It’s a rather polemical TV series which makes the bold (but – to me – fairly plausible) claim that effectively ‘Al Queda’ does not exist.

The programme suggests it is largely a phantom dreamed up by politicians – particularly American neo-conservatives – (with the tacit collusion of the media and the security services) to give western politicians a new role in a cynical world.

It gives copious examples of how the alleged ‘terror cells’ in the UK and US that have been found have been painted as such on the basis of flimsy – even ludicrous – evidence. A summary of the programme with links to transcripts and audio is available at the “Disinfopedia”:http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=The_Power_of_Nightmares/.

Of course that is not to say that Islamic terrorists do not exist or have the ability to carry out atrocities – 9/11 and the Madrid bombings clearly show otherwise – but it suggests these are disparate groups of loosely allied people not some kind of sinister octopus. It is clearly not balanced either – it is making a case and I would be interested to hear the other side of the story. But it does raise the important question – how will we know when the war on terror is won?

It turns out Roddy Lumsden of “Vitamin Q”:http://vitaminq.blogspot.com/ is the partner of one of my fellow PhD students. His is a slightly unusual blog in that it refers neither to the author’s life nor to world events – it is a daily-updated collection of (very) miscellaneous trivia, which has now been made into a “book”:http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/catalogue/0550101454.php (available for £7 from Amazon UK) just in time for Christmas. Although I am studying people whose sites say something about who they are and his gives little away on that score I found it v interesting to talk to him nonetheless about his relationship with his audience – he might turn out to be pilot interview #1 of my thesis…

Microsoft has ‘soft’ launched its new “search engine”:http://beta.search.msn.com/ and it is “reviewed”:http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3434261 by “Search Engine Watch”:http://searchenginewatch.com/, which also provides in-depth info on the new features they’ve found so far.

Meanwhile by coincidence (hah!) Google announced it has nearly doubled the number of pages it indexed to more than 8 billion pages. What’s interesting to me is that I had been assuming that the 4bn-odd pages it used to index represented most of the total visible web – obviously not! But how far short is it now? There’s no easy way to tell, and the search engines aren’t giving us any clues…

An illuminating account of the truth behind the movie revealed that the real-life head of Strategic Air Command was prepared to attack the Soviet Union whether or not the president gave him an order if he thought the Russians were going to attack and the Dr Strangelove character himself was likely based on “Herman Kahn”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn who was at the Rand thinktank and who wrote books about the aftermath of nuclear war containing references to the need to preserve humanity in mineshafts. Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon papers and worked at RAND joked when he first saw the film that it was a documentary.

If that doesn’t scare you enough, it turns out that for about a decade “the ‘top secret launch code’ for US nuclear weapons was 00000”:http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm because Strategic Air Command didn’t agree the security systems were necessary.

And I haven’t heard anything about the security systems and the thinking in the defense departments of the Soviet Union at the time – I imagine what we may learn if and when when that leaks out would be just as scary. It’s a wonder we made it through that period in one piece…

The BBC World Service has taken a look at the issue in a four part programme (on the web and in archived streaming audio) – Profit and Loss: The Story of African Oil. It looks at two countries where oil wealth has spectacularly failed to bring prosperity to most of the populations of the countries (Gabon and Nigeria) and two countries hoping to do better with their newfound income – Chad and Sao Tome.

Also see “earlier stuff”:https://blog.org/archives/000864.html on a similar topic (which is not too encouraging).

And now Google’s ad policies are public. Google will not run ads promoting gambling, beer or spirits (wine is apparently fine), fireworks and a long list of other banned subjects. Of course you can always argue about what they should have added and what doesn’t belong there – I also expect a number of objections by borderline cases. For example, they ban advertising of ‘miracle cures’ (but seem happy to allow ads for homeopathy). And I expect there may be a couple more exclusions they don’t mention. Would they allow dissidents to advertise the “anonymous proxy servers”:http://www.samair.ru/proxy/index.htm that would enable Chinese people to get around their government’s “internet filtering”:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/? Would they let people advertise “Nazi Paraphernalia”:http://www.metronews.ca/tech_news.asp?id=2702 as Yahoo got prosecuted for? (the stuff arguably isn’t in itself ‘advocating against a protected group’ (which they ban) but I don’t see any ads come up if I search for ‘nazi for sale’).

Nice at least to see some openness from Google about the ethical policies they have exercised until now without scrutiny.

It seems – contrary to suggestions made earlier by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com and “essays”:http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR26.3/sunstein.html (and by many others) – people using the Internet don’t tend to just get more political information that agrees with their previously-held beliefs – they are better informed about both sides than their offline counterparts – at least according to the latest report based on a large scale survey from the excellent “Pew Internet & American Life Project”:http://www.pewinternet.org/.

Before you say ‘well that is just because Internet users are on average better educated or of higher social status’ (as I admit I was tempted to do) they found:

Simply being an internet user, controlling for demographic factors such as gender and education, as well as the other factors already discussed, increases the likelihood that a person has heard more arguments about a candidate.

This seems quite persuasive to me but I doubt this argument will go away in a hurry!

Back in September I wanted to know how to find out “where the money comes from to fund US politicians”:https://blog.org/archives/001231.html and was surprised at how hard it seemed to be to get at the info. Fortunately (if a little late) the great guys at “SearchEngineWatch”:http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/041028-604a just provided an excellent overview of a number of search facilities. Interestingly, “Google employees seem to lean overwhelmingly towards supporting Kerry”:http://insidegoogle.blogspot.com/2004/10/google-says-to-vote-google-employees.html (I knew they hired smart people…). Oddly though my own political contribution doesn’t seem to appear.

P.S. “Open Secrets”:http://www.opensecrets.org/ (‘your guide to the money in US elections’) which seemed not to respond when I looked in September is now back online.

P.P.S. I just came across a post over at the Berkman Centre about Cameron Marlow who has found a number of other “political hacks”:http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/home?wid=10&func=viewSubmission&sid=605 (in the sense of interesting uses of technology in the service of politics not to be confused with politicians’ spin doctors!) including a “text analysis of the presidential debates”:http://overstated.net/04/10/01-presidential-debate-analysis.

I always assumed that the large amount of news I receive about battles with the US Congress about various communications policy issues (copyright, privacy, digital divide issues) was simply due to my own interest in these subjects influencing my choice of online media sources. But it seems according to a report by Syracuse University’s “Convergence Center”:http://www.digital-convergence.org/,

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, communications and information policy (CIP) replaced the environment as the policy domain of greatest congressional activity, as measured by number of hearings. From 1997 to 2001, the annual number of congressional hearings devoted to CIP surged to approximately 100 per year.

The BBC provides a case study of what happens when an enthusiastic teacher encourages students as young as seven to blog.

Some of the children who attend the club have improved their knowledge of IT far above what is required of their age group by the National Curriculum. The Government target is for 80% of children of this age to reach level 4 by year 6. All of the webloggers have done that, and some have reached level 6. They are doing what 14 or 15-year-olds are expected to do.

You can see the kids’ weblogs “here”:http://www.hangletonweblogs.org/.