FORGET "TWO CHINESE BOYS" LIP-SYNCHING TO THE BACKSTREET BOYS.
The applications for YouTube continue to expand. I keep wondering what the "Democracy Now" journalist Amy Goodman and videographer Max Stahl could have done with YouTube. When they were in East Timor in 1991 with important footage of civilian massacres, they almost got their video taken away by the Indonesian police. They had to smuggle it out of the country in a different way, but what if they had been able to upload it straight to an open posting video site like YouTube?
The Rodney King effect, writ large?
But would it be harder to fact-check and refute a video than it is to fact-check and refute a blogger?
Link: ABC News: Desperate Whistleblower Turns to YouTube.
Link: YouTube - Homeland Security - Coast Guard Issues.
Desperate Whistleblower Turns to YouTube
Former Engineer Accuses the World's Biggest Defense Contractor of Knowingly Jeopardizing National Security
By JONATHAN SILVERSTEIN
Aug. 29, 2006 — "What I am going to tell you is going to seem preposterous and unbelievable."
Those are a few of the first words of a video posted on YouTube by former Lockheed Martin engineer Michael De Kort, claiming that the defense contractor had built and the Coast Guard had accepted a number of boats that fall far short of government standards and leave our national security in question.
De Kort had tried going through the chain of command at Lockheed, and had contacted the government, the Coast Guard and various members of Congress, but no one seemed willing or able to help.
"YouTube was my last best shot — I never wanted to do this publicly," he explained. "I had gone there to look at entertaining videos and saw that hundreds of thousands of people were visiting the site, and I thought that if there was something that was novel … maybe just the fact that I was doing it would be the story."
[...]
I set up a google alert for Lockheed Martin, just for fun, and you can't believe the stuff on the internet about them.
Nothing along the lines of this whistle blower account, but the number of contracts this company is receiving for a variety of "defense" and "security" jobs is astounding. Billions and billions of tax payer dollars, never mind their long history of ineptitude, failing to complete work and the absurd-bullshit-class war politics behind them or any of these offense companies taking billions of our tax dollars as run off from these privatization schemes being pushed by right wing scam artists in Washington.
Subway security cameras, computer security and systems, the border wall, the NASA contract, tons of weapons - and they deal them to governments all over the world - and that's the short list of what we are paying this company for. Lockheed has their fingers in all the pies.
Of course, that ranch where Darth Cheney shot Harry Wittington in the face is owned by a lobbyist who works for Lockheed Martin and whose partner also lobbies for Lockheed and Halliburton, etc.
The corporations to profit most from Bush's imperial misadventure and economic colonization of Iraq are Lockheed, Bechtel, Halliburton and Chevron. But I don't expect to hear Wolf Blitzer flapping his propagandist jaw on these topics. Even if they are inept or are totally failing to do the jobs correctly. You Tube is a great thing. So are blogs. And I wonder how much long our relatively free and open internet will last.
Posted by: Beth | September 17, 2006 at 12:11 PM
As one of only a handful of people who created an all-digital dissertation (Chris having done what, be all accounts, is the first), the issue of a "relatively free and open internet" is one that is very close to my heart. The Annenberg Center at USC is actually addressing this topic over the course of the year. In particular, Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow are speaking about DRM, copyright & fair use and open source platforms on 12/14; there is a blog for this speaker series and they plan to summarize many of the talks along with the comments so if you can't physically make it, you can still get much of it.
Posted by: virginia kuhn | September 19, 2006 at 06:35 PM