want open diplomacy.

Post forth your quotes in support of open diplomacy !

Yesterday, sparked by a Frederick Douglass quote I stumbled upon at Reddit, I posted my spontaneous thoughts about the Wikileak Cablegate aftermath. Of course by now everyone an his dog is barking across town in delicious cacophony, so here are a few articles in that vein that I liked today.

“How to think about Wikileaks” is a compendium of analysis and reactions that has been widely pointed at. If you don’t know where to start, this is a very good place with choice quotes from interesting voices from all round. Among them, Cintra Wilson’s “The C Word: Julian Assange Isn’t Doing Anything Worse Than What Our Government Is Doing” rang particularly well within me.

Apart from that, I liked this piece from Broadstuff, found through the incredible Glyn Moody : Wikileaks only exists because the mainstream media failed. Here in France I’m pleasantly surprised to have seen Le Monde be one of the five media anchors in the world to collaborate on the Cablegate release – this surely has something to do with its new rebellious ownership. Not to be outdone, the left-leaning Liberation is now hosting a Wikileaks mirror – of course I’m not holding my breath for Le Figaro to do anything. But even Le Monde has only caught the Wikileaks wave, not created it. Journalists used to be the conduit for leaking information – where are they now ?

By the way, Aavaaz petition in support of Wikileaks is past 530k signatures – 300k in past 24 hours. Let’s get it past a million, just in case whoever cluelessly keeps attempting a clumsy crackdown has not got the message yet…

A disturbing number of people around me have expressed misgivings about Wikileak’s disorderly conduct, claiming that progress must be achieved in a more civilized way within the frame of the established government system. Alas, that is not always possible – sometimes a measure of peaceful excess is required to nudge the system out of a local optimum toward the great wide open of better possibilities. To illustrate that, here are a few choice quotes from someone who broke his chains and helped in freeing others from theirs:

“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will” – Frederick Douglass in an address on West India Emancipation (1857-08-04)

If you don’t ask for something, the odds of receiving it are tiny – especially when subjected to more powerful forces. The people have been clamoring for honesty from those who govern them, and not getting it. Now they begin to understand that a struggle is required – and they chose information as their weapon.

The people seeks truth as authority, not authority as truth. But Wikileaks is not about the abstract and impossible absolute transparency – the strawman argument derided by those who oppose it. It is about more transparency in response to a problem : we don’t trust our governments anymore.

Or course, Wikileaks is clearly excessive – but it is only the backlash for the equally excessive treachery that secretive governments have foisted upon their own people.

More balanced views will prevail, but only when trust will have been re-established. Until then, there will be struggle :

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe” – Frederick Douglass in speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C. (April 1886)

It remains that whereas governments have been used to the privilege of surveillance over subjects – they are now waking up to a new world of sousveillance, where citizens forcefully take back rightful lordship over their government.

Wikileaks has contributed to the exposure of how broken the covenant between the people and the governments currently is. That covenant will be renewed : the truth that is pouring out of the shadows is the source of hope that will feed it.

“When a great truth once gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. It is bound to go on till it becomes the thought of the world” – Frederick Douglass in in speech to the International Council of Women (31 March 1888)

The discussion is now open – more information cures all !

Thanks to Frederick Douglass for the inspiration – the Wikileaks affair underlines the timelessness of his writings.

Evil implies that corporations can be judged as humans, but they are not : corporations are just soulless. They knows neither right nor wrong. By definition, a corporation exists merely as a maximization function toward the goals of its shareholders. That is why, in spite of having legal personality, corporations cannot exist in the political sphere that holds control and oversight in the name of the public good – though the extent to which the financial resources of corporations are employed to influence political campaigns shows how poorly that separation of power is applied.

Charles Stross’ Accelerando is heavily loaded with buzzwords – though it is a fun read and a great reflection on post-humanity. Among the interesting concepts that pepper the story, I found the “Turing-complete company constitution” – if you have legal personality, then why not Turing completeness ? And then why not go all the way to human-equivalent sentience and cognitive abilities or better ? You may, but it won’t matter because whatever their sophistication, corporations have a mandate inscribed in their lowest level code that merely makes them paperclip maximizers.

Whether you consider them anthropomorphic artificial intelligences or just really powerful optimization processes, corporations don’t care about you anyway. To paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky : they don’t hate you, nor do they love you – you just happen to be resources that they can use for something else.

