Did Tim Berners-Lee Trip Over his Own Feet?

Tim Berners-Lee is back in the news again. As in the past, it would appear that the combination of his reputation as “inventor of the Internet” (whatever that means) and his knighthood have led him to believe that he can pontificate about anything. Apparently it has only recently come to his attention that, if you create a medium through which anyone can say anything to anyone else, then everyone will. In other words it would appear that Berners-Lee has not yet grasped that phenomena such as fake news and hate speech are the inevitable products of what the Internet is and, for that matter, what Berners-Lee claims he wants it to be.

Back in November of 2013, this site took Berners-Lee to task on the basis of an article summary on the BBC News Web site that quoted him as saying that the “democratic nature” of the Internet was being threatened by a “growing tide of surveillance and censorship.” Apparently, it took him over two years to realize that, where information is concerned, an unregulated democracy has, by its very nature, tended to produce excess noise to the detriment of the signal in was intended to produce. If one wants to filter out the noise, then one must look for it (surveillance) and then design a filter for it (censorship). Before trying to unpack Berners-Lee’s failure to grasp this fundamental reality, it is worth recalling his own origins, as well as those of the Internet.

The important thing to remember is that Berners-Lee is a computer scientist whose skills led to his working as an independent contractor for CERN, a European research agency specializing in the challenging domain of particle physics. It subsequently became the home of the Large Hadron Collider, the primary instrument involved in the discovery of the so-called “God particle,” known more accurately as the “Higgs boson.” CERN is a perfect example of people with a wide diversity of cultural backgrounds coming together to work on shared problems. In that context it is easy to imagine Berners-Lee recognizing that communicating through a computer network could enable an even larger population to share their work and their results. He went about designing and implementing an infrastructure to enable that kind of world-wide sharing; and the result was the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee then became an evangelist for making the Web available to as many people as possible. The result tends to reflect the joke about the Statue of Liberty in the Beyond the Fringe “Home Thoughts from Abroad” routine:

After they put up the Statue, some idealistic Johnny decided to put the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” on the base. Well … people did!

Berners-Lee’s mindset never seemed to recognize that his evangelism would attract more than scientists or that the Web would be used for anything other than doing more science. Even the pre-Internet Usenet had more common sense, thanks to which those responsible for regulating discussion groups came down like a ton of bricks on the very first effort to advertise through spamming.

According to a BBC News story that appeared over this past weekend, Berners-Lee finally seems to have recognized that an unregulated Web is not good for much of anything, particularly his dearly beloved science. For example, he would like to see regulation of “unethical” (those quote marks come from the BBC, not me) political advertising. Unfortunately, he thinks this can be done by putting “a fair level of data control back in the hands of the people,” failing to recognize that “the people” are the ones putting the data he abhors into the system in the first place.

Fortunately, there is at least one government out there with a more realistic model of regulation, and it will be interesting to see if they can put it into practice. In an article that showed up in today’s The New York Times, Melissa Eddy and Mark Scott reported that Heiko Maas, Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection in Germany, is proposing that the technology companies responsible for maintaining social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, be fined for the presence of content that would constitute hate speech or fake news. In other words the only way you are going to get people to fix a problem is to penalize them for failure to do so, and whopping fines can make for a very effective penalty.

I applaud Maas’ effort, and I wish him well. However, whether we like it or not, this kind of regulation is likely to turn into a losing game of Whac-A-Mole. Shutting down one source can easily lead to another popping up, and probably more than one of them. The fact is that just trying to figure out how hate speech can propagate may be a major research problem. It is one thing for an extremist to find a sympathetic blog and then tell all of his friends about it, but what about the process of discovery itself?

Someone I know rather well tripped over this problem the other day. She was trying to track down information about Jews in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust. She typed a search query into Google and discovered a relevant Wikipedia page as the highest-ranked result. On the other hand the second-highest ranked result turned out to be an anti-Semitic blog being maintained on a Wordpress platform. In other words the Google search result was not only unreliable for her needs, it was also disturbingly offensive. Thus, regulating the content itself is definitely a step in the right direction; but, if we are really interested in regulating sources of hate speech or fake news, we have to think about not only those sources but also the ways in which they show up in search results.

Now we are in territory that, as some of Berners-Lee’s professors may have said on more than one occasion, is “beyond the scope of this course!”

