Avoid like the plague (which is exactly why governments are increasingly turning to the British multinational):
A man allegedly changed details on more than 67,000 speed and red-light camera fines in the computer system of the company which manages the data in Victoria.
The tampering did not actually affect any infringement notices as the changes were made after the fines were issued to drivers.
Victoria Police e-crime squad officers are investigating allegations that data on infringements from 2010 and 2011 were changed in the systems of Serco, the company which manages the speed and red-light camera infringement data in Victoria.
It’s alleged that 67,541 infringement notices were changed, with the date and time of offences as well as the speed altered.
Police allege the changes were made over three weeks in February and March this year by a Serco employee who no longer works for the company.
A 36-year-old Craigieburn man was arrested on Wednesday.
Last night I went to Columbia University to see Omar Barghouti discuss his new book, “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.” For those who don’t know, Barghouti is one of the BDS movement’s most effective strategists and promoters, basing his advocacy on a platform of human rights and international law while explicitly rejecting arcane ideology. His book offers the most in-depth and accessible analysis to date of the movement, its history, and why it is gaining so much momentum. Read an excerpt here.
During his talk, Barghouti mentioned that he had approached J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami about arranging a debate on BDS. The response from Ben-Ami was as follows, according to Barghouti: “We want to keep this debate inside the Jewish community. So we won’t participate in a debate with any Palestinians.”
Barghouti joked, “Why would BDS have anything to do with Palestinians?” He went on to describe Ben-Ami’s policy as racist.
Last December, I debated the issue of BDS against the director of J Street U, Daniel May. My debate partner was Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace. Daniel May’s partner was a Jewish student from Princeton also named Daniel May. Everyone involved in the debate was an Ashkenazi Jew, yet we were debating a movement founded and controlled by Palestinian civil society. If I had known at the time that J Street had an alleged policy of refusing to debate with non-Jews, especially Palestinians, I would not have participated at all.
Another person told me about J Street’s “don’t debate Palestinians” policy, but did not authorize me to report it at the time. The source explained that the policy resulted in the Jews-only debate at J Street’s annual policy conference in February, where Rebecca Vilkomerson debated in favor of BDS against opponents Bernard Avishai and Ken Bob of Ameinu.
It is worth noting that after the debate, Bernard Avishai took to his blog to tell a certain member of JVP (he left the person unnamed) that “you remind me, forgive me, of the Tea Party.” Avishai was apparently upset that the JVP member had asked him how he could argue against divesting from multinational companies and Israeli institutions that profit from the occupation while supporting a boycott of the settlements. It is unusual for someone of Avishai’s intellectual caliber to stoop so low to rebut a simple question about tactics. His response makes me wonder if the opponents of BDS, especially those who define themselves as politically liberal, are simply overwhelmed by events in Israel and Palestine.
To J Street’s credit, it is the only major pro-Israel group I know of that will debate BDS at all. None of the other established pro-Israel groups have participated in debates and none seem likely to do so in the near future. Last week, the Columbia University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) responded to a demand by the campus Hillel house for a “dialogue session” by requesting a debate instead. SJP’s leadership told Hillel’s director that he could choose the topic, time and place of the debate. Hillel refused the proposal. Besides international law and human rights, what do they have to be afraid of?
Columnist Thomas Friedman – whose understanding of the Muslim world involves staying at very expensive hotels and then speaking to the doorman to sense the “Arab street” – writes yet another article that shows how little he gets about the region. Want to speak to people who aren’t just in the elites, Friedman?
When I was in Cairo during the Egyptian uprising, I wanted to change hotels one day to be closer to the action and called the Marriott to see if it had any openings. The young-sounding Egyptian woman who spoke with me from the reservations department offered me a room and then asked: “Do you have a corporate rate?” I said, “I don’t know. I work for The New York Times.” There was a silence on the phone for a few moments, and then she said: “ Can I ask you something?” Sure. “Are we going to be O.K.? I’m worried.”
I made a mental note of that conversation because she sounded like a modern person, the kind of young woman who would have been in Tahrir Square. We’re just now beginning to see what may have been gnawing at her — in Egypt and elsewhere.
