Picking two facts at random from the April index – only 3% of Afghans have registered to vote and when the president was asked questions about his tax cut proposals on Meet the Press in 2003 none of the questions related to their inequality.

I just finished Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror.

After a quick overview of the day of 9/11 itself he went back to 1979 and started to work forward. It seems he (along with many others) finds the Saudi government to be duplicitous and often unhelpful to Western interests. More interestingly he seems convinced that Iran from 1979 to 1996 was responsible for a large number of attempted terrorist attacks on western interests and he doesn’t seem at all mollified by the election of Khatami. He suggests (p. 129) that they are still supporting terrorism in Israel and helping al Qaeda. I have the (admittedly ill-informed) impression that Iran is stumbling slowly towards a freer society and I thought they were no longer supporting terrorism despite their often bloodthirsty rhetoric. I guess if he’s right it helps to explain why Iran is one of the countries of Bush’s “Axis of Evil”.

It’s also interesting to have all the al Quaeda terrorist attacks against the US pre-9/11 collected together in one place. I always had the impression that there really hadn’t been much activity but it certainly becomes alarming if you add it all up as Clarke does – especially when you start finding out about the plots that were foiled – not all of which became public. I didn’t know that Ramzi Yousef in 1994 plotted to kill the Pope and Clinton in the Phillipines and in 1995 he had a reasonably well-advanced plot to blow up US airliners in the Pacific for example.

One thing I do wonder about though – he talks a lot about the relative unpreparedness of both the CIA and the FBI (and we all know now about their intelligence failures with 9/11 and WMD in Iraq). And he insists (for example) that the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan really was making chemical weapons. So why should we believe what he says about any US intelligence?

But it seems that one of the best-known conservative bloggers has come to the same uneasy conclusion that I have about the Iraq war.

The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong.

I backed the war originally (though I held my nose – I certainly wouldn’t call it noble). Unfortunately, I don’t think the aftermath of the war could have been managed worse by the US.

I am relieved to find early pictures showing Brits also abusing Iraqi prisoners “were false”:http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/20983.htm, though it seems there “may have been some bad apples after all”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=521760.

How is it that American troops in Iraq (and British ones?) have been shown to be “acting like thugs”:http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&edition=us&q=cluster:www%2esundaytimes%2enews%2ecom%2eau%2fcommon%2fstory%5fpage%2f0%2c7034%2c9504783%25255E950%2c00%2ehtml? Conservatives in the US blame women, feminists, Muslims, and the academic left. Our own home-grown conservative rag, “The Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/ weighs in “as well”:http://www.lewrockwell.com/spectator/spec294.html

the female reluctance to embrace the horrors of war can help to preserve peace. This could not be achieved by a feminised military, which might have the reverse consequence, as de-natured women degrade their sex… by feminising their forces, the Americans may also have brutalised them.

Lessig’s arguments are familiar to me by now (as they will be to many readers) – what is striking and important about his work is that he buttresses these arguments about the rather dry topic of copyright law with well-chosen and interesting examples.

He suggests that copyright owners are no more entitled to use digital right management to hold back file sharing than “the Causbys had to hold back flight”:http://blogspace.com/freeculture/Introduction because property rights extend to the sky.

He points out that in the battle between the capabilities of new technology and law that would mis-regulate it, the common sense does not always win (citing the sad case of Edwin Howard Armstrong whose invention of FM radio was stifled by RCA in America).

And he slyly uses the example of “Disney’s own work”:http://blogspace.com/freeculture/Creators which was very often derived from or inspired by the work of others to suggest that it is wrong for corporations (like Disney) to prevent others from producing derivative works based on their own characters.

And that’s just what I’ve come across in the introduction and first chapter. Hopefully the accessibility and clear logic of this work will ensure it gets read more widely than just among us Internet policy wonks.

See my “earlier post”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_copyright.html#001080 for information about how to download or listen to the book – you may also wish to simply “buy it from Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594200068/lessigorg-20?creative=125581&camp=2321&link_code=as1 or “read it online”:http://blogspace.com/freeculture/Main_Page in an annotatable wiki form.

Disappointingly, the top entry if you search for “jew” in Google is an awful anti-semitic site. Fortunately, a weblog campaign has emerged and they are encouraging people to link “jew”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew to the relevant Wikipedia entry. Please do likewise – if enough people do this, we can drive the anti-semitic site to number two. It’s a pity the Wikipedia entry, informative as it is, does not contain links to material explicitly challenging the lies peddled on ‘Jew Watch’ but I’m sure there is something around one could link to. I had a quick look at the “Anti-Defamation League”:http://www.adl.org site but didn’t find anything there and I have a dim recollection that they are themselves ideologically dubious anyway.

Thanks to “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001631.html for the link.

A few months ago I heard a US radio programme – The Connection – about the newly-constructed Chad to Cameroon pipeline.

Terry Lynn Karl explained in her book The Paradox of Plenty (and on the radio show) how oil revenues have actually made the plight of the poor worse in several countries around the world.

