Chris Boese's Weblog

This writer misses a really big point...

There's a big flurry of folks posting critical pieces on Kevin Kelly's New York Times "Scan This Book!" piece, most of them accusing him of too much cheerleading for business leadership on this project (scanning a Library of Everything), or for Google, or god knows what. I'm hearing a lot of this criticism from the academic blogs, although the Slashdot crowd is buzzing too. Basically, the academics think Kelly isn't critical enough of the folks at the choke points of power in this maze, like this supposed "economic" approach at the site below, which I believe are the words of Umair Haque:

Link: Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab.

The Problems With Gutopia

You know, it's quotes like this (from Kevin Kelly's recent article for the NYT Mag):

"...Brewster Kahle, an archivist overseeing another scanning project, says that the universal library is now within reach. "This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!" he shouts. "It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon."

That amaze me. Of course, the difference between now and then is that doing gives a single company - Google - enormous market power.

[You know, I didn't see anywhere in the article Kelly advocating giving Google that enormous power. Kelly also talks about Amazon Books, which has an even more direct economic model, and Project Gutenberg, which has been chugging along at a snail's pace since forever. Resenting Google's deep pockets as a way of getting something done is NOT the way to make sure it gets accomplished. Do you really want to WAIT for Project Gutenberg to do it?]

[...]

Google is, in a very real sense, profiting enormously from the utopian naivete of the Valley. And though Kevin's article is a great read - and I'm a huge fan of his new work - this flaw makes his conclusion - a utopian vision of ubiquitous, "free", information totally invalid.

Has Kevin used Google Scholar? If you haven't, try a simple query like this.

[How insulting and elitist can you get? Does this guy even know Kevin Kelly? "Has Kevin used Google Scholar?" I'm so special I use Google Scholar and Kelly never has. GIVE ME A BREAK (OK, I'm just getting worked up over one guy who's casting himself as an expert and sounds like he's talking through his hat). Kelly probably wouldn't even dignify such ridiculous crap with a response. ]

That screen is the polar opposite of ubiquitous, free information - it is a set of links which send you to walled gardens built by academic publishers who want to charge $20, $50, or $100 or more for a single article.

[...]

[Puh-leaze! If you want to attack Kelly, attack him for something he did, not something that pisses you off that he had nothing to do with, and which Google has nothing to do with.

So the author above has figured out that academic publishing is DEEP DEEP behind massive cost-prohibitive firewalls, ODIOUS firewalls. Absurd firewalls, because academia is not a real industry that can support an economy of charging $60-$80 for dense scholarly articles that maybe four people on earth will read. Somehow this fact has escaped academic publishers like ScienceDirect, or Taylor & Frances, etc. They live in some kind of closed bubble where they've got a lock on a price scheme with academic libraries, and they don't give a shit if the whole system becomes hermetically sealed!

And this is Google's fault exactly HOW? Google is supposed to pry open those doors, when the companies have no intention of opening their vaults?

What Google has done, which is an immense service, is to REVEAL to us this huge invisible iceberg and show exactly to what degree these odious academic publishers are controlling words, ideas, and the economics of such, even the so-called "public domain" (which I don't believe is in their vocabulary). A concept of a "public domain" is in Google's vocabulary, and when Google exposes the villains, the pure villainy of what the academic publishers and library databases are doing, IT IS GOOGLE'S FAULT?

That's what I'd call killing the messenger, and it is at the very least some seriously sloppy reasoning.]

But it is the future the Googleverse leads to. It's the inevitable result of handing informational market power over to Google - just like physical distribution economies (and price hypersensitive consumers) inevitably lead to Wal-Mart. Either one is just as evil as far as consumers are concerned.

Kevin argues that we should scan books because there is a "moral imperative to scan" - a moral imperative to make information free, essentially.

Are you kidding? That's like saying there's a moral imperative to buy gas, or to buy the cheapest goods possible - because this so-called moral imperative has a single economic effect: to line Google's pockets, handing market power over to it.

[...]

[Did the author above "get" that Kelly's title "Scan This Book!" is a direct allusion to the Abbie Hoffman book title "Steal This Book!" from the 1960's? (How could anyone not get that? I dunno, maybe he's never used Google Scholar) In drawing a metaphor to Hoffman advocating a rebellion against the status quo, Kelly is DIRECTLY ADVOCATING CRIMINAL BOOK-SCANNING. He's saying, "Hey, if you don't want Google to have this power, if you don't want Amazon Books to have this power, they GET BUSY and SCAN THIS BOOK"! Put it up on your own site. That's a whole lot different from telling someone to BUY gas.

And if you don't start scanning, then don't come to me bitching about Google having too much power, whiner.

Since when is advocating rebellion hidden Google appeasement? If we rebel, it's just what Google wants us to do, so whatever you do, DON'T REBEL!Be a good citizen, and that will stop Google in its tracks for sure, yup.