…
Syria, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, countries fractured by tribal, ethnic and religious divisions, would have been ideal for gradual evolution to democracy, but it is probably too late now. The initial instinct of their leaders was to crush demonstrators, and blood has flowed. In these countries, there are now so many pent-up grievances between religious communities and tribes — some of which richly benefited from their dictatorships while others were brutalized by them — that even if the iron fist of authoritarianism is somehow lifted, civil strife could easily trample democratic hopes.
Could anything prevent this? Yes, extraordinary leadership that insists on burying the past, not being buried by it. The Arab world desperately needs its versions of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk — giants from opposing communities who rise above tribal or Sunni-Shiite hatreds to forge a new social compact. The Arab publics have surprised us in a heroic way. Now we need some Arab leaders to surprise us with bravery and vision. That has been so lacking for so long.
Another option is that an outside power comes in, as America did in Iraq, and as the European Union did in Eastern Europe, to referee or coach a democratic transition between the distrustful communities in these fractured states. But I don’t see anyone signing up for that job.
Last night here in Sydney I helped launch – MC really alongside author Andrew Fowler and journalist Kerry O’Brien – a wonderful new book on Wikileaks and Julian Assange, The Most Dangerous Man in the World. Go buy immediately!
What was clear during the discussion was the significance of Wikileaks challenging the media class in general, forcing them to question (well, the good ones, anyway) how they relate to those in positions of power. Skepticism should be order of the day but alas often is not.
In a new interview with Assange published in India’s The Hindu, the Wikileaks founder discusses the world that exists away from the embedded media mindset:
There is a basic structure to geopolitics, which is not often mentioned. One way to think about it is that every country that is not very isolated has to sign up to one provider of intelligence or another. And there are a number of providers in the market. The U.S. is the market leader. And then you have really Russia and China and the U.K. providing a little bit. If you don’t sign up to one of these, then you can’t see what’s happening around you in your borders — because you don’t have geo-spatial intelligence. Information about individuals who may be coming into your territory or conspiring, you do not have; and that’s something that military groups and intelligence groups in various countries want to have. It increases their relative power within their own nations.
That doesn’t mean the nation needs it but rather that, for Indian intelligence, they can, for example, tremendously increase their influence within India by being signed up to all that intelligence product that the United States produces. Similarly, the Indian military can increase its power by having all these relationships with the U.S. military. And those relationships are not just pushed by the U.S. military or by the U.S. intelligence services. Nowadays, most of the economic activity involving intelligence and military in the United States occurs in private companies.
So there’s a blurring out in the United States between what is part of government and what is part of private industry. And these private industry groups, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and so on, and many thousands of smaller companies, lobby and push the U.S. State Department, Congress, and other countries directly to sign up as part of this system — so they can get more power and influence within the United States and have a greater ability to suck money out of the U.S. tax base and out of the tax bases of other countries.
“No leniency [1].” That was the warning from Bahrain’s crown prince last week as government forces continued cracking down on protesters, activists, journalists and doctors. It was issued alongside yet another promise of reform by the Bahraini government.
The warning was also met with silence from the United States. The U.S., which has long considered Bahrain a key ally [2] in the region, condemned [3] the violence in mid-March, and two weeks later noted that arresting bloggers “doesn’t help [3]” promote an inclusive national dialogue.
But so far this month—as reports of increasing intimidation, censorship and brutality emerge—the U.S. doesn’t seem [4] to have had a public response. In one of the State Department’s last statements, spokesman Mark Toner told reporters [5] on March 22, “Our position towards Bahrain is crystal clear. We’re going to continue to work with the Bahraini Government.”
We called the State Department to ask why the violence in Bahrain hadn’t been broached in recent press briefings. “We respond to reporters’ questions,” a State Department spokesman told me, noting that “there’s a lot going on throughout the entire Middle East.”
My following review appeared in this week’s Sydney Sun Herald:
Underground Suelette Dreyfus and Julian Assange (Random House, $24.95) Inside Wikileaks Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Scribe, $29.95)
During a rare public appearance in March, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told a packed audience at Cambridge University that the internet is the “greatest spying machine the world has ever seen”.
Although he praised the ability of the web to inform and challenge the established order, he said to students that, “it is a technology that can be used to set up a totalitarian spying regime, the likes of which we have never seen.”