The Secret Service Takes On the "What is Art?" Question

There are any number of layers of interpretation that make the BBC News account of the case of Kyle McDonald interesting.  On the surface McDonald is an artist, currently working on a project-in-process called People Staring at Computers.  BBC News provided the following description of the project:

A photographic intervention. Custom app installed around NYC, taking a picture every minute and uploading it if a face is found in the image.

Exhibited on site with a remotely triggered app that displayed the photos full screen on every available computer.

Since mine is a generation that endured Andy Warhol’s eight-hour film of a guy’s night of slumber (entitled, appropriately enough, Sleep), I have to say that I find the prospect of looking at how people behave in front of computer screens far more interesting.

One of McDonald’s sites for collecting images is an Apple store in New York.  Having been in the two Apple stores in San Francisco, I again applaud his decision.  Those are lively places;  and, while the people you find there trying out the devices available to them are probably not representative of the overall population of computer users, they are a really great source for people-watching.  McDonald claims he was given permission from security guard, and that may have been the start of his problems.

What has happened is that McDonald’s home has been raided by the Secret Service;  and Apple has “declined to comment” on whether McDonald had been authorized to collect his data.  I can certainly appreciate that a security guard did not have the right to grant this authority;  but, at the very least, we deserve a better account of McDonald’s inquiry.  He may have framed his request for permission in a way that made it more innocuous than it actually way.  These days it is one thing to collect video and photographs on individuals who do not know that they are on camera and quite another to distribute that content globally through the Internet without addressing any questions of invasion of privacy.  On the other hand the guard may have erred by not considering the implications of the request and failing to refer McDonald to someone better equipped to make the judgment call.

Then there is the question of whether or not the immediate action taken by the Secret Service was a raid.  All they have confirmed is that this was an investigation of “electronic crime” having to do with “Fraud and related activity in connection with computers.”  The obvious question is whether the Secret Service felt there were grounds for this accusation by visiting McDonald’s site or by other means that did not wish to state at the risk of compromising their investigation.

All this is one way of saying that it is hard to draw any conclusions (or even formulate some viable hypotheses) on the basis of information currently available.  In this context, however, the real irritant comes from how BBC News decided to headline this story:

Secret agents raid Apple store webcam 'artist'

The implication is that McDonald’s status as an artist is questionable, either because his activities do not confirm to accepted norms for what artists do or because the People Staring at Computers projects is actually a cover for some more nefarious activity.  The fact that the story itself does not use those scare quotes suggests that its author sees no reason to doubt McDonald’s claim to be an artist;  so why did the BBC decided to muddy further the waters of interpreting the events being reported when those waters were already pretty murky?

Common Sense and Human Nature

This morning Peter Cohen used his Gamification column for ZDNet to express his opinions on the Supreme Court ruling against criminalizing the sale of violent video games to minors.  He summarizes the background nicely in his opening paragraphs:

It’s plain to see that some parents - many, in fact - aren’t doing their job when it comes to keeping violent video games away from their children. But is it time for laws to do it instead?

Last week, in a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court said no. In a 7-2 ruling, the court overturned a 2005 California law that would have fined retailers convicted of selling violent video games to minors. In its ruling, the court said that violent video games are subject to the same First Amendment protections as other possibly violent art forms, like art, books or plays.

Similarly, his personal position is summarized in his choice of title:

We don’t need more video game laws, we just need common sense

Here is how he summarizes his position at the end of his article:

Laws aren’t going to change human nature. Parents are going to continue to use video game systems as babysitters and entertainment devices for their kids, because they work. And violent video games are going to continue to be created because they sell.

I do not disagree with any of this.  Cohen even recognizes that what constitutes common sense is tightly coupled to the normative practices of human nature.  Therefore, the real issue at stake is how human nature has brought circumstances to their current situation.

The answer lies in how those “normative practices of human nature” have changed.  One of the consequences of our “citizenship” in “the world the Internet has made” is that ours has become a culture of outsourcing.  Basically, the Internet freed us from conventional boundaries of space for outsourcing;  so, in many respects, the rise of globalization has fostered a belief system based on the premise that every problem can be solved by outsourcing.  Put another way, it is a culture in which no individual need take responsibility for solving a problem because the solution can be outsourced.

