Orwellianism on the instalment plan

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Charles Arthur has written a terrific piece in Media Guardian about the implications for journalism of the new data-retention legislation.

Want to be an investigative journalist of the future? You’ll need a pen and paper, pay-as-you-go phone, and a motorbike. We’ll explain the motorbike later. But you may be an endangered species. New regulations that came into force last week – requiring telephone and internet companies to keep logs of what numbers are called, and which websites and email services and internet telephony contacts are made – have left some wondering if investigative journalism, with its need to protect sources (and its sources’ need, often, for protection), has been dealt a killer blow.

Worries focus on the fact that every government department, local council and even quango can access this telephone and internet data, given a judge’s clearance. What will they use it for? To investigate everything from treason to flytipping. Might it also be used to find out who has been tipping off a journalist on a local paper about the misdeeds of local councillors? That’s the concern.

It’s a real worry IMHO. When the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was being pushed through Parilament in 1999, some of us were concerned — and warned — about its almost infinite extensibility. And in due course we found that it was being used not just to monitor alleged terrorists, but by a local authority to spy on parents suspected of giving a false address in order to get their kids into a particular school.

The new data retention laws will make it impossible to protect journalistic sources — unless totally non-electronic channels are used. And, even then, widespread use of car number-plate recognition software will make it risky to travel to a meeting in a car. So, as Charles says, use only snail mail, unlocked SIM-cards bought with cash and travel to meetings with confidential sources on a bike.

We’re building an Orwellian state on the instalment plan.

The new market for software

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Fascinating Ars Technica piece on hos the market for software is changing as the iPhone consolidates its strangelhold on the smartphone market.

In addition to giving away some nice swag to celebrate the countdown to one billion App Store downloads, Apple also created a list of top 20 paid and and top 20 free applications. The list gave us a good idea of what iPhone users like and what they are willing to pay for en masse (the lists appear to be region specific, so many of you will be looking at the US list).

To make the list a bit more interesting, however, MacRumors has collected sales numbers for some of the apps from a variety of different sources. While none of the numbers are 100 percent up to date, they are a reasonable approximation.

Since not all developers are open with their sales numbers, the article only talks about four of the top 20 applications numbers. The number-two application, Koi Pond by the Blimp Pilots, has made an estimated $623,000 (after Apple’s cut) from about 900,000 downloads. Number three, Pangea’s Enigmo, is harder to pinpoint because it has fluctuated in price over its App Store lifespan. With an estimated 810,000 copies sold, however, Pangea has made at least $561,330 on the one application alone. PocketGod, number 12 on the list, has earned an impressive $350,000 since its release in January with somewhere around 500,000 sales. The last application with any numbers is iShoot, which at number 19 on Apple’s list has reportedly made the author $800,000 in just five months.

While the numbers are in no way indicative of the whole, it makes it quite clear that it is possible to make a comfortable living developing solely for the iPhone. Even with mildly popular applications, we would estimate that a developer could squeak out a living if they were any good…

LATER: Nice email from a reader with a link to an Irish Times story about one of his students, Steven Troughton-Smith, who “has emerged as Ireland’s most successful software developer for Apple’s iPhone, generating revenues of up to $1,000 a day.”

Obama’s ethical Houdini

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I always thought that Larry Summers was an idiotic choice for President of Harvard — and that Obama was crazy to choose him as a senior economic adviser, but it turns out we didn’t know the half of it. Here’s an excerpt from a wonderful column by Frank Rich which explores the extent to which Summers is ethically challenged:

On the same Friday that the Labor Department reported the latest jobless numbers, the White House released (in the evening, after the network news) some other telling figures on the financial disclosure forms of its top officials. From those we learned more about how much the bubble’s culture permeated this administration.

We discovered, for instance, that Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks “too big to fail.”

Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new “public-private investment plan” to buy the banks’ toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate “huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets” from taxpayers.

But perhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House’s disclosure of Summers’s recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard. [emphasis added]

That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn’t even get a CD for his efforts — and Harvard’s deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn’t exactly benefit either.

Summers’s dual portfolio in Cambridge has already led to one potential intermingling of private business and public policy in his new White House post. He tried — and, mercifully, failed — to install the co-founder of Taconic in the job of running the TARP bailouts. But again, Summers’s potential conflicts of interest seem less telling than the conflict of values that his Harvard double-résumé exemplifies…

Interesting footnote: As I observed a while back, Harvard’s endowment (which pays for a third of the university’s operating costs) is in deep, deep trouble. Partly this is due to the collapse in the stock market. But it is made worse, as the New York Times reported, because — on the advice of its President — “it had invested more than its assets, a leveraging strategy that can magnify results, both good and bad. It also had invested heavily in private equity and related deals, which not only lock up existing cash but require investors to put up more capital over time.”