If you want to defeat the walled gardens, explosively expand the public domain. Lots of people are doing that. Google is doing it too, except when they hit roadblocks like ScienceDirect or Taylor & Frances and all the others that I don't use as much.]

Kevin Kelly: Scan This Book! - New York Times

Venerable Wired dude Kevin Kelly has a fun article that is near and dear to my heart in the New York Times, and I just can't pass up calling attention to it (although I think it is Most Emailed, so I'm hardly the only one).

I'm just so easy. All you have to do is mention Alexandria and I get all a-quiver. I have my own theories about grand libraries, which I'll probably mention below, but suffice it here to say that a Library of Everything is one massive part of the reason I jumped into cyberspace with both feet in 1990 and never looked back. And for the record, that was long before I read about Neal Stephenson's Librarian in "Snow Crash."

What would Borges say? What would Confucius say?

I think Confucius would say "It is written... "

But the bigger question, I think, is "Will this Tower of Babel reach to the heavens?"

Link: Scan This Book! - New York Times.

May 14, 2006

Scan This Book!

By KEVIN KELLY

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

[You know, if they were going to build such a great library in Alexandria with all that very precious stuff, why did they have to put it in such a precarious location?! I've been mad about this as long as I've known about it, and I'm still mad about it. I WANT to go to Alexandria and I'm pissed off that I can't, dammit!]

Until now. When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?

Brewster Kahle, an archivist overseeing another scanning project, says that the universal library is now within reach. "This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!" he shouts. "It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon." And unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.

[And we an build this wonderful Tower that will reach to the Heavens! We will all speak the same language and nothing we plan to do will be impossible for us!

Until you look at the appropriate Tarot card, the Lightning-Struck Tower.

You say hey, it's a web, not a tower. Why are you going on and on about a tower? It's my theory, you see, a theory of the Web. In the Platonic sense, or Neoplatonic, if you will, this idea of a Library of Everything is technically an imitation, and perhaps a very pale imitation at that. The original "Library of Everything" supposedly exists as a great Ideal in the sky, in the Heavens, on some energy plane, or in Nirvana. It is called "The Akashic Records," or, to Hebrews, Muslims, I think, and Christians, it is called "The Book of Life."

It's the source of that "This Is Your Life" movie that St. Peter plays for you when you get to the Pearly Gates, before you get your harp and cloud and graduate to a New Yorker cartoon.

Edgar Cayce supposedly went to visit this library when he was asleep and found out all kinds of mysterious and secret stuff. I bet he's got a lot of overdue books by now, too. I usually think it is this library that Borges wrote of in his "Library of Babel" short story in the "Labyrinths" collection. His version is pretty twisted, though.

So what does this "Book of Life" have that our longed for Library of Everything doesn't have?

Some people imagine it as a Tapestry, with a thread for every life and a full record of each and all its intersections. This would be where the Three Fates of Greek mythology would hang out, the Three Norns of Norse mythology.

So the Akashic records would have not only every book, every image, an instantly searchable movie of every life, IT WOULD ALSO HAVE A FULL RECORD OF EVERY THOUGHT.

Stream of consciousness personal diary bloggers are working on uploading this part into the Web, but we're still stuck with a pale imitation of that panoptic record that Santa Claus clearly has access to as well, for checking to see if we've been naughty or nice. I bet the NSA is envious of HIM. Oddly enough, the Panoptic Eye appears to be just as much a part of the Neoplatonic imitation of the Akashic as it is in the "real" Akashic.

New Agers and others believe the Akashic Records are not confined to matter, but also include a record of all energy, which makes sense if matter and energy are conserved. Perhaps the Akashic is where all that dark matter goes that no one can account for. These people believe "Thoughts are Things" that send energy out in to the universe, whether in the form of prayers, wishes, curses (a panoptic and authoritarian god keeps track of sins of thought, word, and deed: God as Universal Accountant), lust in your heart, coveting, or the off-key internal singing of your soul.

So the Akashic Tapestry Record spreads out across the ethers like a giant web, just as our Internet weaves invisibly around our planet. You could make an argument that the Akashic Records are the Mind of God, and all of us (and our atoms and animating energy) make up that godhead at an atomic level as well, microcosm, macrocosm, as above, so below, or is that as below, so above? Ergo, the Akashic Records ARE GOD?

And what does that make our Platonic Imitation of an Imitation of the Akashic, the World Wide Web? The etchings of the Mind of Humanity? Humanity trying to make Itself God?

Interestingly, when you use a Kabala system of numerology (not the "Americanized" one), WWW=666. Those odd literalists, the fundamentalist Christian dispensational pre-millenialists, see three as the number of God, and six as the number of humanity, so they interpret this very famous and ominous symbol 666 (the movie previews are making such a big deal about an "Omen" remake coming out on 6/6/06, so maybe my ramble here is in honor of that) as three times six, or man trying to make himself god, repeated without question in pulpits across the U.S. I don't know if it is really an accurate interpretation, as some Hebrew sites also list six as a holy or "god" number, instead of seven, which I had always heard.