This month, as you might expect, a Washington Post reporter found “prostitutes are some of the only locals doing well”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54448-2004Mar12.html from the $100m a year that will come to Chad’s government because of the pipeline.

Note: the “Internet Centre for Corruption Research”:http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~uwvw/ found Cameroon among the countries with the “highest levels of perceived corruption”:http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~uwvw/corruption.cpi_2003_data.html in 2003.

The Guardian tries to find out by following a blouse donated in the UK from donor to recipient. It turns out that, “Only about 10-20% of the clothes collected in charity shops are sold in Britain to be worn again.” Most of the clothes are sold to specialist for-profit clothing recyclers who pay £100 a year for the right to give their clothing bins a charity logo. The recyclers in turn sell the clothing on to countries like Zambia, where it provides the basis of a local industry (again for-profit) that – arguably – has a devastating impact on domestic clothing suppliers. In the end, shirts get sold for £1.50 or less apiece – a day’s salary in Zambia.

As you can see I find this state of affairs disturbing – the Guardian’s writer is less more optimistic. I suppose I will continue to give away surplus clothing – it is better that it be used than thrown away. But I would like to see charities paid a lot more than £100 a year by companies using their good name to make profits.

“Ethan Zuckerman”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan/2004/02/27#a138 has produced an interesting paper on blogging as a political force in the Third World – commenting on the enthusiasm for Internet-mediated political debate expressed by Jim Moore in an essay “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head”:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.html and by Joi Ito in “Emergent Democracy”:http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html. I blogged about the latter essay “some months ago”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_best_of_blogorg.html#000687.

He warns astutely:

“If that group [enthusiasts for ‘weblog democracy’] forgets that they’re outliers in terms of larger society and fails to include others in the shaping of these technologies, it’s unlikely that these tools will be useful to the wider world”.

He also suggests that bloggers can’t provide a critical alternative to the mainstream media when a region is not adequately covered:

“When journalists don’t cover parts of the globe, webloggers are like an amplifier without a guitar – they have no signal to reinforce. There aren’t enough bloggers in eastern Congo to give us a sense for what’s really going on.”

He suggests that Third World expats writing about their own nations from abroad and (though he doesn’t explicitly say this) First World expats writing about the countries they are visiting or trying to help could help fill the gap in coverage of third world issues and give the rest of the world a personal view.
He notes the weakness of this proposal:

these discussions are open only to people with the access to the Internet (which cuts out people in countries who censor, people in unsderserved rural areas, as well as people who don’t have money to spend time online); primarily open to people who speak and write English well; primarily open to people who can afford to spend time online engaging in these dialogues (cutting out many people whose jobs don’t afford them the luxury of working in front of a CRT).

He highlights some interesting solutions to the problem of language and cultural barriers to mutual comprehension – “Blogalization”:http://www.blogalization.info/reorganization/, for example, encourages bloggers who can speak foreign languages to translate interesting posts and news items into other relevant languages (chiefly English) – acting as a volunteer news agency. “Living on the Planet”:http://www.livingontheplanet.com/about.html is similar (but only translates to English.
In the end, he acknowledges:

Generally speaking, though, in most developing nations, the Net is not the obvious place to look for political change. So few citizens are online, and those who are generally are atypically wealthy and powerful that the Internet is a poor way to reach the grassroots. Instead, it’s useful to think about what media are analogous to the Internet in developing nations. One likely parallel is talk radio.

He seems to suggest in his conclusion that the “solution” to ensuring that the third world can part lies with the toolmakers – a technical fix.

But a real solution, I suggest, would have to involve a lot of grassroots capacity building work to ensure that a broad range of people in these countries (not just the elites):

1) have access to the technology
2) have the time and literacy to engage with them and
3) are listened to by those with power in their countries.

Big (some might say impossible) preconditions but without them a Third World Blogosphere would be an elite echo chamber. I fear that if tech boosters succeed in persuading developing country governments to foster a burgeoning blogosphere in their countries it would just serve to further benefit the articulate middle classes and elites in those countries who already have influence.

The New Face of the Silicon Age, Wired’s cover story, does a pretty good job of outlining the issues, though what the article doesn’t talk about is the profound organizational problems that can emerge when you outsource – that programming (at least past a certain level) is a craft, not just something interchangeable.

The author – perhaps flattering his audience – tries to downplay the creativity of Indian programmers:

It’s inevitable that certain things – fabrication, maintenance, testing, upgrades, and other routine knowledge work – will be done overseas. But that leaves plenty for us to do. After all, before these Indian programmers have something to fabricate, maintain, test, or upgrade, that something first must be imagined and invented.

The US may keep its design and marketing jobs but my guess is that this is not so much to do with a skills gap as it is to do with cultural issues.

This just in – I gather that the California legislature is “considering banning outsourcing”:http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgDate=12-Feb-2004&prgId=17.