How the Obama regime has made killing easy

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The leaking of a secret US government White Paper setting out the supposed ‘legal’ justification for killing US citizens abroad using drones has lifted a corner of the veil that occludes the policy of the Obama Administration in this area. David Cole has thoughtful piece about this in The New York Review of Books. Sample:

On Monday, NBC published a leaked Justice Department “white paper” laying out the Obama administration’s case for when the president, or indeed any “informed, high-level official” of the federal government, can authorize the secret killing of a US citizen without charges, a hearing, or a trial. The paper, which appears to summarize a still-classified internal memorandum drafted by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to authorize the targeted killing in September 2011 of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, provides more detail than has yet been made public about the administration’s controversial drone program.

Consistent with the positions taken in public speeches by former State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh, Attorney General Eric Holder, and White House counterterrorism advisor and CIA director-nominee John Brennan, the sixteen-page white paper argues that killing a US citizen with a drone and without trial is legal under domestic and international law, even if the individual is far from any battlefield, not a member of al-Qaeda, and not engaged in planning an imminent attack on the United States. To date, much of the concern about the administration’s drone program has stemmed from its largely secret character; unfortunately, the more we learn, the greater those concerns become.

Drone warfare is the coming thing, and it’s already a much bigger deal than most people realise. It’s more serious, in a way, than cyberwarfare. And yet it receives very little attention.

Google drops sweetener to French media…

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…in order to persuade the French to forget about that nasty “link tax” idea. Well, that’s how The Register describes the deal reached by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and the French President on Friday. Google, unsurprisingly, describes it in more statesmanlike tones: “Google creates €60m Digital Publishing Innovation Fund to support transformative French digital publishing initiatives”.

Of the two, I’m afraid I’m more convinced by the Register‘s interpretation.

Frederic Filloux’s take on it is here. Excerpt:

Dealing with Google requires a mastery of two critical elements: technology (with the associated economics), and the legal aspect. Contractually speaking, it means transparency and enforceability. Let me explain.

Google is a black box. For good and bad reasons, it fiercely protects the algorithms that are key to squeezing money from the internet, sometimes one cent at a time — literally. If Google consents to a cut of, say, advertising revenue derived from a set of contents, the partner can’t really ascertain whether the cut truly reflects the underlying value of the asset jointly created – or not. Understandably, it bothers most of Google’s business partners: they are simply asked to be happy with the monthly payment they get from Google, no questions asked. Specialized lawyers I spoke with told me there are ways to prevent such opacity. While it’s futile to hope Google will lift the veil on its algorithms, inserting an audit clause in every contract can be effective; in practical terms, it means an independent auditor can be appointed to verify specific financial records pertaining to a business deal.

Another key element: From a European perspective, a contract with Google is virtually impossible to enforce. The main reason: Google won’t give up on the Governing Law of a contract that is to be “Litigated exclusively in the Federal or States Courts of Santa Clara County, California”. In other words: Forget about suing Google if things go sour. Your expensive law firm based in Paris, Madrid, or Milan will try to find a correspondent in Silicon Valley, only to be confronted with polite rebuttals: For years now, Google has been parceling out multiples pieces of litigation among local law firms simply to make them unable to litigate against it. Your brave European lawyer will end up finding someone that will ask several hundreds thousands dollars only to prepare but not litigate the case. The only way to prevent this is to put an arbitration clause in every contract. Instead of going before a court of law, the parties agrees to mediate the matter through a private tribunal. Attorneys say it offers multiples advantages: It’s faster, much cheaper, the terms of the settlement are confidential, and it carries the same enforceability as a Court order.

Legless

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Legless, originally uploaded by jjn1.

I came on this surreal scene on Friday morning. What the photograph doesn’t show is a frustrated van driver who’d been ordered to deliver these mannequins to a shop in town but found when he arrived that his instructions failed to specify which shop! So he’d ben unloading them in the hope that eventually one of his phone calls to base would be answered.

Gove’s decision

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This morning’s Observer column.

Michael Gove is possibly the most unpopular minister in the government, but on Wednesday he made a courageous and enlightened decision. On that day, the Department for Education announced that computer science will be included in the science options for the Ebacc (English baccalaureate), which is one of Mr Gove’s keystone reforms of the school curriculum. Given the amount of hostility there is to these reforms, this development attracted little attention, but in the long run it could turn out to be a really big deal.

Why? Because it signals a determination to undo an educational disaster that’s been running for decades in British schools – the ICT (information and communications technology) curriculum. This was based on the idea that most of what the young needed to be taught about computing was how to use software. In practice, this turned out to be learning how to use Microsoft Office. For both the schoolchildren who had to endure this, and the teachers who had to instruct them, this was a demoralising and dysfunctional experience. Kids would come home from school complaining (as my children did): “Dad, you’ll never guess what we had to do today – PowerPoint!” The result was that ICT became the educational world’s equivalent of a toxic brand.

The Zen of Python

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Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

By Tim Peters.

Cloud computing’s dark lining

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Cheerful UK users of iCloud, Google Drive and other US-based services might do well to ponder this.

Cloud computing has exploded in recent years as a flexible, cheap way for individuals, companies and government bodies to remotely store documents and data. According to some estimates, 35 per cent of UK firms use some sort of cloud system – with Google Drive, Apple iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive the major players.

But it has now emerged that all documents uploaded onto cloud systems based in the US or falling under Washington’s jurisdiction can be accessed and analysed without a warrant by American security agencies.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, allows US government agencies open access to any electronic information stored by non-American citizens by US-based companies. Quietly introduced during the dying days of President George W Bush’s administration in 2008, it was renewed over Christmas 2012.

But only now are privacy campaigners and legal experts waking up to the extent of the intrusion.

Time for UK-based cloud services?

Restaurants Turn Camera Shy

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Tired of people tweeting what they’re about to eat? Well, according to the NYTimes, so are high-end restauranteurs.

When it comes to people taking photographs of their meals, the chef David Bouley has seen it all. There are the foreign tourists who, despite their big cameras, tend to be very discreet. There are those who use a flash and annoy everyone around them. There are those who come equipped with gorillapods — those small, flexible tripods to use on their tables.

There are even those who stand on their chairs to shoot their plates from above.

“We get on top of those folks right away or else it’s like a circus,” Mr. Bouley said.

Just for the record, I’m having tea and toast with home-made marmalade at the moment. Not worth a photograph.