Month: July 2007

What’s Wrong With the Media

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Undercover, under fire – Los Angeles Times
By Ken Silverstein
KEN SILVERSTEIN, a former Times staff writer, is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine.

June 30, 2007

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I put on a brand-new tailored suit, picked up a sleek leather briefcase and headed to downtown Washington for meetings with some of the city’s most prominent lobbyists. I had contacted their firms several weeks earlier, pretending to be the representative of a London-based energy company with business interests in Turkmenistan. I told them I wanted to hire the services of a firm to burnish that country’s image.

I didn’t mention that Turkmenistan is run by an ugly, neo-Stalinist regime. They surely knew that, and besides, they didn’t care. As I explained in this month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine, the lobbyists I met at Cassidy & Associates and APCO were more than eager to help out. In exchange for fees of up to $1.5 million a year, they offered to send congressional delegations to Turkmenistan and write and plant opinion pieces in newspapers under the names of academics and think-tank experts they would recruit. They even offered to set up supposedly “independent” media events in Washington that would promote Turkmenistan (the agenda and speakers would actually be determined by the lobbyists).

All this, Cassidy and APCO promised, could be done quietly and unobtrusively, because the law that regulates foreign lobbyists is so flimsy that the firms would be required to reveal little information in their public disclosure forms.

Now, in a fabulous bit of irony, my article about the unethical behavior of lobbying firms has become, for some in the media, a story about my ethics in reporting the story. The lobbyists have attacked the story and me personally, saying that it was unethical of me to misrepresent myself when I went to speak to them.

That kind of reaction is to be expected from the lobbyists exposed in my article. But what I found more disappointing is that their concerns were then mirrored by Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz, who was apparently far less concerned by the lobbyists’ ability to manipulate public and political opinion than by my use of undercover journalism.

“No matter how good the story,” he wrote, “lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects.”

I can’t say I was utterly surprised by Kurtz’s criticism. Some major media organizations allow, in principle, undercover journalism — assuming the story in question is deemed vital to the public interest and could not have been obtained through more conventional means — but very few practice it anymore. And that’s unfortunate, because there’s a long tradition of sting operations in American journalism, dating back at least to the 1880s, when Nellie Bly pretended to be insane in order to reveal the atrocious treatment of inmates at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York City.

Kurtz’s wife is a Republican apparatchik, and as such, he has a vested interest in the comfortable transmission of lies that is today’s journalism.

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The decline of undercover reporting — and of investigative reporting in general — also reflects, in part, the increasing conservatism and cautiousness of the media, especially the smug, high-end Washington press corps. As reporters have grown more socially prominent during the last several decades, they’ve become part of the very power structure that they’re supposed to be tracking and scrutinizing.

Chuck Lewis, a former “60 Minutes” producer and founder of the Center for Public Integrity, once told me: “The values of the news media are the same as those of the elite, and they badly want to be viewed by the elites as acceptable.”

This is why Journalism school, and the Journalism school academe is so damaging to real journalism. It takes work, and makes it a profession, and those professionals are timid, and see themselves as the same as the people that they cover.

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Yes, undercover reporting should be used sparingly, and there are legitimate arguments to be had about when it is fair or appropriate. But I’m confident my use of it in this case was legitimate. There was a significant public interest involved, particularly given Congress’ as-yet-unfulfilled promise to crack down on lobbyists in the aftermath of the Jack Abramoff scandal.

Could I have extracted the same information and insight with more conventional journalistic methods? Impossible.

Based on the number of interview requests I’ve had, and the steady stream of positive e-mails I’ve received, I’d wager that the general public is decidedly more supportive of undercover reporting than the Washington media establishment. One person who heard me talking about the story in a TV interview wrote to urge that I never apologize for “misrepresenting yourself to a pack of thugs … especially when misrepresentation is their own stock in trade!”

I’m willing to debate the merits of my piece, but the carping from the Washington press corps is hard to stomach. This is the group that attended the White House correspondents dinner and clapped for a rapping Karl Rove. As a class, they honor politeness over honesty and believe that being “balanced” means giving the same weight to a lie as you give to the truth.

I’ll take Nellie Bly any day.

