Category: Ethics

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Journal: Free Twitter Rocks, People Rule in Haiti

Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools
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Twitter Teams with Haiti Telco To Provide Free Text Tweets

WIRED 22 February 2010

Text messages have already raised $32 million for Haiti relief. Now Twitter is partnering with the devastated nation’s dominant telco to provide free text Tweets to Haitians so they can better keep in touch with each other and the outside world.

“Kevin Thau and our mobile team have recently arranged free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes on the company’s blog. “To activate the service, mobile phone users in Haiti can text follow @oxfam to 40404. Accounts are created on the fly and any account can be followed this way.”

The move is much more than a gesture, as it might seem in place where limitless text plans abound and the standard of living is much higher. Under Digicel’s pre-paid plan Haitians pay $0.08 to text locally, $0.15 to text internationally and $0.23 to send an MMS. But considering that the country’s per capita income is about $1,300, that would be the equivalent of $2.46, $4.62 and a whopping $7.07 in the U.S. (which had a 2008 per capita income of about $40,000).

As has become almost routine now, the initial flood of information and pictures to emerge from the disaster zone reached the world via Twitter, and the use of texting is an especially crucial lifeline in the underdeveloped world.

Phi Beta Iota: BRAVO TWITTER!  Who would have thought Haiti would be the silver lining for the poor.  At one stroke Twitter hass connected scharitable giving from the 80% that do not normally give, with the bottom-up needs of the poor articulated via Twitter for free.  Now if Twitter can team with others such as Nokia, Microsoft, and IMB to offer free cell phones to the five billion poor, with back office harvesting of the data and a global grid of volunteer translator educators in 183 languages, we save the world quick time.

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Journal: The End of Old Money

03 Economy, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Mobile
WIRED Home Page

We stopped subscribing to WIRED when advertising crossed the 60% mark, but this issue came to us and has a useful article on the end of old money, which is to say, the end of money where banks and credit cards take an undeserved cut from every transaction while taking huge risks with your money as collateral.

The Open Money movement is proceeding apace, with community-oriented credit cards like Interra, new forms of home rule stripping corporations of their illegitimate “personality” status, and moving money from Wall Street to the local bank.

Meanwhile, Twitter is changing the world again by becoming a trusted point to point money transfer agent.  here are five new ways to pay that cut out the banks and credit card organized legalized crime lords:

Twitpay. Type a friend's Twitter handle, a dollar amount, and twitpay to transfer funds to their PayPal account.

Zong. Instead of entering credit card information anew for every online purchase, users fill in their phone number and the charge shows up on their monthly bill.

Square. The latest from Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, this 3/4 inch cube turns any iPhone into a credit card reader.

GetGiving. This mobile app uses PayPal to enable charities to accept small donations without the usual exorbitant credit card transactions fees.

Hub Culture. Travelers can avoid the hassle and fees of swapping dollars for euros by transacting in vritual currency in this international network of workstations.

To our surprise, PayPal itself, central to most alternative schemes, was not highlighted other than being mentioned above.

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Journal: Modern Obstacles to Spying & Assassination

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement, Military
Marcus Aurelius

(1)  I've seen some of the surveillance video on CNN; here is a link to more.

(2)  Regardless of who ran the operation, sounds like the Hamas guy needed to go;

(3) in addition to surveillance and biometrics, proliferation of commercially-available databases such ChoicePoint  creates additional operational challenges.)

Full Story Online

How spy technologies foil old-school political killings

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Peter Finn

Saturday, February 20, 2010; A13

The practice of secretly assassinating purported enemies of the state — an age-old tool of foreign policy — has run up against steadily improving international police collaboration and the global proliferation of surveillance technologies that make it harder for anyone anywhere to surreptitiously conduct a high-profile killing on foreign soil.

In Doha, London and now Dubai, political killers have been caught on film and tracked, provoking unexpected attention and controversy for the organizers. Because of new biometric technologies, the proliferation of cheap video, and sophisticated monitoring of customs points and airports, the skills of those who specialize in the creation of fictional identities have been tested, and sometimes defeated.

The apparent political killing of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh has ricocheted around the world in recent days after his alleged attackers were spotted by a camera above an elevator at the Dubai Al-Bustan Rotana hotel, in the United Arab Emirates. Four suspects, all obvious weight-lifters, were filmed exiting in pairs and heading for Mabhouh's room.

Shortly after the killing, they were again filmed, this time more nervously boarding the same elevator, wearing the same baseball caps. Then they were filmed again, leaving the airport on flights to Europe, Africa and Asia. On Thursday, Interpol issued warrants for 11 suspects after the Dubai police conducted a careful study of their videotaped movements at nearly a dozen locales. Their mug shots had already been flashed on television screens around the world.ed to this report.

