Tunisia, Egypt, And The Consent Of The People

 Politics  No Responses »
Jan 282011
 

This is a general waffle in relation to the Jasmin Revolution (although the Wikipedia article concentrates on the Tunisian revolution, this phrase is beginning to be used more generally) – no news here.

We often hear that no government can survive without the consent of the people, but what does that mean ? In this case it means that a significant proportion of the people are sufficiently angry with their government to risk violence, arrest, and even death to demonstrate their need for a change. The governments involved can try a variety of tactics to deal with the protestors but their first reaction – violent repression – will only make the protestors more demanding. Ignoring the rights and wrongs of punishing protestors, violence can work if the protestors are a small enough minority, but at a certain point it becomes self-defeating.

If a government offers change, it needs to do so before it resorts to violence – the government wants to offer as little change as possible, and violence means the protestors are more demanding of change. Indeed the government needs to offer just a little more change than it wants to. Offering too little change such as President Mubarak appears to have done, does little to stem the anger of the people.

What makes people annoyed enough with the government to take to the streets ? There are a whole variety of reasons not limited to :-

  • The absence or perceived absence of a say in the composition of the government. Or in other words the lack of a genuinely democratic government. That is not to say that merely having some form of democracy means that a government is immune to this effect as even in a democratic society, there can be those who believe they have no say in their government. For example the UK democratic system can be subject to this effect as people in “safe” constituencies will often believe that they have no say in their government if they do not vote for the party that always wins.
  • A belief that their government does not act in the best interest of the people. This includes but is not limited to the perceived level of corruption within the government or society.
  • Injustice where the people are subject to arbitrary arrest and punishment for “crimes” that most would regard as completely normal activities.
  • A lack of personal freedom (closely associated above) including but not limited to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and the freedom to go about one’s daily business without undue interference from the government.
  • How old a government is. People can put up with a bad government for a year, or even five, but sooner or later it becomes unpalatable. In fact that even applies to a good government – if it stays in power too long, not only will it be subject to strains that make it a bad government, but even if it avoids those it will be condemned simply because people want change from time to time.
  • The economy. If the economy is poor enough that people are suffering, or income inequalities reach the point where the difference between rich and poor becomes excessive, that is in itself a source of grievance.

Dictatorships are more subject to this kind of problem than democracies, but democracies are not immune.

It is perhaps unfortunate that mass protests usually descend into violence. However it is perhaps inevitable particularly when the forces of control are also violent. There are those who claim that the violence by protestors is somehow caused by “dark forces”. Nothing could be further from the truth – the violence is merely an expression of the level of anger felt. President Mubarak’s “dark forces” cannot instigate these level of protests and when they are underway have no way of controlling them.

It is likely that these accusations are themselves enough to cause the protests to continue.

Palin – Take Your Foot Out Of Your Mouth !

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 132011
 

Sarah Palin has recently made a speech on the recent shooting spree in Arizona where a congressperson was shot (and probably targeted by the shooter) in relation to the media noise about the aggressive and combative attitudes in US politics at the moment. In it she claimed the media was launching a ‘blood libel‘ against the right-wing in US politics in its criticism of the political debate.

Whether or not she has a point to make, the use of the phrase ‘blood libel’ here is grossly inaccurate and an example of exactly what the media is talking about. Blood libel is the phrase used to describe the hysterical accusations of anti-semites accusing Jews of sacrificing Christian children and draining the blood for some religious purposes – if it hadn’t been used as the excuse for slaughtering Jews throughout history, it would be ridiculous. I am hardly an expert on the US media, but I find it extremely unlikely that anyone from the US media is likely to hunt down any right-wingers, kill them, and drink their blood.

Sarah Palin’s remarks are merely a hysterical over-reaction to a perceived attack on the right-wing. To be fair I should point out that apparently others have used the phrase in US politics recently. Which just goes to show that US politics is little over-heated. Interestingly a conservative commentator has pointed out that the use of this phrase is an indication that Sarah Palin just isn’t of presidential material – presumably presidents are expected to behave and talk in a slightly more dignified fashion.

Did the US media attack the right-wing ?

The US media did comment after the shootings that there is a considerable level of aggression in US politics today, and used an example showing certain US congressional areas targeted with rifle cross-hairs which was published by the right-wing. This could be said to be unfairly criticising the right-wing except that the reason that example was used was that the congressperson who was shot (Gabrielle Giffords) had previously complained about that very publication in which she was targeted.

Personally I don’t believe the right-wing was specifically targeted in the various suggestions that US politics can be a little aggressive. There is a lot to be said for lowering the temperature in US politics – opposition, criticism, discussion and debate are all a part of politics and essential in any healthy democracy. But there’s no need to go too far, and throwing around inappropriate phrases like “blood libel” is certainly an example of that.