Orwell rolls in his grave

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It appears that in addition to bad orthodonture, the British share a fetish for surveillance cameras. Blah

Orwell rolls in his grave: Britain’s endemic surveillance cameras talk back
05/30/2007 @ 10:56 am
Filed by Will Byrne

Observed by over 4.2 million closed circuit – or CCTV – cameras across the country, Britain is already the most surveilled industrialized state in the Western world. It was recently estimated that the average Briton is captured by electronic eyes more than 300 times on a typical workday.
a
Yet the country’s surveillance network, which boasts one camera for every fourteen citizens, is no longer merely facilitating observance: It has now begun talking back. In a scene eerily reminiscent of Orwell’s dystopian vision of 1984, loudspeakers in one small-town center in northern Britain scold anyone they catch engaged in “anti-social behaviour,” including littering, drunkenness, or fighting.

Observing a bank of monitors in the council “control centre,” Middlesbrough town officials use the technology to broadcast warnings to deviants in real-time. The crime-fighting strategy behind the “speaker cam” draws upon the humiliation of being rebuked in public. A representative explained its function to the BBC in April as being to “embarrass” misbehavers into following the rules. Reports of wrongful chiding have been plentiful.

In one case, a young mother named Marie Brewster was falsely reprimanded for littering. She recounted her experience for The Guardian. “We were in the town centre and I’d got some chips at McDonald’s for my daughter Ellie, but they were hot so I tipped them into a box and crumpled the packet up. I put it on the bottom of Ellie’s pram to take home but then heard this voice say: ‘Please place the rubbish in the bin provided.’” She filed her complaint when she saw footage of the event in a televised news piece advocating the effectiveness of the new innovation in combating crime.
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And Another One Bites the Dust

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Yep, another corrupt Justice Department political appointee leaves.

When a Dem gets in, we need to run all the crooks to ground.

In her case, I think that suborning perjury by Supreme Court nominees is one of her crimes. Roberts and Alito were clearly coached to lie.

Seventh official quits Justice Departmen

Fri Jun 29, 2007 7:29PM EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An assistant attorney general at the Justice Department announced her resignation on Friday, becoming the seventh official to quit the department since the Democratic-led Congress launched an investigation in March into the firing of nine federal prosecutors.

Rachel Brand, assistant attorney general for legal policy, said she would step down on July 9. No reason was given.

Brand was nominated to her position on March 29, 2005, and confirmed by the Senate four months later.

She was responsible for preparing Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito for their confirmation hearings and helped in the reauthorization in 2006 of the USA Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism law that Congress approved after the September 11 attacks.

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Surprise, Big Companies Discover that Chinese Corruption Might Endanger Customers

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Actually, it’s not the deaths that they are worrying aobut, it’s the poor PR.

This has been a concern for decades.

Companies in U.S. Increase Testing of Chinese Goods
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

General Mills, Kellogg, Toys “R” Us and other big American companies are increasing their scrutiny of thousands of everyday products they receive from Chinese suppliers, as widening recalls of items like toys and toothpaste force them to focus on potential hazards that were overlooked in the past.

These corporations are stepping up their analysis of imported goods that they sell, making more unannounced visits to Chinese factories for inspections and, in one case, pulling merchandise from American shelves at the first hint of a problem.

General Mills, which makes food products like Pillsbury dough and Chex cereals, is testing for potential contaminants that it did not look for previously, although it would not name the substances. Kellogg has increased its use of outside services that scrutinize Chinese suppliers and has identified alternative suppliers if vital ingredients become unavailable. And Toys “R” Us recently hired two senior executives in new positions to oversee procurement and product safety, mainly for goods made in China.

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Is the NSA Screwing With the Net?

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Many of you have only a vague knowlege of the 1988 Internet Worm.

I was not on the net at the time, but a number of friends and relatives were. It took down the net.

It was launched by Robert T. Morris, III. Of note is the fact that RTM, Jr., his father, was chief scientist of the National Security Agency’s National Computer Security Center at the time.

It’s a thing that makes you go hmmm, as in, do federal agencies have back doors written into critical software on the net to cripple it on an as needed basis?

A glitch in the Matrix, or a hungry exploit?
By Sûnnet Beskerming
Published Saturday 30th June 2007 23:37 GMT

Sûnnet Beskerming researchers observed an interesting deviation in global network traffic over the last 24 hours, particularly for South American, Asian, and Australian networks. Normally, global Internet traffic (as observed by the Internet Traffic Report) oscillates around nine per cent packet loss, with global response times of 138 ms, and the internally derived traffic index at around 79.

Sustained over the last 24 hours, the traffic index has dipped almost five per cent, packet loss has climbed to 11 per cent, and the global response time to almost 150 ms.

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I Want This Job

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I’ll work cheap? Heck, I’ll lose weight, hit the gym, and wear a rug….I’ll even shave my body hair if required.