Guillaume Esquelisse tipped me about an interesting discussion arising from Andy Grove’s article on the need for US job creation and industrial policy, which highlights the relationship between innovation,manufacturing and trade. Rajiv Sethi summarized its central point : “An economy that innovates prolifically but consistently exports its jobs to lower cost overseas locations will eventually lose not only its capacity for mass production, but eventually also its capacity for innovation“.

Unlike some of the commentators of Tim Duy’s article, I’m not one of those heretics who openly toy with protectionist ideas as a protection against the shameless exploiters of the international trade system. But as Tim Duy warns : “if you scream ‘protectionist fool’ in response, then you need to have a viable policy alternative that goes beyond the empty rhetoric“. So here is a proposal.

I believe that the fix does not lie in the selfish tweaking of trade barriers – that is merely treating a symptom. We need to act much deeper by addressing a foolishly held belief about the fundamental nature of the knowledge economy : underlying the fabless follies of glamorous captains of industry no longer worthy of the title is the fallacious narrative that applies capitalist analogies to the knowledge economy.

Knowledge cannot be hoarded. Like electricity production, knowledge creation is an online process : there are marginal hacks for storing some of it, but to benefit you must be plugged in the grid. As John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison put it : “abandon stocks, embrace flows”. Read their article and let it sink in : knowledge flows trumps knowledge stocks.

This is the same point that Mike Masnick found in Terence Kealey’s “Science is a Private Good–Or: Why Government Science is Wasteful” :

“How many people in this room can read the Journal of Molecular Biology. How many people in this room can read contemporary journals in physics? Or math? Physiology? Very, very few. Now the interesting thing — and we can show this very clearly — is that the only people who can read the papers, the only people who can talk to the scientists who generate the data, are fellow specialists in the same field. And what are they doing? They are publishing their own papers.

And if they try not to publish their own papers… If they say, ‘we’re not going to get engaged in the exchange of information; we’re going to keep out of it and just try to read other people’s papers, but not do any research of our own, not make any advances of our own, not have any conversations with anyone,’ within two or three years they are obsolescent and redundant, and they can no longer read the papers, because they’re not doing the science themselves, which gives them the tacit knowledge — all the subtle stuff that’s never actually published — that enables them actually to access the information of their competitors.”

This is a huge point that fits with similar points that we’ve made in the past when it comes to intellectual property and the idea that others can just come along and “copy” the idea. So many people believe it’s easy for anyone to just copy, but it’s that tacit knowledge that is so hard to get. It’s why so many attempts at just copying what other successful operations do turn into cargo cult copies, where you may get the outward aspects copied, but you miss all that important implicit and tacit information if you’re not out there in the market yourself.

Collecting ideas is easy, but acquiring tacit knowledge takes actual involvement. Tacit knowledge requires doing. This is quite far from being news to the practitioners of knowledge management or to anyone who has ever reflected on what internalizing knowledge actually means… But is is no longer just a self-improvement recipe nor an organizational issue : it has now acquired visibility at the national policy level.

The Chinese are not just mindlessly pillaging out intellectual property : they have also understood the systemic effects of a fluid knowledge economy – take open standards for example. We must now get on with the program and admit that the whole idea of capitalizing intelectual property is a lost cause. Political leaders will soon understand it… Patent trolls are already dead – but they just don’t know it yet.

But we have already advanced far into a de-industrialization process whose only redeeming strategic value is that the Chinese must be laughing hard enough for their gross national product to be slightly negatively affected. Is it too late ?

You may have heard that the Chinese word for “crisis” is composed of two characters representing “danger” and “opportunity”. Well… Forget that – it is wishful folk etymology. And next time you hear a fluffy motivational speech using this handy rhetorical device, expose the scam !

Anyway, I would love to believe that the current crisis is indeed an opportunity. European political integration has been mired in national egoism for so long that I have found myself wondering if we would ever achieve any practical degree of coordination for the things that actually matter to our sovereignty, namely defence and finances for starters.

According to a TNS-Sofres/Logica survey on 26 March 2009, 58% of French people believe that the banks bear the bulk of the responsibility for the crisis. Doesn’t everyone love to pile on the scapegoat ? Let’s get beyond that – we must take responsibility for our complacency !

Two months ago, the IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn reiterated the common wisdom that coordinated economic policy is inseparable from currency union. But so far European Union was a political project without political support. By exposing weaknesses in our institutional framework, the financial crisis may have changed that :

“I don’t like it, but it was probably the only way to force all the governments together, to have more discipline on their budgets and on their deficits and more centralised government of the eurozone”  – Yves Carcelle, Louis Vuitton’s chief executive – interviewed by the BBC.