I have no doubt that there are Democrats who go too far too.

We have no way of knowing how much the current atmosphere in US politics had an effect on the shooter, and will probably never know. After all he is clearly a deranged individual and he probably doesn’t know himself. The naysayers who claim it had no effect have no way of knowing that. If it did have an effect, it does not make those making inflammatory comments responsible for these shootings – not even to the extent of inciting murder.

But the current state of US politics could have an effect on deranged individuals even if it did not in this case. As such it is worth considering whether toning it down is worthwhile. Say “she’s an idiot” rather than “she’s a traitor”, say “he should be fired” rather than “he should be put in the chair and the switch thrown”. It doesn’t ruin the debate and it might just save someone’s life – isn’t that worth it ?

Pastor Jones To Speak In The UK ?

 Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Dec 122010
 

A certain Pastor Jones already notorious as the idiot who threatened to burn copies of the Koran on the date of the 911 attacks is rumoured to be invited to speak at some sort of English Defence League event. Well it appears he has found his appropriate level – the gutter amongst his far right hate friends. Of course the issue of whether he should be allowed to visit the UK has been raised, and the Home Secretary is said to be considering the issue.

Pastor Jones has allegedly said that prohibiting him from visiting the UK would be “incorrect and unfair”, and even “unconstitutional”. Well I’d perhaps agree with the unfair bit, but whoever said life was supposed to be fair? As for “incorrect” and “unconstitutional”, well Pastor Jones needs to read the Wikipedia article on the UK to educate himself on the fact that the UK is not part of the US so the US constitution doesn’t apply over here, and as for “incorrect” … who knows what he means ?

On a legal level, the Home Secretary certainly has the right to prohibit aliens (which is what the Pastor Jones is if he were in the UK) from visiting within certain constraints. So it is “correct” on that level.

Of course the meanest thing to do would be to allow him to visit and then throw him into prison for incitement to religious hatred – ignoring the fact that his threat to burn the Koran would count as that, just his presence in the UK could count as incitement to religious hatred. And given his history, it seems likely that what he says is likely to count to.

Of course Pastor Jones isn’t likely to realise that he could be imprisoned over here!

Attitudes To Students …

 Media, Politics  No Responses »
Dec 122010
 

The peculiar thing about the student protests are the reactions of ordinary people – gathered through various Facebook posts. There is not a lot of sympathy for the plight of students out there. Negative reactions to the violence are all very reasonable, although there does seem to be a media slant towards the violence committed by the students as opposed to the violence committed by the police – after all the figures are something like 12 policeman injured and 43 protestors injured, which doesn’t sound very even-handed to me. Especially when you consider that many minor injuries amongst the protestors will be unreported whereas they are much more likely to be reported amongst the police (it’s an “injury at work” sort of thing).

The reactions against students in general protesting on the tuition fees issue seem to concentrate on :-

  1. Why should the government pay for the students to study anyway ?
  2. Students should go out to work to pay for their studies rather than just skiving off with a handful of lectures a week.

Basically students have a bad reputation for some reason, and most of the anti-student comments are not justified. Let’s take the work argument first.

Studying for a degree is hard work. You may well find students walking around at any time during the day, and discover that students have just 2 hours of lectures a week. All is not quite as it seems … First of all, students on 2 hours of lectures a week are pretty rare, and just because there are just two lectures doesn’t mean that’s all of the work they are expected to do.

In a typical week, a student may have lectures, tutorials, be expected to read a huge pile of books, and write an essay or six. And that’s before considering some courses where the students may have to spend time on projects – a series of themed photographs, writing a piece of software, building a high-precision lathe, etc.

And things are not always timetabled especially well for a student’s convenience – a student may have two hour long lectures in the morning with an hour’s break in between. Depending on what the student needs to do in terms of other work, that hour may not be easy to work through – sure a student can open up a netbook and write a few words of an essay, but that huge book on “Operational Management” that they suddenly realise they need may be at home, or booked out of the library. That student you see in the park outside the library messing around, may well be later working for 6-hours in the library before going home and spending a couple of hours sorting out their lecture notes.

When I started my degree many years ago, it was pointed out to me that students on the course I was on were expected to work at least 40-hours a week with the amount of time going up as it approached exam periods. Sure there are students who goof off, but most only do so for a few weeks at most; the ones who keep goofing off end up being thrown out or end up with a poor degree.

On a similar note, it is common to see criticisms of how much students spend their time drinking and partying. In University towns, it has gotten to the point that people assume that loud bunch of young people running down the street at midnight (or later) are students. How do they know ? It is not as if students are marked in some way – those young people could be anybody – students, or a group from some workplace.

