Phi Beta Iota: The story lacks context; Powell was not duped, he knew he was lying for his party, never mind that this left his integrity in the trash can. If Curveball had not existed Dick Cheney and the Neo-Cons would have fabricated someone like him. This is a classic case of integrity failure across the board. The British, the Germans, the CIA, everyone knew this guy was a liar, but in a repeat of “reasonable dishonesty” as immortalized by Sherman Kent in talking to Sam Adams, everyone chose to let Dick Cheney get away with a massive crime against humanity and a massive crime against the American people. Integrity. Keeping your integrity matters; you pay a price in the short-run when surrounded by those without integrity, but in the long run, you honor your Oath to the Constitution and your obligations to God, country, and family. It's a challenge. See Paradigms of Failure for context–integrity is not easy. Those of us that tried to fund full-page information pages against the war and the lies supporting the war were pushed back by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times (no doubt there were many other pushbacks). America has become a cheating culture in which “anything goes” for short-term selfish gain, without regard to the long-term consequences. Groundswell, Netroots, Smart Mobs, Wise Crowds, Generation 2.0, Youth Pirates, Everybody, all are meeting huge resistance in the near-term.
Hezbollah-Israel: Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised address to be ready to invade northern Israel if ordered to do so, The Associated Press reported. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned the Israel Defense Forces Northern Command on 15 February that the border could explode into crisis. Nasrallah said Hezbollah should be ready to seize the Galilee area, which refers to part of northern Israel.
Comment: Well-informed and Brilliant Feedback reports that Galilee already is mostly Arab. It is only a matter of opportunity before Arabs attempt to seize it from Israel. A fight over Galilee promises to be a crisis this year, in which Arab forces and proxies fight on and for Israeli soil.
On Tuesday afternoon, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clintonspoke in Washington about the Internet and human liberty, a Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers.
Eben Moglen
The list begins with “cheap, small, low-power plug servers,” Mr. Moglen said. “A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it.”
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Put free software into the little plug server in the wall, and you would have a Freedom Box that would decentralize information and power, Mr. Moglen said. This month, he created the Freedom Box Foundation to organize the software.
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Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”
Venessa Miemis is a futurist and digital ethnographer, researching the impacts of social technologies on society and culture and designing systems to facilitate innovation and the evolution of consciousness. She is currently pursuing a Masters in Media Studies at the New School in NYC.
A startup is offering free encrypted voice and text communications to protesters in Egypt.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2011 BY ROBERT LEMOS
MIT Technology Review
Two new applications for Android devices, called RedPhone and TextSecure, were released last week by Whisper Systems, a startup created by security researchers Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson. The apps are offered free of charge to users in Egypt, where protesters opposing ex-president Hosni Mubarak have clashed with police for weeks. The apps use end-to-end encryption and a private proxy server to obfuscate who is communicating with whom, and to secure the contents of messages or phone conversations. “We literally have been working night and day for the last two weeks to get an international server infrastructure set up,” says Anderson.
Anderson and Marlinspike are working with several nongovernmental organizations, such as MobileActive, to create a product that will be of use to other protesters. Of course, the software would not have helped when the Egyptian government took the unprecedented step of effectively shutting down both Internet and cellular communications across the entire country at the end of January.
