This morning, Mr & Mrs Pigeon decided that they would nest on our vine. Mrs perched herself sulkily, like so…
… and waited for her mate to bring her twigs, most of which she inspected critically and dropped. But he persisted and after a couple of hours, she had something to sit on. We remonstrated with her that this was not a good place to settle, on account of our two cats, but she greeted us with a totally insouciant air, thus:
Hmmm… This is Not Good. Our cats are diligent hunters.
Further to that earlier post about Nokia-Siemens and the monitoring of Iranian protesters, I’ve just been reminded of something I had known, but had forgotten, namely that Siemens is the firm which runs the BBC’s own IT systems. You think I jest? Well, see the picture above. And here’s the BBC press statement announcing the deal (in October 2004):
BBC appoints Siemens Business Services to provide Technology Framework Contract for next decade
The BBC has announced today that it has completed the procurement for a 10-year Technology Framework Contract (TFC) with Siemens Business Services worth almost £2bn.
As part of the landmark deal, Siemens Business Services has acquired BBC Technology Ltd, a commercial subsidiary of the BBC.
Led by Tom White, Managing Director, Siemens Business Services, BBC Technology will be renamed Siemens Business Services Media Holdings Ltd.
The BBC has received approval for the sale from the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and approval from the BBC Governors for both the procurement and the sale.
Now let’s ponder the implications of this for a moment. We seem to have a situation where the Beeb is asking Iranians to risk imprisonment – and possibly worse – by uploading photos and videos to its websites. And yet the company that runs the BBC’s own IT services is a partner in the joint venture that supplied the monitoring system the Iranian regime is using to detect those who are doing this perilous uploading. Stand by for corporate reassurances of a (ahem) “Chinese Wall” between the Beeb’s journalism and its IT department.
Well, well. A few minutes ago I posted on Twitter a link to this earlier post. And guess what arrived in my inbox a few moments later? Impressive, ne c’est pas?
Now here is something worth supporting.
I’ve always thought that engineering courses ought to include courses in ethics. Nothing I’ve seen in the last forty years as an academic in a technology faculty has changed that view. But ethics remains a taboo subject in most engineering curricula. Here’s a contemporary illustration of why we educators need to take the subject seriously.
Two European companies — a major contractor to the U.S. government and a top cell-phone equipment maker — last year installed an electronic surveillance system for Iran that human rights advocates and intelligence experts say can help Iran target dissidents.
Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), a joint venture between the Finnish cell-phone giant Nokia and German powerhouse Siemens, delivered what is known as a monitoring center to Irantelecom, Iran’s state-owned telephone company.
A spokesman for NSN said the servers were sold for “lawful intercept functionality,” a technical term used by the cell-phone industry to refer to law enforcement’s ability to tap phones, read e-mails and surveil electronic data on communications networks.
In Iran, a country that frequently jails dissidents and where regime opponents rely heavily on Web-based communication with the outside world, a monitoring center that can archive these intercepts could provide a valuable tool to intensify repression.
And of course this applies even more to the technology Cisco & Co are supplying to enable the Chinese regime to operate their Great Firewall.
Sigh.
UPDATE: Rory Cellan-Jones just tweeted “Nokia Siemens just told me the software they supplied to Iran is the same “lawful intercept” system used by loads of western governments.” That’s what they all say. What it boils down to is this: “If it’s ‘lawful’ within the jurisdiction we’re exporting to, then we will supply it”. Which gives them carte-blanche to supply anyone, no matter how barbaric, so long as the client is a sovereign state. I wonder, for example, who supplies IT surveillance kit to the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe?
At a party a few weeks ago I ran into a climate-change denier and was struck by how impermeable he seemed to any kind of cautionary reasoning. He was especially hostile to any case based on scientific ‘consensus’. Afterwards, I wondered if there was an argumentative strategy that might be more effective. So I wonder if this post by Tim O’Reilly might provide a way forward. “In my talks”, Tim writes,
I’ve argued that climate change provides us with a modern version of Pascal’s wager: if catastrophic global warming turns out not to happen, the steps we’d take to address it are still worthwhile. Given that there’s even a reasonable risk of disruptive climate change, any sensible person should decide to act. It’s insurance. The risk of your house burning down is small, yet you carry homeowner’s insurance; you don’t expect to total your car, but you know that the risk is there, and again, most people carry insurance; you don’t expect catastrophic illness to strike you down, but again, you invest in insurance.
We don’t need to be 100% sure that the worst fears of climate scientists are correct in order to act. All we need to think about are the consequences of being wrong.
Let’s assume for a moment that there is no human-caused climate change, or that the consequences are not dire, and we’ve made big investments to avert it. What’s the worst that happens? In order to deal with climate change:
1. We’ve made major investments in renewable energy. This is an urgent issue even in the absence of global warming, as the IEA has now revised the date of ‘peak oil’ to 2020, only 11 years from now.
2. We’ve invested in a potent new source of jobs. This is a far better source of stimulus than some of the ideas that have been proposed.
