bin Laden 1 – democracies nil

Posted on by

From Timothy Garton-Ash’s column today…

The erosion of liberty. Four words sum up four years. Since the attacks of September 11 2001, we have seen an erosion of liberty in most established democracies. If he’s still alive, Osama bin Laden must be laughing into his beard. For this is exactly what al-Qaida-type terrorists want: that democracies should overreact, reveal their “true” oppressive face, and therefore win more recruits to the suicide bombers’ cause. We should not play his game. In the always difficult trade-off between liberty and security, we are erring too much on the side of security. Worse still: we are becoming less safe as a result…

Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy

Posted on by

A learned article by Benjamin Barton in the Michigan Law Journal. Who says lawyers have no sense of humour? (One of my favourite legal scholars hails from Michigan btw; but that’s probably a coincidence.) Anyway, here’s the Abstract:

This Essay examines what the Harry Potter series (and particularly the most recent book, The Half-Blood Prince) tells us about government and bureaucracy. There are two short answers. The first is that Rowling presents a government (The Ministry of Magic) that is 100% bureaucracy. There is no discernable executive or legislative branch, and no elections. There is a modified judicial function, but it appears to be completely dominated by the bureaucracy, and certainly does not serve as an independent check on governmental excess.

Second, government is controlled by and for the benefit of the self-interested bureaucrat. The most cold-blooded public choice theorist could not present a bleaker portrait of a government captured by special interests and motivated solely by a desire to increase bureaucratic power and influence.

Consider this partial list of government activities: a) torturing children for lying; b) utilizing a prison designed and staffed specifically to suck all life and hope out of the inmates; c) placing citizens in that prison without a hearing; d) allows the death penalty without a trial; e) allowing the powerful, rich or famous to control policy and practice; f) selective prosecution (the powerful go unpunished and the unpopular face trumped-up charges); g) conducting criminal trials without independent defense counsel; h) using truth serum to force confessions; i) maintaining constant surveillance over all citizens; j) allowing no elections whatsoever and no democratic lawmaking process; k) controlling the press.

Google Base…

Posted on by

… is online. Lots of speculation in the Blogosphere about What It Means. I like the view that it’s basically early Yahoo! in reverse: where Yahoo! had Directory first, then Search, Google now has Search first, Directory second. And users build the directory, whereas Yahoo! had to pay people to do it for them. But it’s too early to say how this will pan out.

PIN 2 PIN

Posted on by

Quentin alerted me to an interesting facility of the BlackBerry — direct handset-to-handset messaging. In the event of a catastrophic loss of network, email, or back-end infrastructure, BlackBerry users can take advantage of PIN-to-PIN messaging to communicate directly with similarly-equipped folks over the wireless network. Unlike email, PIN messages travel within RIM’s messaging network and are not routed through your organisation’s (or network’s) email servers. This provides greater speed of interaction and communications fault tolerance. BlackBerry PIN messaging will continue to work when email servers are down or when their connection to the Internet is disrupted. That’s one reason why BlackBerries are increasingly popular with governments and security services. Paradoxically, it’s also why they have become problematic for US banks and financial institutions in a post-Enron age. Many financial firms are bound by SEC and NASD regulations to archive and monitor all forms of communications between their employees and customers — and to avoid the liability of non-compliance, many have chosen to disable PIN messaging, thus reducing the communication flexibility provided by the BlackBerry device. Verily technology giveth and the law taketh away.

Peter Drucker…

Posted on by

… has died, at a great age. Somewhat anodyne obit in the Guardian. I expect the WSJ did him proud.

Later… They did. My friend Andrew, who subscribes to the WSJ, sent me links to four pieces — all about to disappear behind the Paywall, alas. But this one (from Fortune.com) is public.