New Orleans

Factoids include:

• Verizon reported to Congress in 2007 that it received 90,000 such requests per year. [Note to self:  thank god I don’t have a Verizon service on a phone!]
• Google has an accessible tool for all countries that shows it received 4200 requests in the first half of 2010.
• Facebook told Newsweek they get 10 to 20 requests per day, so let’s say 5000 per year or so.
• “Last year … the Justice Department argued in court that cellphone users had given up the expectation of privacy about their location by voluntarily giving that information to carriers.”  [Of course there is no way to obtain a cellphone without giving your address that I know of!]
• “In April, it [DOJ] argued in a federal court in Colorado that it ought to have access to some e-mails without a search warrant.”  [April 2010 under AG Eric Holder and the Obama Administration]
• “…the government does not notify people that they are searching their online information or prove probable cause, and if the government violates the law in obtaining information, defendants are generally unable to exclude that evidence from a trial…”  This information is courtesy of Professor Susan Freiwald, an expert in electronic surveillance law from the University of San Francisco School of Law!
• “…law enforcement officials do not need a warrant to read e-mail messages that are more than 180 days old.”  [OMG! WTF!!!]
• There have been no amendments to privacy laws on communications since 1986 before the dominance of the internet.

From reading the paper everyone makes sure that they say that DOJ and others are just “doing their jobs” trying to catch criminals and stuff.  The companies (other than our Twitter heroes of the day!) were silent other than saying that their privacy rules in the fine print say that they respond to proper legal requests.  It’s very clear nobody out there is doing anything to protect the freedom of speech and privacy protections of your run-of-the-mill Americans, who are the ones most likely to not use protected accounts or servers, but instead rely on the free systems provided by Google and the like.

This is scary stuff.  When the requests start coming in the tens of thousands and the totals start breaking hundreds of thousands who can be sure anymore that you are not in that number?

If you want to know my opinion on this, call me or send me a letter!

New Orleans

The article takes a peek, certainly no more than that, at Prime Minster Manmohan Singh’s program to create rural employment “guarantees.”  Despite India’s huge and growing urban areas, almost half of the population still is based in rural areas in desperate poverty in many situations.

Here’s how the logic runs in trying to establish that the poor are being harmed.  A report is cited that says rural wage increases have “doubled to nearly 8 percent after 2006” when the program came into existence.  That would seem to be very good news!  Big “but” in the article though because the benefit was diluted because the price of basic commodities “rose just as fast.” The rest of the piece is too conditionalized, contradictory, and speculative to make much out of, but the basic inference, despite qualifiers, is that the program drove inflation, including some accusations that the government has stockpiled such “mammoth food reserves” that unnamed critics are saying has boosted prices by creating an “artificial shortage.”  Huh?!?

Inflation in basic foodstuffs and energy was so severe in 2006 and 2007 before the Great Recession that many countries, including India, had to step in and both release food reserves and take steps to freeze prices to prevent inflation and assure access to food and fuel for the poor.  This was a global situation, not something isolated in the Asian subcontinent!  I’m not big defender of the existing Indian government, but come on – if not for the employment guarantees the devastation to the rural poor would have been even more deadly because they would have had to absorb the price spikes without any income increases.

The message of this short piece is that good intentions are having bad results.  There’s no evidence in the article to support either the flat, judgmental conclusion of the headline or the conclusion that “good will doesn’t guarantee good results.”  The Newsweek position would presumably have been that nothing should have been done by the Indian government to help the Indian rural poor.  The article lifts up a phrase:  “the plight suggests that the rural poor need not just more jobs but better one.”  Wow!  Tell me how that is not true as well for the urban poor, for all of the poor, and in fact a universal fact everywhere for everybody, and also something that no government has mastered in creating citizen wealth yet.

How does this all happen that we get such a twisted piece flopping all over the map?  Part of it is simply subcontracting without the ability to edit well.  Turns out that Mr. Overdorf, who may be a committed and knowledgeable reporter, though this garbled piece makes it hard to know, is one of a bunch of “correspondents” or stringers for a new for profit website called GlobalPost which launched out of Boston earlier this year and is trying to get traction.  It’s business model is the ability to create a “network” of people being supported in the field for all of the news outlets that can no longer afford their own bureaus and people.  They make most content available for free and then try to up-sell special access to reporters and reports to business and others, unsuccessfully so far.

It is easier to understand that if they are trying to pitch a piece to Newsweek and others they need an angle with some edge, and that’s the way the headline rolls this piece.  The problem of subcontracted news and fewer and fewer harried editors that are trying to sort it out, is that no one along the chain has any real time or interest or resources to check the facts.

In the meantime where good intentions are really paving the road to hell is also by slapping down even this feeble $5 Billion dollar program for the rural poor at the altar of pretending this is some kind of news or commentary and undercutting the small amount of support it has as well.

And, maybe I’m wrong, too, and if it were shown to me, I’d be the first to admit I lacked the full story or the facts, but at least I want to see something really make a difference to the poor in India no matter who is making it happen, and not just sell a magazine while the devil takes the hindmost.  This is not the right direction for Newsweek.