Will it be enough to force the national governments on that common path ? As Henrik Müller writes for the Spiegel :

“If the monetary union is to survive, member states will have to abandon their egos”.

“The member states must learn to understand themselves as a community that shares a common fate and together they must strengthen democratic control over shared finances”.

Strong democratic control over our common fate… That’s my wish for Europe – a wish that some such as George Friedman greet with scepticism :

“What we have learned is that Europe is not a country. It is a region, and in this region there are nations and these nations are comprised of people united by shared history and shared fates. [..] but in the end, they share neither a common moral commitment nor a common fate”.

I disagree. We are the citizens of Europe – willingly or not we will stand or fall together. This is a common fate and it binds us together with a moral commitment toward our success as a people.

Will the politicians finally accept the need for the deeper transparency and the democracy that will empowers us ? As Dominique Strauss-Kahn told :

“20 years from now, when Europeans look back at the present period, will they see a missed opportunity ? Not to be too emphatic, but what is at stake in the current debates is simply the future of Europe”.

Twenty years is not even what it will take us to repay our irresponsible debts… Lean years are ahead of us – let’s make them count toward a better future for us, as the people of the European Union.

Stéphane Richard, chief executive at France Telecom, argued recently : “There is something totally not normal and contrary to economic logic to let Google use our network without paying the price”. I could barely control my hilarity.

But wait, there’s more :

Telefonica chairman Cesar Alierta said Google should share some of its online advertising revenue with carriers to compensate them for the billions of euros they are investing in fixed-line and mobile infrastructure to increase download speeds and network capacity. Alierta said that regulators should step in to supervise a settlement if no revenue sharing deal was possible between search engines led by Google and network operators. France Telecom CEO Stephane Richard said, “Today, there is a winner who Google. There are victims that are content providers, and to a certain extent, network operators. We cannot accept this”. Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann stated, “There is not a single Google service that is not reliant on network service. We cannot offer our networks for free”.

Whiners ! France Telecom, Telefonica and Deutsch Telekom are all historical monopoly operators that suffered the full impact of the internetworking revolution. It took them a while to realize that the good old times were gone for good, but I thought that with a good help of new blood they had reluctantly adapted to the new reality. Apparently I was wrong : in spite of  a decades long track record of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, executives at the incumbent club keep fantasizing about the pre-eminence of intelligent networks and how they somehow own the user. Of course I would not tax them with sheer stupidity – they are anything but stupid. This is rather a case of gross hypocrisy serving a concerted lobbying effort. And maybe after all they end up believing their own propaganda.

Users pay Internet access providers for – guess what – Internet Access. And most providers are very happy for their Internet access to do exactly what it says on the tin while they get well earned monies in exchange. Only a few of them have the political clout necessary for this blatant attempt at distorting competition – they are trying to leverage it but they will fail, again like they failed to stop local loop unbundling.

Ultimately, if large operators across Europe make a foolish coordinated move against Google, it will look suspiciously like a cartel. You can play that game with the national governments, but you definitely don’t want to do that in view of the European Comissionner for Competition.

Since Google is in the crosshair, I’ll let them have the last word :

— Guide to Net Neutrality for Google Users, cited by the Wikipedia article on Network Neutrality.

Update : I am far from the only one to feel slack-jawed astonishment at that shocking display of hypocrisy. From the repeating-something-relentlessly-does-not-make-it-true dept, Karl Bode at Techdirt published “Telcos Still Pretending Google Gets Free Ride”. You’ll find comments and more context there.

« Aliens from the communist planet of Rooskee are invading peaceful, democratic planets and turning their inhabitants into “Communist Mutants”. The communist mutant armies are controlled by the Mother Creature, a strange alien who has gone mad due to irradiated vodka. »

Is this real ? Is this really the synopsis for a 1982 computer game ? Wikipedia and various other sources agree that Communist Mutants from Space really did exist. I did not have the privilege of playing it on my Atari 2600 at the time – and somehow I’m glad that the Cold War propaganda we were exposed to did not go to such baroque lengths…

Stéphane Bortzmeyer has a very long track record of interesting commentary about the Internet – his blog goes back to 1996. Its a pity that my compatriot doesn’t write in English more often: I believe he would find a big audience for his excellent articles. But as he told me : “Many people write in English already, English readers do not need one more writer”. I object – there is always room for good information to be brought to a greater audience. And since his writings are licensed under the GFDL, I’ll do the translation myself when I feel like it.