Doctor Who recruits new sidekick
Martha Jones off to Torchwood
By Lester Haines
Doctor Who will gain a new companion for the next 13-episode series of the cult show, the BBC reports.

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To cover the temporary redeployment, the good Doctor will be accompanied on his travels by an as-yet-unnamed newcomer. His or her identity will be “announced shortly”. ®

Andrew Orlowski is the Smartest Man in Computer Journalism

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I’ve know this ever since Mr. Orlowski, in the process of describing the Microsoft® anti-trust case coverage, called Declan McCullagh, a “Draw by Crayon Libertarian.“

He has a real knack for getting to the heart of the matter, and nailing the reality without getting caught up in the PR bull$%#@.

El Reg gets an iPhone
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
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These complaints aren’t going away, and as I continue to use this thing, I’m sure that others will crop up. El Reg editor Andrew Orlowski says you can never draw conclusions about a phone unless you’ve used it for at least a month. He even predicts that users will grow weary of all that screen touching and call out for more hardware buttons. We’ll keep you updated.®”

OK, This is Insanely Neat

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I know that whenever I Mapquest something (actually Yahoo), I frequently know a better way to get there once presented with the map.

Now you can fix it before printing.

WOOT!

Google embarasses MapQuest

Driving directions redux
By Cade Metz in San Francisco → More by this author
Published Friday 29th June 2007 20:26 GMT
Mobile computing: Opportunities and risk – Free whitepaper

You’ll never use MapQuest again. With a new addition to its Google Maps service, Google has completely reinvented the notion of online driving directions, letting you adjust routes with a simple drag and drop.

In the past, when you asked services like MapQuest or Google Maps for driving directions, you took what they gave you. Now, thanks to Google’s latest brainstorm, you can customize your directions on the fly. If you’re dead-set on avoiding a particularly-congested part of town, for instance, you can drag your driving route a little this way or that – and Google will automatically change the turn-by-turn directions.

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Space nuke boffin: NASA Moonbase needs nuclear rockets | The Register

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If you reference some of the links off this page, a nuclear powered engine of this type does give a higher ISP 875 vs 350 for the very efficient SSMEs.

Of course, other technologies, Ion and plasma are much higher (a quick google gives an ISP of 3300 for early ion drives).

Of course, Ion and plasma are low thrust, and cannot be used for ascent or descent, but neither can NERVA class motors, as their exhaust is radioactive.

Space nuke boffin: NASA Moonbase needs nuclear rockets
By Lewis Page
Published Saturday 30th June 2007 07:02 GMT

One of America’a top nukes-in-space boffins says it’s time to consider nuclear-powered rockets again. He reckons atomic boosters could cut the cost of NASA’s upcoming Moonbase plan.

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This guy runs the premier RTG battery (nuclear batteries) manufacturer in the US, The Center for Space Nuclear Research, and he is someone who has a hammer, and sees everything as a nail.

But Howe reckons that there’s more to nukes in space than just providing electricity. He says that nuclear power should be used for propulsion, too. According to an article in New Scientist, his plan is to update a 1960s design called Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) to carry payloads from Earth orbit to the Moon.

NERVA-type rockets use a fission reactor to heat up hydrogen and blast it out of the thrust nozzle at extremely high speed, faster than can be achieved by normal chemical-powered boosters. This allows a nuclear-driven spacecraft to achieve more with a given amount of liquid fuel, or “reaction mass.” The NERVA test programme had its problems – not least the fact that the reactor tended to come apart and fire itself out of the exhaust – and was terminated in 1972 during NASA budget cuts.

Howe and his team reckon that the greater efficiency of nuclear drive would allow each Moon shot to carry an additional eight tons of payload, which would mean fewer launches being needed. He thinks the savings from a lower number of launches would more than offset the cost of updating the original NERVA design, perhaps yielding overall savings of as much as $2bn.

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ICANN Breaks the Law

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It’s interesting how ICANN’s internal meetings are run. This informality is in fact illegal. The by-laws are a legally binding document upon a corporation.

I have had fairly extensive experience with and exposure to (though I am NOT a lawyer) non-profit corporate governance in the US.

It is clear that ICANN is opening up themselves for a lawsuit, and given the millions and perhaps billions of dollars involved in their decisions, if they continue to run their meetings in this manner, they will lose, particularly in California.