My Neoplatonic argument isn't really that compelling, if you look at the actual text that mentions it, because it is a WEB, not a man, unless the Web is the Mind of Man.

In the New International Version Bible, Revelation 13:18 reads:

This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.

And here's a neat tidbit, care of Wikipedia: The fear of the number 666 is known as "Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia". Say that three times fast.

Now about that Tower of Babel, reaching to the heavens, is the Web another instance of man trying to make himself like the gods, to reach into the heavens? The cautionary tale here is the lightning-struck tower, the blow to the head, a fall from a high place. The Tower is a nearly universal cultural symbol of hubris, of pride going before a fall.

Something to look forward to! Anyway, let's get back to Kevin... (grin)]

But the technology that will bring us a planetary source of all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that hold them. The universal library and its "books" will be unlike any library or books we have known. Pushing us rapidly toward that Eden of everything, and away from the paradigm of the physical paper tome, is the hot technology of the search engine.

1. Scanning the Library of Libraries

Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone — the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.

This is a very big library. But because of digital technology, you'll be able to reach inside it from almost any device that sports a screen. From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what's taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

[Kevin! You of all people know we won't need that white cord into our heads, iPod reference not withstanding. The library of all libraries will of course either be transmitted wirelessly, or hell, it'll probably be implanted into our heads directly! Instantaneous interfacing, always on, ubiquitous. Neal Stephenson's Librarian, beamed directly to gargoyles everywhere.

Surely Plato has reincarnated around here somewhere at this time. He pre-dates Alexandria (Aristotle was Alexander's tutor, so I imagine Plato had been dead a while) but he actually wanted Greeks to keep things in their amazing big Greek memories. Plato had his toga in a twist because this new thing, WRITING, was creating cheat sheets, so to speak (cheat scrolls?). If you could write something down, your brain, your big-Greek-reciting-Homer memory didn't have to work so hard, and you started keeping fewer things INSIDE your head, storing them so much more effectively in written form, which could then be assembled into a library.

Just as most of our math skills have withered in this age of the calculator, poor Plato was watching the decline of Greek oratorical skills based on memory. Was the trade-off worth it, Plato? Could Alexandria be the consolation prize?

And now, if we can have a Library of Everything implanted in our heads, does that mean we're returning to the days when people will be able to recite Homer without a teleprompter or PowerPoint? Will we get those big Greek memories back, augmented and more complete with access to everything that was ever written? Would Plato reincarnated feel redeemed at long last, or would it be the final betrayal?]

[...]

But because of copyright issues and the physical fact of the need to turn pages, the digitization of books has proceeded at a relative crawl. At most, one book in 20 has moved from analog to digital. So far, the universal library is a library without many books.

But that is changing very fast. Corporations and libraries around the world are now scanning about a million books per year. Amazon has digitized several hundred thousand contemporary books. In the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford University (one of the five libraries collaborating with Google) is scanning its eight-million-book collection using a state-of-the art robot from the Swiss company 4DigitalBooks. This machine, the size of a small S.U.V., automatically turns the pages of each book as it scans it, at the rate of 1,000 pages per hour. A human operator places a book in a flat carriage, and then pneumatic robot fingers flip the pages — delicately enough to handle rare volumes — under the scanning eyes of digital cameras.

[Boggles your mind, doesn't it? All those texts, all those words, keyword-searchable, context-searchable. But still, not enough of those texts in the public domain.]

[...]

The idea is to seed the bookless developing world with easily available texts. Superstar sells copies of books it scans back to the same university libraries it scans from. A university can expand a typical 60,000-volume library into a 1.3 million-volume one overnight. At about 50 cents per digital book acquired, it's a cheap way for a library to increase its collection. Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe's e-publishing business, says: "Some of us have thousands of books at home, can walk to wonderful big-box bookstores and well-stocked libraries and can get Amazon.com to deliver next day. The most dramatic effect of digital libraries will be not on us, the well-booked, but on the billions of people worldwide who are underserved by ordinary paper books." It is these underbooked — students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru — whose lives will be transformed when even the simplest unadorned version of the universal library is placed in their hands.

[Democratizing, yes, I suppose, if people are still reading these books. If they one day become inert material, like the quartz crystals New Agers think are embedded storage devices holding the wisdom and all the knowledge of Atlantis, about as useful to us as that funky vinyl record the post-apocalyptic kids spin on the end of a forked stick in "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome." Gotta watch out for the Pocky Clips, or your giant Atlantis pyramid shaped quartz crystal Library of Everything gets as wrecked as Alexandria, and then where are you? Standing in front of a frame of branches and "telling the tell" through a memory of television?

I'm still chuckling at the idea of lesser university libraries getting to make huge leaps in how many "volumes" they supposedly have, simply by downloading a big old mess of these public domain texts from those famously massive major university libraries. Will they use the new numbers to adjust their budget requests? Will university administrators realize they don't have increased heating and lighting costs for all these new "volumes?"]