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Journal: Goldman Sachs Outed, European Audit Soon?

03 Economy, 08 Wild Cards, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement

Chuck Spinney

Goldman Goes Rogue – Special European Audit To Follow

Simon Johnson     Baseline Scenario      February 14, 2009

We now learn – from Der Spiegel last week and today’s NYT – that Goldman Sachs has not only helped or encouraged some European governments to hide a large part of their debts, but it also endeavored to do so for Greece as recently as last November.  These actions are fundamentally destabilizing to the global financial system, as they undermine: the eurozone area; all attempts to bring greater transparency to government accounting; and the most basic principles that underlie well-functioning markets.  When the data are all lies, the outcomes are all bad – see the subprime mortgage crisis for further detail.

A single rogue trader can bring down a bank – remember the case of Barings.  But a single rogue bank can bring down the world’s financial system.

Goldman will dismiss this as “business as usual” and, to be sure, a few phone calls around Washington will help ensure that Goldman’s primary supervisor – now the Fed – looks the other way.

But the affair is now out of Ben Bernanke’s hands, and quite far from people who are easily swayed by the White House.  It goes immediately to the European Commission, which has jurisdiction over eurozone budget issues.  Faced with enormous pressure from those eurozone countries now on the hook for saving Greece, the Commission will surely launch a special audit of Goldman and all its European clients.

Phi Beta Iota: The balance of the above article is a “must read.”

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Happy Birthday Arno Reuser–Master Librarian

08 Wild Cards, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Librarian Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Real Time, Threats, Topics (All Other)
Arno Reuser

PLATINUM LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

Arno “The Curious” Reuser

Mr. Arno Reuser, Arno the Curious, is a Master Librarian who has done more for the practice of Open Source Inteligence (OSINT) in support of national security than anyone else in Europe.  He has been a pioneer in the explotiation of badly-delivered OSINT from private sector vendors, writing original PERL programs to make sense of their feeds; he has known how to make the most of the Internet; and above all, he has known how to find and engage human intellects around the world, each capable of producing unique tailored knowledge not available online or in print.  He is the Master Librarian of the OSINT world and all seven intelligence tribes.

When InterNET is InterNOT (2008)

Virtual Open Source Agency (2006)

Librarian Tradecraft (2003)


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Journal: Taming Twitter–Emergence of Baby World Brain?

Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Technologies, Threats, Tools
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Taming Twitter’s Streams With Automated Web Sites

Unlike Facebook, whose builders strive to make it an ever more organized social network, Twitter seems to thrive on being a jumble. It is an egalitarian sort of mess: Twitter does not sort its users into categories, does not tag some as celebrities, does not map out who does lunch with whom in the real world. You and Shaquille O’Neal are Twitter equals, only he has an extra 2.8 million followers.

There is also a Web site, Listorious listorious.com where volunteers publish personally chosen lists of posters to follow based on specific themes. But it is hit or miss. The Best of Photography list is a sharp collection of 29 eye-catching feeds, but Tech News People is a pile of 499 journalists for you to sort through.

So, how do you figure out who to follow? Start with a sweeping generalization: Twitter users can be grouped into different categories. For each, there is an automated site somewhere that lets you follow the genre without having to find and follow dozens, or even hundreds, of individual Twitter streams.

Phi Beta Iota: This article provides an extraordinary bridge to the future, when Twitter could become the real-time feed for inputs easily sorted in an infinite number of “back offices” that remix the information by threat, policy, player, and zip code.  The difference between Google and Twitter is that Twitter empowers the end-user, Google ravages the end user (intellectually and metaphorically speaking).

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Journal: Ushahidi Rocks in Haiti–New Schematic

08 Wild Cards, Analysis, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Technologies, Threats, Tools
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Project 4636 Revisited: The Updated Info Graphic
UPDATE: Since this graphic was published, a few additional clarifications have come to light. Please see Robert’s comment for more details.

Shortly after we posted the original Project 4636 info graphic, a few folks involved in the project got in touch to see if we could clarify the process. There are a lot of moving parts,  many of which are constantly changing, and so the original graphic didn’t quite reflect the exact process as well as it could have. With that in mind, we worked with Josh Nesbit of Frontline SMS Medic and Nicolás di Tada of InSTEDD to make sure the graphic reflected the process as accurately as possible. The biggest update that we made is that InSTEDD’s Nuntium SMS Gateway and the Thomson Reuters Foundation Emergency Information System are now the first entities that receive and process incoming SMS’s.  Everything else is pretty much the same.

Click for Zoomable Version

Journal: Haiti Rolling Directory from 12 January 2010

noble gold