Now you see us, now you don’t: ICANN goes transparent
By Burke Hansen in San Juan
Published Saturday 30th June 2007 13:02 GMT

ICANN San Juan 2007 The Wednesday ICANN-arama wrapped up with a session covering ICANN’s ongoing efforts to improve its management and accountability practices: the “Accountability and transparency management operating principles” workshop.

Maybe the title itself had something to do with it, but this very lightly attended workshop had the ring to it of one of those obscure sessions where useful information tends to get swept out of sight and mind. Much of the discussion revolved around making the ICANN board actually accountable to someone other than, well, the ICANN board. There are procedures already in place at ICANN that allow appeals of board decisions, but those procedural appeals always seem to circulate back to the board itself.

Milton Mueller contrasted ICANN’s structure with that of the American Cancer Society, which has a national council that decisions may be taken up with. Mueller also recommended bringing back the short-lived direct election of board members, a suggestion we endorse here at El Reg, too. We believe there are enough clever people at ICANN to work out the technical kinks of direct elections – after all, we’ve given them the authority to run the entire internet.

Of course, ICANN is a California nonprofit corporation, and as such is bound by California law, which means that public or even private attorney general actions are a possibility. However, litigation is never the ideal solution and ICANN is wise to consider some institutional options before someone takes matters into their own hands.

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Paul Levins, vice president of corporate affairs and moderator of this session, let slip, however, that under Chairman Vint Cerf, formal voting requirements have frequently been relaxed, and the opinions of non-voting members have been given equal weight in the decision-making process. This is clearly a violation of the corporate by laws and clearly not a model for transparent management. That may be a way to encourage wider input and greater consensus, but that also means that non-voting members have more of a say than widely believed, which hardly encourages transparency.

If the board wants those other parties to have a stronger voice, they should amend the bylaws, rather than just ignoring them when convenient. It also creates an unwieldy de facto voting board of 21 members – hardly a model of efficiency. This is also why there is lingering public paranoia about the role the government affairs committee (GAC)-and particularly the US Department of Commerce (DOC)- in the decision-making process, since GAC meetings are typically closed to the public and the GAC is one of these “non-voting” members.

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Emphasis mine. They are admitting breaking the law here.

Gangs of San Jose

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Rival criminals gangs on the net, sabotaging each other.

On the bright side, no one is being shot gangland style, which implies, contrary to the hype that the Russian Mafia, the Cali Drug Cartel, and al Queida are not involved.

Additionally, any effort spent going after each other is time NOT spent going after us.

This is the real second life.

Rival malware gangs wage turf war
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Published Sunday 1st July 2007 07:02 GMT

Security researchers have uncovered evidence of a turf war between rival criminal enterprises connected to two of the most sophisticated malware toolkits in current use.

Like competing gangs in the Mafia – for those who followed the HBO series The Sopranos, think the New York-based Lupertazzi crime family and its sometimes enemy the DiMeo crime family, which Tony Soprano ran from New Jersey – the malware groups are fighting for turf and control.

But rather than clashing over who gets to skim money off a garbage collection contract or a major construction project, the cyber criminals are battling to own tens of thousands of compromised computers.

Enter the propagators of a piece of malware Symantec dubs Trojan.Srizbi (http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2007-062007-0946-99&tabid=1), one of a handful programs spread by the MPack attack kit (http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/18/hijacked_sites_install_malware/). A trojan that makes infected computers part of a botnet that churns out spam, Srizbi is also known to uninstall competing spam malware being spread by another nasty piece of malware dubbed the Storm Worm.

“The Storm Worm criminals appear to have taken exception to that,” says Lawrence Baldwin, a malware researcher who has recently observed Storm zombies DDoSing the server Srizbi uses to download installation files. Baldwin is unable to estimate how much traffic the Storm bots are sending to the Srizbi server, but he says attempts to get an infected machine in his lab to update the Storm malware makes him believe the attack is significant.

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Pratt Whitney considers geared open rotor concept-28/06/2007-London-Flight International

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Previously, P&W had previously said that the geared turbofan would make propfan/un ducted fan technology irrelevant.

Pratt Whitney considers geared open rotor concept

By Victoria Moores

Pratt & Whitney has begun studies of open rotor engine architecture despite its long-standing pursuit of geared turbofan (GTF) technology, and does not rule out shifting to a propfan configuration if this path is favoured by the airframers.

The company is developing a GTF engine to power the next generation of regional and single-aisle aircraft. This engine’s low-pressure spool operates at high speeds for peak efficiency, while its fan operates at slower speeds to maximise efficiency and significantly reduce noise.

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