And why shouldn’t students have a night out from time to time ? If you work hard, you need to play hard too – to unwind; this is particularly important when your “work” is the kind of thing that you don’t put down at the end of the day and go home, but something you take home with you.

I happen to live in a flat on a road that is fairly busy at night – it is a route commonly used by students (or anonymous young people) to stagger home after a drink or six in some of the main drinking areas. Whilst there is a few groups almost every night, people forget just how many students are around – at certain times of the year, the procession of groups is almost continuous from midnight to 2am, but for most of the year the groups are few and far between. It would seem to me that students go out for a drink or six far less often than people assume.

Now let’s tackle the thorny issue of whether the government should pay for students or whether they should pay for their own education. Let’s make it a little less vague – should the community (through taxation) pay for students to study ? Even in the most distant past, there have been communities who pay for exceptional students to go to University – at least as far back as the 14th century. In those times of course, it was only the exceptional few who got to go to University with the support of the community; the overwhelming majority were the sons (daughters were stuck at home) of the wealthy who got to go.

This led to a situation where the overwhelming majority of the population were lucky to get enough education to read and write poorly – only a tiny number were lucky enough to get a more complete education and become part of the “knowledge economy”. That was fine (if more than a little unfair) way back in the 14th Century, but what about today ?

Today, the UK economy is dependent on having a highly skilled workforce and will become more and more dependent on skilled workers., Indeed during the recent recession, it was noticeable that many firms went to great lengths to try and retain staff rather than dump them as would have happened in earlier recessions – they realised that to recover from the recession, they would need those highly skilled workers and did not want to take the chance that they would be unavailable come the recovery. The old days when money could be made by using large numbers of unskilled labour are over in this country – the places where such tactics work are places where wages are so low that it wouldn’t be possible to employ people in this country.

Today’s students are tomorrow’s “knowledge workers” – even those doing media studies, or games programming (both are useful skills for industries that bring in billions). We need young people to get good qualifications to pay the taxes of the future and ensure that the economy is healthy enough to ensure that we get a reasonable pension.

Who benefits from a plentiful supply of highly qualified graduates ? The graduate does to a limited extent – he or she has a better chance of getting a highly paid job (although that is not guaranteed). Private industry benefits because it has a work force with added value. Government does become a highly qualified work force ensures that the money coming in from taxation is high. In fact we all benefit.

So why do people insist that the prospective graduate pay ? When you consider that we all benefit when those students work for a degree, isn’t it more than a little selfish to insist that they pay ?

In addition to protesting, the students need to do a little PR work – their protests will never work until they get a significant amount of the general population on their side. And they have some negative PR to overcome – the violence at their demonstrations.

The WikiLeaks Conspiracy ?

 Computing, Media, Politics  2 Responses »
Dec 082010
 

If anyone has been following the news closely over the last few days, they will be aware of the attempt that the Swedish authorities are making to extradite Julian Assange to face an assortment of sex charges including rape. Even by itself, there is enough suspicion about the timing of this given previous history of the charges to cause any neutral observer to wonder just what is going on here.

For those who have not dug into the details, the charges were first investigated in August 2010 and then dropped before being re-opened. All the while Julian Assange was either in Sweden, or willing to talk to the prosecutor although not prepared to travel to Sweden at his own expense. The escalation to a request for extradition was unfortunately timed happening at the same time as the latest WikiLeaks (linking to a mirror as the main site is mysteriously down) publications.

By itself it is just about enough to cause a sensible to person to say to themselves … “I wonder … Nah!”, but there are other things happening to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks appears to be under a continual distributed denial of service attack where many computers are used to send traffic to the WikiLeak servers. There are two sets of servers involved in hosting the WikiLeaks sites – the actual web servers themselves, and the DNS servers hosting the name.

In the case of the web servers, the servers were first moved to the Amazon cloud service in the middle of a denial of service attack – so Amazon can hardly complain about this as it was known about at the time. Yet after less than a week, the site was booted off the Amazon cloud without a public explanation. The suspicion is that political pressure was brought to bear especially given one of the earliest statements about the issue was from a certain Joseph Lieberman – a US Senator.

WikiLeaks then went to a French hosting company – OVH – who have stated that they will honour their contract. Presumably providing that the French courts do not insist that they terminate the contract, which is possible given that the case is under review.