The result of is that child care has become outsourced to any number of technological innovations, one of which happens to be video games.  The ensuing problem of violence cannot similarly be outsourced to technology;  so the “next level” involves outsourcing to legislative bodies.  It seems to me that the real difficulty that we face as a culture is that our capacity for common sense can no longer cope with even the simplest levels of problem solving.  I would further hypothesize that this proposition is a corollary to the ways in which Google and related media have gotten us hopelessly addicted to consumerism:  Why think about solving your problems when you can buy a solution (as easily as you can buy a video game)?  Earlier this year I suggested that this has led to the infantilization of most parents, to the point that, through their normative behaviors, they may be more infantile than the kids whose care is their responsibility.

I would thus question Cohen’s appeal to common sense because it does not account for what common sense has become!

Highway 61 Under Water?

I have to confess that my knowledge of the geography of the Southern states is weak.  So, when I see footage of the current flood damage on television, I have only a vague sense of the places where the footage has been shot.  However, there is one location down there that has nothing to do with either the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement that should resonate with anyone who believes in taking a broad view of music history.  This is the intersection of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where (legend has it) Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil and became the blues master that so many find inspirational.  I had to go to Wikipedia to find out that Clarksdale is in Coahoma County, which is one of the Mississippi counties that sits on the Mississippi River.  Thus, it did not surprise me to read Robert Lee Long’s report in the Desoto Times Tribune that Coahoma County had been declared eligible to receive Federal disaster assistance.  My guess, however, is that Clarksdale is far enough inland that its famous intersection was never threatened.  Does the Devil still hang out there;  and was he protecting it (and Clarksdale as part of the bargain)?

The Corollary of Helplessness

Naomi Klein has filed a report for The Nation from Cochabamba in Bolivia, the site of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. However, there is one path that her logical analysis does not follow; and I think it is important, because it addresses a line of reasoning far more general than current environmental problems. Let me begin with how she sets the stage with her opening paragraphs:

It was 11 am and Evo Morales had turned a football stadium into a giant classroom, marshaling an array of props: paper plates, plastic cups, disposable raincoats, handcrafted gourds, wooden plates and multicolored ponchos. All came into play to make his main point: to fight climate change, "we need to recover the values of the indigenous people."

Yet wealthy countries have little interest in learning these lessons and are instead pushing through a plan that at its best would raise average global temperatures 2 degrees Celsius. "That would mean the melting of the Andean and Himalayan glaciers," Morales told the thousands gathered in the stadium, part of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. What he didn't have to say is that the Bolivian people, no matter how sustainably they choose to live, have no power to save their glaciers.

Bolivia's climate summit has had moments of joy, levity and absurdity. Yet underneath it all, you can feel the emotion that provoked this gathering: rage against helplessness.

It's little wonder. Bolivia is in the midst of a dramatic political transformation, one that has nationalized key industries and elevated the voices of indigenous peoples as never before. But when it comes to Bolivia's most pressing, existential crisis--the fact that its glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, threatening the water supply in two major cities--Bolivians are powerless to do anything to change their fate on their own.

That's because the actions causing the melting are taking place not in Bolivia but on the highways and in the industrial zones of heavily industrialized countries. In Copenhagen, leaders of endangered nations like Bolivia and Tuvalu argued passionately for the kind of deep emissions cuts that could avert catastrophe. They were politely told that the political will in the North just wasn't there. More than that, the United States made clear that it didn't need small countries like Bolivia to be part of a climate solution. It would negotiate a deal with other heavy emitters behind closed doors, and the rest of the world would be informed of the results and invited to sign on, which is precisely what happened with the Copenhagen Accord. When Bolivia and Ecuador refused to rubber-stamp the accord, the US government cut their climate aid by $3 million and $2.5 million, respectively. "It's not a free-rider process," explained US climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing. (Anyone wondering why activists from the global South reject the idea of "climate aid" and are instead demanding repayment of "climate debts" has their answer here.) Pershing's message was chilling: if you are poor, you don't have the right to prioritize your own survival.

The concept that deserves more attention than Klein allotted lies in the center of this excerpt, subsequently reinforced by the following two paragraphs. The heart of the problem is the helplessness of those who try to act and the recognition that the only reaction to that helplessness is rage, rather than logic.