[...]

Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability — the nifty translation of a book's full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

[Aha! Decontextualized Library of Congress notation, The Dewey Decimal System, arbitrary shelving, or even mis-shelving, a black hole that books sometimes disappear into in some libraries, even the venerable card catalog, will they all become irrelevant? Remember those dreary library classes where you were drilled in when to use the Author's name, when to use the Subject Index, when to try to find the Title? And even early databases used in libraries preserved this quaint eccentricity long after it was necessary, in some cases, is present still, although I have no idea why we need separate fields for Author, Subject, and Title, when Keyword ought to catch everything just fine.

I remember an argument I had with a librarian once, and I remember the exact year: 1990. I was bringing my research paper classes to the library for their regular library orientation sessions. After class, I questioned the librarian about the new InfoTrax database system for periodicals that she was happily touting. It was pretty neat, and I was ready to go to town with it, but as a usual dyslexic, I was frustrated when it couldn't find things I didn't type precisely, or in the correct Subject, Title, or Author field.

Why can't it all be keywords I asked her? Oh, that's coming soon, she said, and went on to explain what it would do. But no, I wanted keyword searching of ENTIRE TEXTS, just of magazine, journal, and periodical articles, which I thought was perfectly reasonable. Why wouldn't it do that? I wanted to be able to run Boolean combinations through this jackpot, just to see what would turn up. The librarian's eyes went wide, and then she got angry. How dare I even expect such an impossible thing! The absurdity of it. THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN, she pronounced. Don't even think about it.

Meanwhile, I got to graduate school three years later and eventually encountered my future dissertation adviser, a hypertext theorist who imagined a world where EACH AND EVERY WORD is a hypertextual link to somewhere else. Even "a" "an" and "the." Ted Nelson's "docuverse" indeed!]

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic amateurs have written and cross-referenced an entire online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. Buoyed by this success, many nerds believe that a billion readers can reliably weave together the pages of old books, one hyperlink at a time. Those with a passion for a special subject, obscure author or favorite book will, over time, link up its important parts. Multiply that simple generous act by millions of readers, and the universal library can be integrated in full, by fans for fans.

[I just can't wait. Not only will the future be hyperlinked, but it will also spin out into recombinant document DNA, and we don't even need plagiarizing Harvard sophomore novelists to start us off on the right/wrong foot.

Imagine recombinant Faulker and parody Faulker, the novelistic version of "filksongs."

Interweave Emily Dickinson's 1,775 quatrain-driven poems with 1,000 "Centuries" of Nostradamus quatrains! Ooh oh! Hold me back, hold me back! Audio track them all over the midi-tune of Gilligan's Island.]

Secret gov't source tells ABC News: 'Get new cellphones' | Chicago Trib Blog: The Swamp

This is one of the most disturbing things I've seen in a long time...

Right up there with what the Nixon Plumbers did to Daniel Ellsworth, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

This story is so important, I can't bear to excerpt it. Spread it all over the place. That's more important, especially if it starts disappearing.

Link: Secret gov't source tells ABC News: 'Get new cellphones' | The Swamp - Chicago Tribune - Blogs.

Originally posted: May 15, 2006

Secret gov't source tells ABC News: 'Get new cellphones'

Posted by Frank James at 12:10 pm CDT

ABC News has a very disturbing report today, at least for reporters and anyone else who believe that whistleblowers serve an important role in safeguarding American democracy.

On its blog, The Blotter, ABC News reports that a senior government source has told its reporters that the reporters’ phone calls with sources are being tracked by the U.S. government “to root out confidential sources.”

I hasten to say I don't have independent confirmation of the facts underlying the ABC News report. But I thought it was something readers of The Swamp would find interesting. The item follows. 

Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling
May 15, 2006 10:33 AM

Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.

Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials.

People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.

Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.

The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.

A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.

Being a confidential source who disagrees with a presidential administration then decides to oppose it by becoming a whistleblower can take courage when discovery means loss of a job and possible legal consequences.

It’s just that kind of courage that this revelation is likely to chill. That could be the administration’s intent here, to make would-be confidential sources think twice before talking with reporters.

It’s no small irony that the only reason we now know about this is because a ABC News’ confidential source told them about it.

The Blotter posting raises the question of whether ABC News’ phone calls were swept up as part of the vast National Security Agency database consisting of the phone-call records of millions of Americans which USA Today reported on last week.

It’s impossible for anyone outside of a few inside the government to say. But the fact that ABC News journalists are even seriously wondering about whether the warning is connected to the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities indicates just how anxious many people in Washington have become.

Call me paranoid, but you know what I'd be doing if I were running a news or an umbrella blogging operation? I'd send buyers out to get those advance pay-per-use cell phones, like drug dealers use, from what I hear. Buy 5-10 of them at a site here, a site there. Keep 'em in the managing editor's office, in a big basket. Reporters can just rotate in and out with them, swap out the SIM chips with new ones once they run out of pre-paid calls.