Separately to this, the Wikileaks domain (or “name”) has itself been under attack. Large scale distributed denial of service attacks took place against the EveryDNS infrastructure servers that provide the name wikileaks.org, and every other name hosted by the same infrastructure. EveryDNS took the step of terminating their domain hosting. As of now, the domain wikileaks.org is not available via the DNS servers I run, indicating that either they have not found another hosting company for the name, or their alternative arrangements are under sufficiently serious attack.

Those are the technical attacks.

In addition, a number of financial companies have frozen WikiLeaks accounts preventing funds from being used, or donations being made – PayPal (who admit that their decision was influenced by the US Government) and Mastercard amongst them.

Add all the attacks together and you start to think that there is some kind of conspiracy behind all this – perhaps the US government is waging cyberwar against WikiLeaks. It is almost certain that they have this capability and there are indications that they are annoyed enough with WikiLeaks to do this.

However it is still more probable that this is a combination of :-

  1. Annoyed US (and possibly other) “hackers” making denial of service attacks against the WikiLeaks infrastructure and the associated infrastructure.
  2. Various commercial organisations deciding that it is too much hassle to “help” WikiLeaks and deciding to terminate their contracts.

Probably the harshest criticism should be directed at PayPal who have just said in a TV interview that they received advice from the US State Department that the WikiLeaks site was probably illegal under US law. Well the opinion of a government in a free society should not be enough to condem an organisation, and the directors of PayPal could deservedly be called chickenshit arse-lickers for their actions.

Perhaps you do not believe that WikiLeaks is in the right here. I’m not entirely sure myself – leaking US diplomatic cables is one thing, but perhaps publishing a list of potential targets the US government feels are critical to its security was a step too far. But there is a bigger issue here than “merely” WikiLeaks itself. We are seeing a situation where a website that has not been condemned for their actions in any court of law has been pushed around and to some extent off the Internet by the actions of a few – both people engaged in illegal activities (denial of service attacks) and people making commercial decisions (terminating contracts).

Imagine if you will, this website is something controversial in a country that is considered a pariah by most of the world – Iran perhaps; perhaps they publish allegations with evidence of widespread government crimes and corruption. Iran and supporters of Iran undertake to destroy that website with “cyberwarfare”. Wouldn’t we want that website to be protected in some way ? Perhaps you are thinking that Iran doesn’t have the resources to undertake such an attack; well think again. Many of the largest botnets capable of carrying out widespread denial of service attacks are under the control of organised criminals (spammers) who have less resources than any government – it takes little more than a spotty teenager in a basement to control tens of thousands of compromised machines and target whatever they like.

In such a situation, it would seem to make sense to provide a hosting service of last resort. Presumably a volunteer effort as it would have to be immune to commercial interests, and presumable massively parallel to ensure that there are many servers providing service so that a distributed denial of service attack would fail to hit everywhere.

Lastly, the US reaction to WikiLeaks seems to me to be a little over the top. And I am not talking about the lunatic fringe who are likely to jump and down screaming at the slightest criticism of the US, but at more respected figures. Some of the reactions verge on coming close to events such as the Fatwwā against Salman Rushdie way back in the 1980s.

For example :-

  • Jeffrey T Kuhner wrote in an editorial in the Washington Times that Julian Assange should be treated “the same way as other high-value terrorist targets” and be assassinated.
  • Gordon Liddy has suggested that Julian Assange should be added to a “kill list” of terrorists to be assassinated without trial.
  • Mitch McConnell has called Julian Assange a “high-tech terrorist”.
  • Newt Gingrich has stated “and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant.”. Well it would be a start to treat any terrorist as an enemy combatant (the US doesn’t as enemy combatants have rights).

Calling for the assassination of Julian Assange is no better than a radical Islamist calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie – we’re supposed to be better than the knuckle dragging fundamentalists frothing at the mouth. Seems that some in the US aren’t. A reminder to those people – we supposedly live in countries where the rule of law is supposed to be followed, and nobody has tried and convicted Julian Assange of anything in relation to WikiLeaks.

As for calling Julian Assange a terrorist, that is blatantly ridiculous. However annoyed you may be with him, none of his actions equate to driving a truck packed with explosives into a crowded shop entrance, or hijacking a plane and flying it into a large city killing thousands. Even if any information published by WikiLeaks has led to the death of anybody (and nobody has managed to demonstrate this – merely raised ill-founded concerns about the possibility), the responsibility for those deaths belongs to those carrying out the killings and not WikiLeaks. At most (in such circumstances), WikiLeaks might be guilty of incitement to murder – and in a much less obvious way than those calling for the head of Julian Assange to be delivered to them on a platter.

The US is beginning to look like the fool in all of this – their information security is a joke, and their reaction to their inability to keep secrets is to shoot the messenger in a way that makes them look no better than those rogue regimes they complain so much about.

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