How Will the New Homeland Security Bill Affect You

Christian Science monitor interview with the journalist who’s been covering the bill. Good mid-level overview of the content and implications of the bill.

“Secrecy is also a chief concern among critics. The Homeland Security Department’s actions will largely be exempt from Freedom of Information Act oversight by ordinary citizens and will be subject to a decreased level of congressional oversight, critics say.”
“Congress has, to a large extent, left it to the Bush administration to take actions it deems necessary. Critics say this is a blank check that could seriously erode civil liberties by opening the door to widespread surveillance, including creation of a centralized databank collecting all available electronic information on individuals. Supporters say tough measures are necessary during tough times. They stress that the administration will not abuse its powers.”

The founding fathers created laws to forbid searches without warrants and secret trials because they knew from experience with European monarchies that these sorts of policies were subject to abuse. The laws and policies should protect citizens in case the government abuses our trust. That is part of what they meant when they talked about forming “a government of laws, not of men.”
Don’t other people remember this from civics class (and I wasn’t paying that close attention, either)? Do the legislators remember?

Been using a wiki for business collaboration…

…on a project over the last few weeks, with a group of geographically dispersed colleagues. For the most part the experience has been quite pleasant. For folks who aren’t familiar with wikis, they’re collaborative web spaces that anyone can edit.
Benefits
* The wiki is used to post meeting times, resources for the group, and for individuals to post what they’re working on.
* We typically email to brainstorm ideas; then post the results of the brainstorming to the Wiki where it can be sculpted.
* The absurdly low overhead is delightful — click “edit this page” to edit the page. Even easier than keeping an intranet and ftp-ing html pages (which I’ve done in a previous startup). Less likelihood of versionitis caused by ftp-ing an old file version onto a newer one.
* Easy to keep track of what’s new by clicking on “recent changes”
* Keeps behind-the-scenes work out of email, freeing email for interactive conversation
Drawbacks
The easygoing “anyone edit” system works well except when more than one person is editing the same document on a deadline. Upon which we needed to implement “social document management” by verbally “checking-in” and “checking-out” sections.
After the first dozen or so entries, you need to start gardening the home page to keep it from getting tangled and overgrown.
The hyperlink-tyranny of the Wiki interface makes multi-page structures rather dizzying to navigate. This method will top out above a certain level of complexity, without the ability to add more navigational cues.
Reflections
Using a Wiki is much easier and more pleasant than the corporate Microsoft monoculture, which requires the use of rock-heavy tools like PowerPoint and Word to do simple things.
Using a Wiki requires collaboration and trust within the workgroup. Knowledge management isn’t technological, it’s social.
It will be interesting to see how and whether the use of Wiki will scale when and if the project matures. In the mean time, there’s a set of rapid, low-overhead collaboration processes that the Wiki works really nicely for.

Congress passes bill saving small webcasters from destruction

from Kurt Hanson’s blog, via SlashDot
“In a stunning victory for webcasting, both the Senate and the House of Representatives unanimously passed a revised version of H.R. 5469 late last night that clears the way for copyright owners to offer webcasters a percentage-of-revenues royalty rate, essentially allowing the parties to mutually agree to override the CARP decision of last spring.”
Aggressive lobbying stopped previous versions of the legislation with fixed royalty fees that would have put small webcasters out of business, and helped pass a bill that allows small webcasters to pay fees on a percentage of revenues.
The story isn’t over, according to a Washington Post article; rather than fixing the rates the bill delegates rate-setting to a negotiating process between SoundExchange, a recording industry organization, and the webcasters. But small webcasters support it, according to the coverage I’ve seen.
The Post article doesn’t display correctly in Mozilla, but appears fine in IE.

Blog Neighborhoods

Blogstreet searches a database of 28,000 blogs.
Blogstreet can show which blogs are related to other blogs. If you type in a Blog URL, Blogstreet will show you a list of related blogs derived from their blogroll, and the list of blogs that blogroll it. This would be even more helpful if the neighborhood was assembled using topics and other references. After all, it’s easy enough to blogrollsurf already.

Big brother

So I was thinking about the latest worrisome developments, like John “Iran-Contra” Poindexter running a Defense Department program to set up a vast data mining operation, which will sift through credit card records, medical records, travel records, and email, along with government and legal records, on a vast and random fishing expedition for signs of potential crime.
No prior cause, no warrants, no permission necessary.
William Safire’s tirade against the program, if you haven’t read it yet. Posted by David Weinberger in full, here.
The ACLU’s arguments against it.
And I thought that the one thing we were missing was a real, honest-to-goodness secret police.
Then I saw this. The President’s national security advisors are recommending the creation of a brand new domestic spy agency.

Delta relieves “gate stress” with new display for waiting passengers

John Udell writes about a new system that Delta has designed to give passengers waiting at the gate more information about the boarding process, like updates on how many people have checked in, and the state of the standby list.
Sounds really helpful for those times you’re standing there anxiously waiting to see if you’ll get on the flight.

Web, code, and Talmud

Reflecting on David’s puzzlement about the Jews and software meeting in Boston the other day, I recalled this Joel Spolsky essay on how reading code is like studying Talmud, in that it is best done in pairs, puzzling through and arguing about the meaning of the text.
When you think about it, the “link” form of the weblog has similarities to the classical Jewish form of text commentary. The blogger links to an article somewhere on the web, and then writes a commentary on the original text; then other commentators refer to the original commentator. In the traditional form, Jewish scholars wrote texts that commented on the bible or on the writings of earlier rabbis; and other rabbis wrote texts that commented on the earlier rabbis’ writings.
Because they didn’t have hypertext at the time, commentaries linked using chapter and sentence references; so when you study traditional texts, you wind up with a table full of books following the cross-references from book to book.
The form of the Talmud is similar to a recorded newsgroup or blog comments discussion. In the classical rabbinic academies, scholars discussed and debated a wide variety of topics, and those discussions were eventually edited into book form. The editors were concerned with representing the debate of ideas, not with historical accuracy — often, there are arguments between rabbis who didn’t live at the same time.
Its not that the Rabbis didn’t know how to write neat, logical, linear exposition. The classic rabbinic period was contemporaneous with the Hellenized civilization of the ancient world; they had the models of Greek thinking all around them, and they borrowed when it suited them — the Passover seder is modeled after the Platonic symposium. They looked at neat, logical, linear, hierarchical writing, decided that they didn’t like it, and wanted to write in weblog form instead.