See, the reporter would keep her "official" cell phone, the one with the address book, family contacts, etc. The second phone would be the throwaway. You can look up or keep the numbers somehow, elsewhere. Reporters probably do that for confidential sources now anyway, to keep from the risk of losing a regular phone.

So you'd use the two phones the way I used to use my two camera bodies when I shot football. (I'd dropped one camera on its head and busted the internal light meter) I had one on long lens and one on shorter lens, so I'd spot meter with one camera, and use it to set the broken meter on the other camera. Hey, a broken meter is no reason to throw out a perfectly good Nikon manual camera, from back in the day when cameras were made of something other than plastic.

Must-read story in USAToday - NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls

One section in particular just jumped out at me... anybody besides me wishing we could all switch over to Qwest?

[...]

Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

Qwest's refusal to participate has left the NSA with a hole in its database. Based in Denver, Qwest provides local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states in the West and Northwest. But AT&T and Verizon also provide some services — primarily long-distance and wireless — to people who live in Qwest's region. Therefore, they can provide the NSA with at least some access in that area.

[...]

Here's some other important bits from the story that should not be missed (bold emphasis mine). This link below has a really comprehensive bunch of sidebar, timeline, and background information, as well as the Bush administration response so go take a look for yourself.

Link: USATODAY.com - NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls.

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls

Updated 5/11/2006 10:38 AM ET
By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: The NSA record collection program

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said.

The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency's domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.

[...]

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

[...]

The White House would not discuss the domestic call-tracking program. "There is no domestic surveillance without court approval," said Dana Perino, deputy press secretary, referring to actual eavesdropping.

She added that all national intelligence activities undertaken by the federal government "are lawful, necessary and required for the pursuit of al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorists." All government-sponsored intelligence activities "are carefully reviewed and monitored," Perino said. She also noted that "all appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on the intelligence efforts of the United States."

[...]

This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it's been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for "social network analysis," the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.

[...]

In 1975, a congressional investigation revealed that the NSA had been intercepting, without warrants, international communications for more than 20 years at the behest of the CIA and other agencies. The spy campaign, code-named "Shamrock," led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was designed to protect Americans from illegal eavesdropping.

Enacted in 1978, FISA lays out procedures that the U.S. government must follow to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches of people believed to be engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States. A special court, which has 11 members, is responsible for adjudicating requests under FISA.

Over the years, NSA code-cracking techniques have continued to improve along with technology. The agency today is considered expert in the practice of "data mining" — sifting through reams of information in search of patterns. Data mining is just one of many tools NSA analysts and mathematicians use to crack codes and track international communications.

Paul Butler, a former U.S. prosecutor who specialized in terrorism crimes, said FISA approval generally isn't necessary for government data-mining operations. "FISA does not prohibit the government from doing data mining," said Butler, now a partner with the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C.

The caveat, he said, is that "personal identifiers" — such as names, Social Security numbers and street addresses — can't be included as part of the search. "That requires an additional level of probable cause," he said.

The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone-call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear. Also unclear is whether the database has been used for other purposes.

[...]

The NSA's domestic program raises legal questions. Historically, AT&T and the regional phone companies have required law enforcement agencies to present a court order before they would even consider turning over a customer's calling data. Part of that owed to the personality of the old Bell Telephone System, out of which those companies grew.

Ma Bell's bedrock principle — protection of the customer — guided the company for decades, said Gene Kimmelman, senior public policy director of Consumers Union. "No court order, no customer information — period. That's how it was for decades," he said.

The concern for the customer was also based on law: Under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding their customers' calling habits: whom a person calls, how often and what routes those calls take to reach their final destination. Inbound calls, as well as wireless calls, also are covered.

[...]

The NSA's domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation's biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks.

The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their "call-detail records," a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation's calling habits.

The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.

With that, the NSA's domestic program began in earnest.

[...]

The domestic and international call-tracking programs have things in common, according to the sources. Both are being conducted without warrants and without the approval of the FISA court. The Bush administration has argued that FISA's procedures are too slow in some cases. Officials, including Gonzales, also make the case that the USA Patriot Act gives them broad authority to protect the safety of the nation's citizens.

[...]

One company differs

One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.

Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as "product" in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.

Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest's financial health. But Qwest's legal questions about the NSA request remained.

Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio's successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.

Contributing: John Diamond

How did all those FEMA folks get on board for taking bribes so quickly?

This story of Katrina and New Orleans just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser. First, the fraud is a big deal, esp because so much of it seems to be linked to the same kind of massive no-bid government contractor fraud as we also hear so much about in Iraq.

But then this FEMA angle is just bizarre. A crony boss (Brownie) can't turn it into a culture of corruption on this scale overnight. Still, there were the Florida hurricanes the year before. I'd just chalked the irregularities there up to election-year pandering, but maybe there was something more going on after Ivan, Charley, and Frances, when people were getting FEMA money and buying new appliances in parts of Florida where no hurricane hit.