Maybe this will be the only of his articles I translate – or maybe there will be others in the future… Meanwhile here is this one. I chose it because DNS hijacking is a subject I am sensitive about – and maybe because of the exoticism of Chinese shenanigans…

---

Before reading this interesting article, please heed this forewarning : as soon as we talk about China, we should admit our ignorance. Most people who pontificate about the state of the Internet in China do not speak Chinese – their knowledge of the country stops at the doorstep of international hotels in Beijing and Shanghai. The prize for the most ludicrous pro-Chinese utterance goes to the Jacques Myard, representative at the National Assembly and member of the UMP party, for his support for the Chinese dictatorship [translator’s note : he went on the record saying that “the Internet is utterly rotten” and went on to say that it “should be nationalized to give us better control – the Chinese did it”]. When it comes to DNS, one of the least understood Internet services, the bullshit production rate goes up considerably and sentences where both « DNS » and « China » occur are most likely to be false.

I am therefore going to try not emulating Myard, and only talk about what I know, which will make this article quite short and full of conditional. Unlike criminal investigations in US movies, this article will name no culprit and you won’t even know if there was really a crime.

DNS root servers hijacking for the purpose of implementing the policy (notably censorship) of the Chinese dictatorship has been discussed several times – for example at the 2005 IETF meeting in Paris. It is very difficult to know exactly what happens in China because Chinese users, for cultural reasons, but mostly for fear of repression, don’t provide much information. Of course, plenty of people travel to China, but few of them are DNS experts and it is difficult to get them to provide data from mtr or dig correctly executed with the right options. Reports on censorship in China are often poor in technical detail.

However, from time to time, DNS hijacking in China has visible consequences outside of Chinese territory. On the 24th March, the technical manager for the .cl domain noted that root server I, anycast and managed by Netnod, answered bizarrely when queried from Chile :

$ dig @i.root-servers.net www.facebook.com A

; <<>> DiG 9.6.1-P3 <<>> @i.root-servers.net www.facebook.com A
; (1 server found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 7448
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.facebook.com.              IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.facebook.com.       86400   IN      A       8.7.198.45

;; Query time: 444 msec
;; SERVER: 192.36.148.17#53(192.36.148.17)
;; WHEN: Wed Mar 24 14:21:54 2010
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 66

[translator’s note : sign of the times, the Chilean administrator chose to query facebook.com – google.com and, before that, microsoft.com used to be classic example material Mauricio used facebook.com (or twitter.com) because it is hijacked by the chinese govt, unlike microsoft.com (or even google.com)]

The root servers are not authoritative for facebook.com. The queried server should therefore have answered with a pointer to the .com domain. Instead, we find an unknown IP address. Someone is screwing with the server’s data :

• The I root server’s administrators as well as its hosts deny any modifications of the data obtained from VeriSign (who manages the DNS root master server).
• Other root servers (except, oddly, D) are also affected.
• Only UDP traffic is hijacked – TCP is unaffected. Traceroute sometimes ends up at reliable instances of the I server (for example, in Japan) which seem to suggest that the manipulation only affects port 53 – the one used by the DNS.
• Affected names are those of services censored in China, such as Facebook or Twitter. They are censored not just for political reasons, but also because they compete with Chinese interests.

If you want to check it yourself, 123.123.123.123 is hosted by China Unicom and will let you resolve a name :

% dig A www.facebook.com @123.123.123.123 

; <<>> DiG 9.5.1-P3 <<>> A www.facebook.com @123.123.123.123
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 44684
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.facebook.com.              IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.facebook.com.       86400   IN      A       37.61.54.158

;; Query time: 359 msec
;; SERVER: 123.123.123.123#53(123.123.123.123)
;; WHEN: Fri Mar 26 10:46:52 2010
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 66

37.61.54.158 is a currently unassigned address and it does not belong to Facebook. [translator’s note : I get 243.185.187.39 which is also abnormal]

It is therefore very likely that rogue root servers exist in China and that Chinese ISP have hacked their IGP (OSPF for example) to hijack traffic bound toward the root servers. This does not quite explain everything – for example why the known good instances installed in China still see significant traffic. But it won’t be possible to know more without in-depth testing from various locations in China. A leak from this routing hack (similar to what affected YouTube in 2008) certainly explains how the announcement from the rogue server reached Chile.

« The Great DNS Wall of China » and « Report about national DNS spoofing in China » are among the reliable sources of information about manipulated DNS in China.

For more information about the problem described in this article, you may also read « China censorship leaks outside Great Firewall via root server » (a good technical  article), « China’s Great Firewall spreads overseas » or « Web traffic redirected to China in mystery mix-up ».