The truth is that Summers is a creature of the monster he is now charged with nursing back to health. Why should anyone believe that he is capable of acting impartially — or even ethically — given his record?

Bringing it all back home

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Extraordinary article in the Irish Times giving a per capita breakdown of Irish public finances. Sample:

We hear financial analysts talk about the economy in billions of euro, and in concepts such as GNP per capita. But for many of us, it may be difficult to appreciate these numbers and concepts. So let me try a different approach.

Let us take the Macroeconomic and Fiscal Framework 2009-2013 published on the web site of the Department of Finance. I also assume that our population is approximately 4.2 million.

Last Tuesday, our Government said it will collect this full year, on average, €8,200 of tax for every single woman, man and child in the State. However, some of this comes in the form of corporation tax from companies – €900 for each of us.

The difference – €7,300 – is on average each citizen’s burden of taxes. The €7,300 figure consists of €3,000 of income tax; €2,700 of VAT; and the remaining €1,600 in further taxes such as excise, stamp duty and so.

How, then, is our money to be used? The Budget showed for each person in Ireland, our Government will spend €11,000 on “current” recurring activities (such as, in particular, civil service salaries and social welfare). It also showed a further €2,600 for each one of us on “capital” items (such as roads and buildings). The total spend by our Government for 2009 for each citizen in the State will be €13,600.

Note that €13,600 is ahead, by a considerable margin, of the tax which the Government expects to collect from us. The difference will be borrowed from overseas investors, and we will have to pay this loan back – along with the rest of the money we already owe in the national debt – through further taxes in the future. At the end of 2008, the net debt position of our Government was about 22 per cent of GDP, that is, about €9,000 for each one of us. Since then about a further €11 billion has been raised, which brings the total to about €11,600 per capita. These figures do not include the investment that our Government is intending to make into our new National Asset Management Agency. For every billion euro that the agency spends in the future, a further €240 has to be found for each one of us.

Repaying our national debt to foreign investors is dead money: it is money that will be lost from our society and which could otherwise have been used to help build a better Ireland.

How is each of our €13,600 going to be spent across the Civil Service? There is a full department-by-department breakdown in the document I mentioned above and, from this, the per capita expenditures can be derived.

Some €5,100 for every person in the country will be spent by the Department of Social and Family Affairs, which of course includes all social welfare benefits to those challenged in our society. Another €3,600 will be spent by the Department of Health and Children (including the Health Service Executive). Then there is €2,300 that will go to our schools and third-level institutions via the Department of Education and Science. The Garda will get €360 for each person in the State, and the Defence Forces will receive €190 on behalf of each one of us. The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment (which includes the IDA, Enterprise Ireland, and Science Foundation Ireland) gets €350.

Thanks to Karlin Lillington for the original link.

Another case of police brutality caught on a cellphone

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It seems that the spirit of the old LAPD lives on — though this time in San Francisco. Chris Nuttall sent me this link to a story about a police murder which occurred in January.

The cell phone video, one of a handful that have surfaced, aired Friday night on KTVU-TV. It shows a male BART police officer walking over to three men lined up against a wall near a female officer, and then striking one in the face.

The victim of the punch – identified by Channel 2 as 22-year-old Grant – slides to the ground. The video then shows the moments preceding the shooting, then the shooting itself. It appears that the officer who punches the man is the same person who later is seen kneeling on Grant's head when he was shot.

Sources have identified that officer as Tony Pirone. He and the other officers present at the time of Grant's shooting all remain on paid administrative leave while the investigation continues, but until Saturday BART was not investigating the conduct of anyone besides Johannes Mehserle, 27, who shot Grant.

Mehserle later resigned from the force and was charged with murder. He pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail…

Famous Seamus

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(Image from Wikipedia.)

Today is Seamus Heaney’s 70th birthday. As Ireland slides into economic meltdown, governed by a clique of incompetent, corrupt and venal politicians, this is a rare opportunity to celebrate. RTE, the national broadcaster, has done something imaginative: in collaboration with the Lannan Foundation they have produced a landmark 15-CD box set of the poet reading his own Collected Poems. And from 9am this morning RTE is broadcasting this entire collection. You can listen on the Web. If you have time, his 1995 Nobel Lecture — “Crediting Poetry” — is a great read — as a reminder that we are all, ultimately, “hunters and gatherers of values”. Or you can listen to him giving the lecture here.