Assange’s message was clear: Wikileaks had provided invaluable information on a range of issues that society had not previously known but repressive states could equally use the same tools – YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and others – to track and arrest dissidents. We have seen this happen in the last months in Egypt, Libya and across the Arab world.
These two books – one written by a former confidante of Assange at Wikileaks and the other by a colleague who penned this definitive hacking tome in the late 1990s – offers insights into the ideology behind the whistle-blowing website and why it’s touched such a raw nerve in the halls of power.
During a recent interview on ABC TV’s Q&A, Prime Minister Julia Gillard dismissed Wikileaks, argued that there is no “moral purpose” behind the leaks and accused Assange of believing in an “anarchic, here it all is, just have it” ideology.
Gillard could not have been more mistaken. Reading Underground, an updated edition of the 1997 release, co-written with Dr Suelette Dreyfus, we are taken into a world of global hackers whose “youthful curiosity was more about adventure than serious crime.”
Assange has a very clear moral code, one that is much less fawning towards American power than displayed by Gillard.
We read about the Australian Federal Police attempting to understand the motivation of young men (and it was mostly men) who were determined to prove that corporations and universities should not chose what remains private from the public. These are classic David vs. Goliath tales, with the US military, NASA and law enforcement agencies realising that the internet revolution could not be so easily tracked like communication technology before it.
The context for the times is the end of the Cold War with the continuation of the “Secret State [as] the world’s most powerful western spy agencies were reinventing themselves to spy on their own citizens instead of Russian KGB agents”.
A decade after September 11, 2001, the levels of official snooping massively exceeds the relatively innocent period of the 1990s. Little accountability takes place. As Assange discussed at Cambridge university, governmental monitoring of social media is now ubiquitous.
It was revealed in March that the US military was working with a private company to covertly influence Facebook and Twitter and institute fake online personas to spread pro-Washington propaganda and allegedly stop terrorism.
Wikileaks would not believe a word of this program, questioning the reasons anybody should have the right to obtain information on potentially billions of global citizens.
Former Wikileaks collaborator Daniel Domscheit-Berg would surely share this scepticism. His book is a curious combination of personal attacks on Assange – “So imaginative. So energetic. So brilliant. So paranoid. So power-hungry. So megalomanic” – and a passionate defence of the need to provide transparency in democracies.
He was, in his own words, Assange’s best friend and they fell out terribly. His book is like a scorned lover explaining what went wrong (from his perspective).
Although it’s undeniably interesting to read a close account of Assange and his supposedly unhealthy ego, the validity of the analysis has been denied by the Wikileaks founder. Domscheit-Berg explains the ways in which the website developed into a multi-million dollar operation. He wanted it to be “the most aggressive press organisation in the world, public and visible’’. Assange supposedly preferred an “insurgent operation”, to avoid the ever-increasing number of enemies who wanted to shut the site down.
Domscheit-Berg writes that Assange said that living underground was the best way to avoid detection. His paranoia was arguably justified, considering the leaked documents from the UK and US governments that outline ways to destroy Wikileaks and crush its credibility.
A little game; how many Western “journalists” and politicians continually visit Israel on a propaganda tour?
Answer; most of them.
In 2009 I wrote about the Sydney Morning Herald’s international editor Peter Hartcher visiting the Zionist state and being more than happy to speak to a very select collection of people, all offering a very similar message; we are under threat, we fear the Iranians, nothing about the occupation and all about repeating Israeli talking points.
Israel is troubled by the perception the US is an “empire of the past” and wants a resurgent America to lead a decisive confrontation with Iran, a top official has said.
“America is tested” at a pivotal moment in the history of the Middle East, said Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Dan Meridor, who is also the Minister for Intelligence and Nuclear Energy.
The Arab world was watching the US closely: “They look to America. If America does not seem to be able to contain the Iranian threat, will they go with Iran?”
“This is of world-order magnitude,” he told the Herald in an interview. Israel, which depends on the US as its security guarantor, itself appears to have new doubts about US judgment.
Mr Meridor said he was “surprised” at the Obama administration’s treatment of a longstanding US ally, Egypt’s former president: “Was it necessary to immediately empower the demonstrators against him and let [Hosni] Mubarak go? It’s seen by all the allies of America in the Arab world. I don’t know where the tide of history will go and I’m not sure they know.”