3. We’ve improved our national security by reducing our dependence on oil from hostile or unstable regions.
4. We’ve mitigated the enormous “off the books” economic losses from pollution. (China recently estimated these losses as 10% of GDP.) We currently subsidize fossil fuels in dozens of ways, by allowing power companies, auto companies, and others to keep environmental costs “off the books,” by funding the infrastructure for autos at public expense while demanding that railroads build their own infrastructure, and so on.
5. We’ve renewed our industrial base, investing in new industries rather than propping up old ones. Climate critics like Bjorn Lomborg like to cite the cost of dealing with global warming. But the costs are similar to the “costs” incurred by record companies in the switch to digital music distribution, or the costs to newspapers implicit in the rise of the web. That is, they are costs to existing industries, but ignore the opportunities for new industries that exploit the new technology. I have yet to see a convincing case made that the costs of dealing with climate change aren’t principally the costs of protecting old industries.
By contrast, let’s assume that the climate skeptics are wrong. We face the displacement of millions of people, droughts, floods and other extreme weather, species loss, and economic harm that will make us long for the good old days of the current financial industry meltdown.
It really is like Pascal’s wager. On one side, the worst outcome is that we’ve built a more robust economy. On the other side, the worst outcome really is hell. In short, we do better if we believe in climate change and act on that belief, even if we turned out to be wrong.
One of the most pernicious conspiracies between Westminster politicians and journalists is the ‘lobby’ system. In an interesting article in the Independent, Tom Watson, the former Minister for Digital Engagement, thinks that abolishing the lobby system is one of the first things a new Speaker should do.
Driven by the decreasing space allocated to Parliament in their papers, lobby journalists report only a fraction of Westminster discussions. Where, for example, can you read of recent debates on extreme solar events or addiction to prescription medicines? These and others were not reported because they were not the big story of the day – and all because a cartel of political editors convened over afternoon tea to decide that this was so.
Last month, Sri Lanka was the big story. This month, alas for the Tamils, it wasn’t. So Siobhain McDonagh’s debate on 12 June over the plight of 300,000 Tamil refugees was barely noticed.
The 238 pass-holding lobby journalists do not have an outlet for lesser stories, so they end up, pack-like, having to chase the same one or two stories each day.
Yet it is a stark reality of life in the internet age that parliamentary reporting no longer has to be constrained by column inches. The new Speaker should log on to see what is possible. See, for example, Ispystrangers.org. There you will read of discussions as wide-ranging as NHS provision in Cornwall and job losses on a missile range in South Uist.
The problems for the lobby are also compounded by absurdly out-of-date “you must wear a tie in the gallery” rules.
David Miliband has called for an end to unattributable briefings. He’s right. In the internet age there is no such thing as a secret. Over the next few months I will argue for a technologically enabled democracy, from e-petitions to digitally encoding each clause and amendment to every Bill. This will further open up Parliament.
Crack open the lobby cartel. Let in a new generation of online commentators. Share access to lobby briefings with a more diverse group of reporters. Rip up the lobby rules and put all briefings on the record. Do this, and a new Speaker can genuinely be part of a new era of accountability.
Can’t see this idea appealing to the Lobby hacks. After all, it would mean that they would have to do some real reporting, and wear out some real shoe-leather.
In an earlier post, I contrasted Barcelona FC’s sponsorship of UNESCO with Manchester United’s sponsorship by AIG, the well-known imploding insurance giant (now bailed out by the US taxpayer). Now comes a fascinating account in The Atlantic of how Man U found some new letters to embroider on its shirts.
When two executives of Chicago’s Aon Corp. went through their mail one day last fall, they each found a large package with a leather-encased box, containing, of all things, a soccer shirt with the company’s own logo emblazoned across the chest. The shirts appeared to be bonafide red home jerseys of Manchester United, arguably the most famous sports team in the world—or at least in the world outside the soccer-suspicious United States.
They had the red and yellow team logo and the Nike swoosh, and were obviously high quality, but they were just mockups. Aon, which is Gaelic for “Oneness,” had no relationship with the team. It doesn’t even have anything to do with its own hometown teams, the Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks, Bulls, or Bears.
That overture led, eight months later, to a sponsorship and marketing deal in which AON paid a reported $130 million in exchange for having its logo on the jersey. The story of how this deal came about, and the benefits each party derives from it, offers an instructive look at the world of international commerce, where in the quest for global success, companies sometimes find themselves venturing into unexpected but auspicious pairings.
Footnote: ‘aon’ is Irish for ‘one’, not oneness (whatever that is).
Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for spotting the piece.
This morning’s Observer column.
Many years ago, the Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Lessig coined the phrase “Code is Law” to express the view that, in a digital world, private fences erected via software can undermine public law in all kinds of unanticipated ways. The recent antics of our parliamentary authorities in relation to MPs’ expenses have provided us with an instructive case study of the Lessig principle in action.
Their chosen tool for controlling our access to information is the computer code embodied in the portable document format (PDF)…
The Economist has been pondering the strange mix of information sources about events in Iran. Conclusion:
Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events. Both Twitter and YouTube are hobbled as sources of news by their clumsy search engines.
Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English. The winner of the Iranian protests was neither old media nor new media, but a hybrid of the two.