This article is distributed under the terms of the GFDL. The original article was published on Stéphane Bortzmeyer’s blog on the 26 March 2010 and translated by Jean-Marc Liotier the same day.

Nothing new, but as Paul Currion remarks, the Haïti post-earthquake crisis shows once again that media and governments alike are still operating under the rule of sensationalism :

“Nobody can deny that Haiti needs assistance right now to save lives, but it also needed assistance yesterday when the infant mortality rate was the 37th lowest in the world. When it comes to natural disasters, we – our governments, our media, ourselves – are victims of the same biases that cause impulse buying at the supermarket. Thousands of people dying from buildings falling on them instantly mobilises a huge amount of resources, but thousands of children dying from easily preventable diseases is just background noise. This is the uncomfortable reality of the aid world, but it’s not one that our media or governments really wants to hear”.

But is it possible, in a noisy media environment, to find success in promoting the long view of human capability instead of a short term view of human suffering ? Some examples do exist, but forming, out of the background noise, a coherent signal that has political impact remains a rarely solved problem.

The quality of OpenStreetMap‘s work speaks for itself, but it seems that we need to speak about it too – especially now that Google is attempting to to appear as holding the moral high ground by using terms such as “citizen cartographer” that they rob of its meaning by conveniently forgetting to mention the license under which the contributed data is held. But in the eye of the public, the $50000 UNICEF donation to the  home country of the winner of the Map Maker Global Challenge lets them appear as charitable citizens.

We need to explain why it is a fraud, so that motivated aspiring cartographers are not tempted to give away their souls for free. I could understand that they sell it, but giving it to Google for free is a bit too much – we must tell them. I’m pretty sure that good geographic data available to anyone for free will do more for the least developed communities than a 50k USD grant.

Take Map Kibera for example :

“Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, widely known as Africa’s largest slum, remains a blank spot on the map. Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of Kibera it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents. This November, young Kiberans create the first public digital map of their own community”.

And they did it with OpenStreetMap. To the million of people living in this former terra incognita with no chance of profiting a major mapping provider, how much do you think having at last a platform for services that require geographical information without having to pay Google or remain within the limits of the uses permitted by its license is worth ?

I answered this piece at ReadWriteWeb and I suggest that you keep an eye for opportunities to answer this sort of propaganda against libre mapping.

The French satirical investigative journalism weekly “Le Canard Enchaîné”  reveals that our holier-than-thou presidency is in fact a pirate’s lair. In a stunning display of hypocrisy, the presidential audiovisual services produced 400 unauthorized copies of the 52 minutes documentary “A visage découvert : Nicolas Sarkozy“.

The editor, Galaxie Press had only shipped 50 copies, but the propaganda plan required more so the Elysee went to work, going as far as modifying the cover and replacing the Galaxie Presse name and logos with “Service audiovisuel de la présidence de la République”.

Isn’t is deliciously ironic that the same executive power is the main force behind the latest disgusting bungled piece of French legislation regulating and controlling the usage of the Internet in order to enforce the compliance to the copyright law ?

It is even more appalling that we are dealing with repeat offenders : last spring, while the Hadopi law was discussed, U.S. music duo MGMT received €30,000 as a settlement for a copyright infringement by French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party who used one of its songs at a political rally without permission. Those who led the charge against Internet users are not the most respectful of copyright.

Hadopi is also known as the “three strikes” law because it after a certain number of warnings a copyright infringer’s Internet access would be cut off. Hadopi has just been adopted. Nicolas – one more of those antics and your Internet access is toast !

I just finished reading “The Strongest Tribe – War, Politics and the Endgame in Iraq” by Bing West. Once the author’s own ideas about the relationship between the nation, the media and the armed forces are set aside, what remains is an account of reference on the civil war in Iraq from 2003 to 2008.

Bing West’s military experience gave the author an excellent relationship with the troops, and that granted him access to a variety of sources in theater throughout the whole period. He provides a comprehensive view from the bottom to top about what the US forces experienced in Iraq and how they adapted to overcome the challenges of counter-insurgency in a very muddy political environment.

Communicating the complexity of this conflict is incompatible with the mass-media formats. This book offers the volume necessary to describe how the invaders went through the messy process of stumbling upon new problems, trying solutions, gaining understanding and then building doctrine from the ground up. Bing West’s work is the first one to my knowledge that exposes the whole process and articulates it into a coherent narrative.