On this day…

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… in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States, died of a cerebral hemorrhage in at the age of 63 & Vice President Harry Truman became president.

Half-timbered motoring

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My musings about my family’s Morris Minor prompted this lovely blog post on the Nicci French blog:

My own childhood experience was entirely different. My parents’ first car, bought in 1970, was a Morris Traveller. Six years later it was the car I learned to drive on. Three things I remember about it:

1) It was the car with wood on it. When we took it to Sweden, crowds used to gather in the street to stare at it, touch it, to see that it was real. The Swedes were keen on wood and keen on cars, but didn’t believe in mixing them.

2) When we travelled to Sweden we took a ferry from Newcastle. Getting the car on to the ferry involved each car being lifted into the hold by a crane. It took a long time.

3) Changing gears on the Traveller, I had to learn a special skill called double declutching. It’s not a skill that I’ve needed to call on much in later life. (I couldn’t believe there’d be an entry on double declutching in Wikipedia, but there bloody is.)

Of course there is!

LATER: Quentin can even remember the registration number of his family’s Morris Traveller.

The Met’s Rodney King moment

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This morning’s Observer column.

The police have two choices. Accept that digital technology will make them accountable for their actions or try to control the technology. In any normal society there would be no decision to be made. But since 9/11 the threat of global terrorism has given the state – and its security apparatus – carte blanche to take whatever measures it deems necessary. And it has imbued in every uniformed operative, from ‘Community Support’ officers and the bobby on the beat to the bored guy in the airport checking your toothpaste, the kind of arrogance we once associated only with authoritarian regimes.

You think I jest? Talk to any keen amateur photographer. As a group, photographers have been subjected to increasingly outrageous harassment by police and security operatives. (For a partial list of incidents see bit.ly/22VFRX). Try photographing a bridge, public building or a police car parked on a double-yellow line and you will have a goon demanding your camera, image card or film.

Better still, ask John Randall, a Tory MP who recently told the Commons how one of his Uxbridge constituents, a Mr Wusche, photographed properties he thought were in bad repair to pass on to the council…

Marina Hyde had a great column on the same subject in yesterday’s Guardian:

If there is anything to feel optimistic about today, perhaps it is the hope that we are witnessing the flowering of an effective inverse surveillance society. Inverse surveillance is a branch of sousveillance, the term coined by University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, and it emphasises “watchful vigilance from underneath”, by citizens, of those who survey and control them.

Not that turning our cameras on those who train theirs on us is without risk. Indeed, one might judge it fairly miraculous that the man was not forcibly disarmed of his camera phone, given that it is now illegal to photograph police who may be engaged in activity connected to counterterrorism. And as we know, everything from escorting Beyoncé to parking on a double yellow while you nip in to Greggs for an iced bun can now be justified with that blight of a modern excuse – “security reasons”.

Yet it will by now have dawned on even the most dimwitted Met officer that it is increasingly impossible for them to control the flow of information about their activities – to kettle it, if you will – no matter how big their army of press officers putting out misleading information in the immediate aftermath of any event may be.

Did the Met genuinely think they could prevent the emergence of a far more joined-up picture of Tomlinson’s passage through the City of London that afternoon, much as they thought they could suppress the details about Jean Charles de Menezes’s tragic final journey? If so, their naivety is staggering…

Some people have emailed to say that they find the closing prediction of my column (that police from now on will start confiscating cameras) implausible. Well, they clearly haven’t read Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act, which came into force on 16 February. That makes it an offence to photograph any police officer or member of the armed services in ways that could aid terrorism. As Roger Graef (one of the wisest people I know in this field) pointed out yesterday much — if not most — policing of demonstrations these days is ‘justified’ not just under the Public Order acts, but anti-terror legislation which gives anyone in uniform authority to do or ban almost anything.

In fact, one of the great ironies of the Bob Quick case is that the photographer who took the picture could have been prosecuted under Section 76. And probably would have been if he hadn’t got the picture out quickly.

The bigger picture is that Osama bin Laden has won, hands-down. He provoked Western democracies into an obsession with security that justifies any degree of trampling on liberty. He stimulated the introduction of legislation (like the Patriot Act in the US) and the Counter-Terrorism Act in the UK which enables the State to treat ANY activity, including legitimate democratic activity (like protesting against the looting of the banking system, the launching of a war under false pretences, the banning of fox-hunting or airport expansion) not as a nuisance to the normal business of a city but as a threat to the State itself.