“The perception, that I hope is wrong, that America is weakening is not good, but I hope that America will find a way, and I believe they can, to restore itself as the leading country and not allow those impressions spread by the Iraq war that America is an empire of the past. All this is here on the table.
“America has started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Is it a success story or not? What happens in Pakistan? … It may be the use of power showed the limits of power.”
Mr Meridor, a senior member of the Likud party of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the confrontation with Iran was “a decisive conflict”.
“The end of it is very important.
If the end of it is that Iran has nuclear power, it will have grave effects on world order, on balance of power, and on the Middle East.
“It may spell the end of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty regime, not only because Iran will be nuclear, but because other countries say they will need to be nuclear, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and others may do it.
“No more the responsible adults tell the kids what to do. When everybody has the bomb you can’t contain or control or interfere as America could do.”
Israel’s Mossad enjoys a reputation as the world’s most fearsomely effective intelligence agency, but it didn’t see the Arab uprisings coming.
“The first lesson I draw [from the uprisings] is that we should all be very humble,” says Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister responsible for intelligence and nuclear energy, Dan Meridor.
“We didn’t know,” he told the Herald. “Had you asked me the day before it happened in Egypt, I would have told you ‘no way’. Or Tunisia for that matter . . . Nobody predicted this happening in any specific way.”
Israel’s President, Shimon Peres, the ceremonial head of state, puts an optimistic face on the tumult. During a visit to Washington last week he imagined that “the moment that the Arab world will become free and open and peaceful it will be a major change in the world experience and in the annals of the Middle East”.
Surely an Israel surrounded by democracies would be a much more secure nation? One of the most striking features of the Arab ferment to date has been the fact that Israel has been irrelevant.
As Meridor points out: “What we saw in Cairo that was quite heartwarming, hopeful, promising, was that the slogans we heard were not taken from the Muslim vocabulary, they were taken from the Western vocabulary.
“You didn’t see the usual – ‘Down with America, Kill the Jews, Allahhu Akhbar [God is great]‘ and all the rest. You heard words like liberty, freedom, equality, justice, an end to corruption.”
The people of the Arab world are more interested in improving their daily lives than demonising Israel, it seems.
Both pieces end with this:
Peter Hartcher is the international editor. He travelled to Israel as a guest of the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce.
Well, that’s alright then. It’s clearly too much to expect that a senior journalist from a major Australian paper would actually speak to people his guests haven’t arranged him to interview. Any Palestinians? Arabs? Gazans? Those under occupation? Discussion about Israel’s growing racism problem?
LEIGH SALES: Commentators have noted that in terms of what the cables revealed about American diplomacy, it didn’t show anything particularly scandalous, if anything it showed that there was quite a bit of consistency between America’s public positions and their private positions, although in private of course they are more frank. Do you agree with that assessment?
JULIAN ASSANGE: The statement that embarrassing information, information, internal information is revealed and it simply shows the US Government to be a good guy is something that is done by apologists. The cables across the board reveal a very nuanced position – everything from that state security apparatus using a diplomatic core to spy on NGOs and take their DNA all the way through to bona fide pushing of a human rights agenda in some countries. So we can see that the State Department and US embassies in their interactions with other governments are not the caricature that the White House presents, but neither are they the caricature that some leftists present.
Travelling isn’t an ethics-free zone. The places we visit are imbued with political and social meaning. Tourism in repressive states should be carefully navigated to avoid giving support to the regime (as much as possible).
Sri Lanka, still in the grip of a political culture that refuses to acknowledge its massacre of Tamils and ongoing oppression of the minority, is a perfect example. I’ve covered here the countless stories in the New York Times travel section that simply ignores any human rights issues on the island and encourages Americans to visit post-war.
Just a few years ago Sri Lanka emerged from a civil war, but even as the Tamil north was embattled and fighting a rear-guard action, there were tourists sunning themselves on the southern coast and touring the Buddhist stupas in Kandy. Now the war is over, and Sri Lanka can claim to be peaceful, except for the crowing of its government over the vanquishing of the Tamils. Tourists have returned in even greater numbers for the serenity and the small population. (Amazingly enough, almost the same number of people live in the Indian city of greater Mumbai than occupy the whole of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.)
At one point Sri Lanka was on the Could Be Your Last Trip list of the traveler Robert Young Pelton.