We follow the troops as they are dealing with duplicitous Iraqi politicians, struggling to build trust in a lawless society, sustaining morale while working with thankless partners, sticking to western due process standards in a country with no reliable judiciary, overcoming the impulse to stick to search and destroy, living among the locals to stop commuting to work from large bases, learning how to seize and hold sectors in a sustainable way, turning a population terrorized by campaigns of murder and intimidation, and finally getting it all together to find how to get the local potentates to stand for themselves. With the authors eyes, these problems are seen through the prism of the Vietnam war, and we discover what connects to the historical lessons learned in Vietnam and elsewhere, and how the Iraqi mix created original challenges.

The Strongest Tribe stops almost entirely short of the political territory of why the United States went to war in Iraq – and that is a good thing. Bing West does an outstanding job of explaining how the military in Iraq and its chain of command dealt with the fighting, and I extend my praise to him for sticking within that perimeter, apart from a handful of gratuitous mentions of Senator John McCain.

All in all, a recommended read for making sense of Iraq from the local point of view – provided you understand the bias of an author strongly connected to the culture of the US armed forces. Hats off to Bing West for his in-depth work, and hats off to the ingenuity, flexibility and sheer dedication of the troops who navigate in the dangerous unknown.

48 police vans, 65 motorcycles and more than 200 security personnels, around the flame (one would almost forget the flame bearer drowned among them with an uneasy smirk while Chinese flame guards frame him) dozens more riot police vans at various locations along the way, 3000 police officers dedicated to the event on foot, horseback, roller blades and boats, full mobilization of local security forces for maintaining the outer security perimeter, helicopters… I had never saw such extensive measures in Paris. Was anyone taking notice that the olympic flame was not welcome in Paris ?

So why did I wait for the flame just to shout my displeasure at it ? First, let it be known that it has nothing to do with Tibet, nor with Chinese internal political life. I support the freedom of people and individuals when the struggle is within my reach, but I also recognize the diplomatic need for Realpolitik. I like my cheap Chinese goods and I am fully aware that they cost lives. At the moment we, as a nation-state, do not have the means nor do we really have the will to impose our values on China. We do have an influence, but let’s not delude ourselves about it.

Here are a few interesting items from the fundamental principles of olympism enumerated in the olympic charter :

2. The goal of olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.
4. The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practising port, without discrimination of any kind [..]
5. Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.

Human dignity, absence of religious or political discrimation ? Am I the only one who believes that the IOC is being more than slightly hypocritical ?

While our relationships with the Chinese government are diplomatic and commercial links between equals, the IOC is an international body and as such it must be considered fully accountable to its members. So my message was not addressed at China – the intended recipient were the IOC and my own government, to put pressure towards an organization of the games more in line with international ethical standards.

Respecting the spirit of olympism within the sport events is one thing I support. I can also understand the economic needs of sponsors and the career stakes of athletes. But I won’t stand for our governments surrendering all diplomatic leverage. We need a strong symbol to express our political views while not needlessly sabotaging the event. I therefore believe that we should be absent from the official ceremonies, while letting our athletes participate as they see fit. As for the sponsors, I wish them all the negative publicity they deserve.

I witnessed with satisfaction the flame being extinguished and the crowd showing hostility toward the traveling circus. I am grateful toward Reporters Sans Frontières for actively expressing ideas I share with them – I donated to them in the past and I am not disappointed by their enduring passion for press freedom. And I salute the anonymous people of Paris who did not let this propaganda event unfold unopposed.

But I am more than displeased about the way our government handled the event. Was it so difficult to recognize the public mood and choose a low key ? Was it absolutely necessary to push through in force, making the torch convoy a ridiculous police caravan ? And most of all, who did order the police to rip the Tibetan flags and RSF olympic flags away from the hands of those who were waving them ? This is an utter disgrace ! Since when is it illegal to wave a flag in our country ? Do we really have to do the bidding of the Chinese police state ? I am outraged at the attempts of the police, reported by multiple persons along the flame’s path, to remove the flags while the Chinese flags were flying. Not that I care that much about one nation annexing another when the interests of my nation state are not even remotely concerned : my outrage is about freedom of speech in my own country and respect of the law there by its own police force.

I do not know if the governments will listen, but I wish there will be a joint Euro-American action so that the message will be effectively passed while not letting China single out specific countries for retorsion. Once more we dream about the European Union coming of age – but meanwhile let’s hope we can at least coordinate our diplomacy somewhat.

Now we pass the olympic torch to our comrades in San Francisco and beyond… Why should only the Chinese use the relay as a propaganda event ?