This story below just takes the cake, however. Bold emphasis is mine.

Link: More Katrina Waste, Fraud Said to Be Seen - Yahoo! News.

More Katrina Waste, Fraud Said to Be Seen

By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer
50 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - The government is at risk of squandering significantly more money in a Gulf Coast rebuilding effort that has already wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, federal investigators said Wednesday.

Prosecutors and inspectors general from five agencies addressed a House subcommittee on Katrina rebuilding and pledged stronger oversight to combat waste. They cautioned that some of the biggest fraud may be yet to come as some of the larger government contracts are awarded.

[...]

It also comes amid heightened congressional scrutiny of contracts and audits showing the government wasted hundreds of millions of dollars — much of it on large contracts awarded to large, politically connected companies — in the initial days after the Aug. 29 storm.

Last week, the Senate passed a little-noticed provision in its $109 billion Iraq and hurricane relief bill that would block the government from entering into no-bid contracts in excess of $500,000. The provision was prompted by numerous reports of bloated Katrina-related contracts.

[...]

During the hearing, investigators:

• Identified poor data-sharing among agencies as a major barrier to stemming fraud. Collaboration between Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, the IRS and the Postal Service, for instance, would allow the government to verify names and addresses of aid applicants.
• Said they had filed fraud, theft and other charges against 261 people accused of hurricane-related scams; 44 have been convicted. Many of the defendants were FEMA employees accused of soliciting bribes from contractors in exchange for higher government payments; or individuals fraudulently obtaining emergency aid.
  
  
• Said they were reviewing delays in the processing of $9 billion in small business loans. While internal controls might explain why only $1 billion has been disbursed to Gulf Coast victims, "We are looking into whether agency inefficiencies are contributing," said Eric Thorson, inspector general for the Small Business Administration.
• In the months since the Aug. 29 storm, the government has appropriated some $85 billion for Katrina rebuilding, and the Senate last week approved an additional $28 billion. Of the $85 billion, agencies have awarded about 6,665 contracts worth $9.7 billion.

A postmodern moment: "authentic" teen experience equals a mirror looking in a mirror at a mirror...

Link: Slate | Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism case. By Ann Hulbert.

This amazing plagiarism story has been all over, but Ann Hulbert at Slate has the good sense to point up all the incredible layers of irony running all through this story, where the Harvard student author in many ways enacts the crass plot her own heroine runs through, and perhaps in just as crass and calculating a manner.

Several thousands of dollars were plunked down to one of those elite college admissions consultants for Viswanathan, people who are actually college marketing "agents" for the very rich and the wanna-bes, the natural evolution to the practice of parents clawing each other's eyes out to get their dear kiddies into the "best" pre-school, etc. (I've been listening to a wonderful series of podcasts on this... on ABC News Nightline).

So is it one more small step to have the high-end admissions marketing "agent" work with the professional editors so many would-be authors are hiring these days, again at several thousand a pop, to massage their manuscripts before they ever get to an agent or a publisher? Hey, trust funds ought to be good for something! If you want to be a best-selling author, isn't this better than using your trust fund to buy up most of the copies? Vanity publishing reaching for new heights.

So we package high school students as marketing products for the college admissions process, and to reach an even more sophisticated level, we present the would-be Harvard student as a precocious, best-selling "chick-lit" author, working with several layers of the publishing industry to package and market the student to Harvard, and to package and market the Harvard student to the book-buying public. And if necessary, we edit, plagiarize, and package (what else? Focus group? Phrase-test?) the book manuscript as completely as the kind of testing multi-million-dollar audience-driven wag-the-dog Hollywood scripts are subjected to, right?

So art imitates life, which imitates art, which imitates life. The postmodern loop of irony closes in on itself in infinite regression. Of course it is highly dependent on an evolving new aristocracy, or wealthy class with a mind-boggling amount of discretionary income. But that makes sense, because postmodernism as a theory and a condition both seem to be dependent on a recursive system of thinking that requires unending leisure or a leisure class to give the recursiveness the time and attention it requires, sort of like a Japanese tea service.

Thanks Slate, for finding all the delicious irony and doing the research to bring it out. I suppose I could have dug for it more myself, but my condition of postmodernity doesn't have the requisite leisure or discretionary income [grin].

Link: Slate | Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism case. By Ann Hulbert.

How Kaavya Got Packaged and Got Into Trouble

Plagiarism and the teen-marketing culture.

By Ann Hulbert
Posted Thursday, April 27, 2006, at 2:50 PM ET

"Is it hard work being a poser?" One of the Haute Bitchez at Woodcliff High School puts that taunting question to Opal Mehta, the protagonist of the teen novel by Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, whose confession this week that she unconsciously plagiarized the work of the best-selling young-adult author Megan McCafferty has stirred controversy. The dig comes near the end of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life when Opal's parent-driven self-packaging mission has been revealed to the entire high school. As her peers now know (from a tell-all Treo that she dropped), the senior has been devoting her fall semester to a marketing plan that the Mehtas fondly refer to by the acronym HOWGAL, How Opal Will Get A Life—a plan geared toward turning a science grind into a glamour girl. Heretofore she had been doggedly pursuing a more conventional marketing plan, HOWGIH, How Opal Will Get Into Harvard. The inspiration for the strategic swerve is Harvard's dean of admissions himself, who, at Opal's August interview, suggests that a girl who has been engineered since birth to be a super high-achiever needs to "Have fun. … Find out what you're really passionate about." Harvard doesn't want "automatons." By the January application deadline, he says, come back and "show us what a well-rounded candidate you've become. Sound good?"

The ensuing formulaic story is far more poignant in light of the accusations that Viswanathan—a super-achieving, Scholastic Art & Writing Award-winning, Johns Hopkins program-attending high-schooler who went on to become a Harvard student with a half-million-dollar book advance—is a poser herself. In Viswanathan's novel, Opal's parents get right to work on R&D, scrutinizing trashy TV shows and teen magazines; they marshal their whiteboard, spreadsheets, to-do lists, and Photoshop technology to the end of packaging a new hip, popular, less uptight product.

[...]

The darker moral of her story seems to be that if you succeed by packaging, you can expect to fail by packaging, too—and you alone, not your packagers, will pay the price. McCafferty's publisher, Steve Ross of Crown, has rejected as "disingenuous and troubling" Viswanathan's apology for her "unintentional and unconscious" borrowings from two McCafferty books, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, that she says she read and loved in high school. He's right, it doesn't sound like the whole story. I don't mean simply to let Viswanathan off the hook, but her own book—indeed, its very copyright line, Alloy Entertainment and Kaavya Viswanathan—suggests a broader culture of adult-mediated promotion and strategizing at work. It's a culture, as her novel itself shows, that might well leave a teenager very confused about what counts as originality—even a teenager who can write knowingly about just that confusion. In fact, perhaps being able to write so knowingly about derivative self-invention is a recipe for being ripe to succumb to it. Viswanathan may not be a victim, exactly—she's too willing for that—but she is only one of many players here. [emphasis mine]

Before the scandal hit, Viswanathan emphasized that her own route to Harvard was not as obsessively scripted as Opal's. Still, no one would mistake the fruition of her novel for a case of independent creative genius unfolding. The project got its impetus from none other than Viswanathan's professional college packager. Katherine Cohen, a founder of IvyWise, a premier outfit that choreographs the college application process from ninth grade onward, and, crucially, helps produce essays that convey students' "passions." Working with Viswanathan, Cohen sensed "a star in the making" merely from surveying the teen's writing samples. Just how the publishing deal evolved from there gets a little fuzzy—just as it can be a little hard, often, to say just how a carefully coached college essay evolves, or how, exactly, a particular résumé-enhancing after-school club membership came to be. Whose idea it initially was, how much massaging was involved, what relation the final result bears to the first impulse: Students and consultants alike can find it hard, or uncomfortable, to clarify such matters.

A story a year ago in the New York Sun said Viswanathan's "plot was hatched well before she signed up with Ms. Cohen," and reported that a manuscript went from Cohen's own literary agent at the William Morris Agency to the fiction specialist there, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, and from her straight to Little, Brown. According to a Boston Globe article of two months ago—which, strangely, comes in the novel's media packet—there was considerably more intervention than that. Several recent articles in the New York Times add more confusing details about a less-than-streamlined process. What the Morris agent saw wasn't "commercially viable" work, the Globe reported.

[...]

Viswanathan was referred to 17th Street Productions, now owned by Alloy Entertainment, which describes itself as "a creative think tank that develops and produces original books, television series and feature films" with a focus on the teen market. Their properties are carefully targeted—and they're not known as showcases of authenticity in the sense that most writers usually mean it. The whole idea is to produce variations on a tried-and-true formula...

[...]

To be sure, there were "lots of discussions about 'finding my voice,' " as Viswanathan told the Globe, no doubt reminiscent of those conversations with Cohen about her various college essays—but probably even more reminiscent, to judge by the 17th Street Productions think-tank style, of the meetings convened by Opal's parents to map out what could be learned and applied from the latest episodes and outfits on, say, The O.C. Once the book's concept had been "fleshed out," the project went back to Walsh, who worked with Viswanathan further, according to the Globe. It doesn't sound as though the Morris Agency's goal was to tap into her unique imagination. "We had all recognized that Kaavya had the craftsmanship, she's beautiful and charming, she just needed to find the right novel that would speak to her generation and to people beyond her years as well," Walsh told the Globe. "We worked on it some more and sold it for oodles and boodles of money." Having bought it for those oodles, Little, Brown then did its share of meddling. "There was more shaping to this book than we generally do," Asya Muchnick, a senior editor, said in the same piece; she declined to comment in the Times this week.

[...]

An overloaded Harvard freshman with plenty of other writing to get done, Viswanathan might almost be forgiven for having forgotten that originality was even the goal she was striving for. Not that she would think twice, either, when Little, Brown's publisher touted the "freshness of the voice" in a special publicity letter about her book. A veteran of a college packaging process that puts a premium on audience-targeted expressions of "passion," she's surely used to that hype.

[...]

Here's a bit from the New York Times article that shed some light on the calculating process Viswanathan went through. Yes, I get that Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys were also products of this same hamburger grinder, but Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were not push-button consumer marketed to climb the best-seller's charts for Little Brown in the same way music "stars" are created, by a marketing machine that looks for image first and talent second, if at all.

Link: First, Plot and Character. Then, Find an Author. - New York Times.

April 27, 2006

First, Plot and Character. Then, Find an Author.

By MOTOKO RICH and DINITIA SMITH

The books' spines bear names like Cecily von Ziegesar, Ann Brashares and, most controversially, since plagiarism charges were leveled against her on Sunday, Kaavya Viswanathan. But on the copyright page — and the contracts — there's an additional name: Alloy Entertainment.

Nobody associated with the plagiarism accusations is pointing fingers at Alloy, a behind-the-scenes creator of some of the hottest books in young-adult publishing. Ms. Viswanathan says that she alone is responsible for borrowing portions of two novels by Megan McCafferty, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings." But at the very least, the incident opens a window onto a powerful company with lucrative, if tangled, relationships within the publishing industry that might take fans of series like "The It Girl" by surprise.

In many cases, editors at Alloy — known as a "book packager" — craft proposals for publishers and create plotlines and characters before handing them over to a writer (or a string of writers).

[...]

Alloy owns or shares the copyright with the authors and then divides the advances and any royalties with them. This Sunday, books created by Alloy will be ranked at Nos. 1, 5 and 9 on The New York Times's children's paperback best-seller list.

"In a way it's kind of like working on a television show," said Cindy Eagan, editorial director at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, a sister imprint of Ms. Viswanathan's publisher, and the publisher of the "Clique," "A-List" and "Gossip Girl" series. "We all work together in shaping each novel."

Depending on the series, some writers have more freedom to develop plot and characters than others. Ms. von Ziegesar, who created the concept, plots and characters for the "Gossip Girl" books while an editor at Alloy, went on to write the first eight books of the series. She said that while at Alloy she crafted carefully plotted packages for other series and recruited writers who were told to follow her directions closely. But other writers on different series received very broad-stroke outlines.

[I had a friend in my MFA program who wrote Harlequin and Silhouette novels this way. She was translated into 13 languages, did very well, considering. They'd send her the outlines and she'd whip out the books in about 3 months. She was a tough, practical butchy sort of straight woman, but she said she had a more romantic friend, who would go through the manuscripts and sprinkle around more "heaving bosoms" and such.]

Ms. Viswanathan was, in some ways, an unusual Alloy author. She was not recruited by the packager, but rather, was introduced to it by William Morris, the agent. In an interview yesterday Ms. Viswanathan said that after an initial meeting with the book packager, "They asked about my life, who I was." She added, "Basically, it was like, 'Send us an e-mail writing about yourself that seems most natural.' "

[...]

Once Little, Brown decided to buy the book, Ms. Viswanathan said that she worked almost exclusively with Asya Muchnick, an editor there.

But the publishing contract Little, Brown signed is actually with Alloy, which holds the copyright to "Opal" together with Ms. Viswanathan. Neither Little, Brown nor Alloy would comment on how much of the advance or the royalties — standard contracts give 15 percent of the cover price to the author — Ms. Viswanathan is to collect.

The company that eventually became Alloy was founded in 1987. It had its first hit with the "Sweet Valley High" series. The company, then known as 17th Street Productions, was sold in 2000 to Alloy Inc., a large media company that owns the teenage-oriented retailer Delia's, and changed its name to Alloy Entertainment. Since then it has become a 'tween-lit hit factory.

Alloy works for many of the biggest publishing houses. The "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" series has generated three best sellers for Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, while Simon Pulse, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, publishes Alloy's "Au Pairs" and "Private" series.

Packagers have been around for decades, dating at least as far back as the Stratemeyer Syndicate, creators of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery series. Today, packagers work not just in the teenage market, but on all kinds of titles, from illustrated coffee-table books and toddler series to self-help tomes and graphic novels.

But the market for young-adult fiction is undeniably hot for book packaging. The financial stakes are much higher: Carolyn Keene, the pen name for the writers of the Nancy Drew books, never earned a $500,000 advance, which Ms. Viswanathan received, The Boston Globe and others have reported. (Little, Brown said the amount was less than that.)

For publishers, the appeal is that the packagers will take care of jobs like  copy-editing and designing book covers.

[...]