I found myself dwelling on this proposition because last week I happened to see Leila Khaled, Hijacker on the Sundance Channel. Much of this documentary amounts to an account of the making of a terrorist, and the fundamental argument is that one resorts to terrorism to get the attention of those who have willfully chosen to ignore one's plight. In other words, when one is helpless, whether as a Palestinian refugee, a disgruntled American citizen living on (or over) the economic brink, or a resident of a country facing "existential crisis" as a result of current climate conditions, there is little one can do but rage. That rage can be localized, but that amounts to banging one's head against the wall. The alternative is to warp that old motto of the Sixties into a more sinister proposition:

If you are not part of the problem, make the problem so bad that someone will have to do something about it.

The consequent of that conditional is basically a prescription for terrorism.

In the wake of 9/11, we experienced the better part of a decade immersed in rhetoric about a Global War on Terror that was as passionate as it was misconceived. After he took office, Barack Obama tried to undo those misconceptions with a concerted effort to establish better communication between the White House and the rest of the world on both national and international scales. From his speeches we felt that he appreciated the nature of helplessness in the face of abusive practices; and we all hoped that he would deal with the helpless with more substance than the I-feel-your-pain platitudes of Bill Clinton. What we probably did not anticipate is that Obama's own strategy would basically follow the first chapter of the Book of Isaiah (Jerusalem Bible version):

"Take your wrong-doing out of my sight.
Cease to do evil.
Learn to do good,
search for justice,
help the oppressed,
be just to the orphan,
plead for the widow.

"Come now, let us talk this over,
says Yahweh.
Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
thought they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool.

"If you are willing to obey,
you shall eat the good things of the earth.
But if you persist in rebellion,
the sword shall eat you instead."
The mouth of Yahweh has spoken.

For those who have resorted to terrorism in the face of helplessness, an invitation to "talk this over" just does not cut it, not when it involves conversations with the likes of someone like Pershing who will not even grant you the priority of your own survival.

After 9/11 Tony Judt invoked considerable wrath with an article in The New York Review that presumed that there were deeper motives behind those acts of destruction in New York and Washington. His position was that it was more important to address those motives through meaningful actions than to presume that one could wage war on terrorism the way the Allied powers had waged war on the Nazis. It would be fair to say that there are any number of reasons why the Bush Administration did not want to get Judt's message, but now it seems as if the Obama Administration is not getting it either.

If we are defuse the rage against helplessness, we need to turn not to Isaiah but to Oliver Cromwell:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

Let us not presume that the objective of talking things over is to get others to obey. Rather, let us "think it possible" that, in the eyes of the helpless around the world (including in our own country), we are the ones perceived stereotypically as terrorists. Even if we do little more than entertain the premise, talking things over might then lead to productive actions, rather than meaningless circumlocutions that can only provoke further rage.

Switzerland Discovers Irrationality?

Imogen Foulkes' analysis for BBC News of the Swiss vote to ban minarets indicates that the descent of reasoned political debate into irrationality has now spread beyond the United States to Europe. As I read it, I could not help but remember what I recently wrote about Howard Dean's thoughts on the debate over health care reform:

Thus, in commenting about how problematic the opposition has been, all Dean could say was, "We didn't realize they would go that low." His worldview simply could not imagine that someone like Sarah Palin could turn arguments about health care into arguments over death panels. Dean's admission reveals an interesting principle, which should serve as a warning to all who try to engage in argumentation in the present day:

Rationality defines is limits through fundamental principles of logical reasoning; irrationality knows no bounds.

The very concept of a death panel was so far off the map of just about anyone in the Democratic Party that they simply could not anticipate those who live by fear-mongering putting it on the table.

Compare those remarks with the following observation by Foulkes:

What many Swiss politicians are beginning to realise this morning is that they underestimated the concern among their population about integration of Muslims in Switzerland, and about possible Islamic extremism.

So while the right-wing Swiss People's Party campaigned hard, warning in meetings up and down the country of the possible introduction of Sharia law in Switzerland, the middle ground and left-wing parties did very little.

There were few posters, and none to compete with the People's Party's eye-catching and controversial offering, which showed a woman shrouded in a black burka, a map of Switzerland behind her, black minarets shooting out of it like missiles.

Basically, the People's Party got their way through the same fear-mongering tactics that we have seen practiced so well by Palin and those who sail under her flag (which, presumably is not the State Flag of Alaska and hopefully is not the Flag of the United States of America).

Thus, the principle that irrationality knows no bounds applies not only to personal ethics but also to geographical extent. Almost two years ago I wrote about the entropic nature of political discourse:

Entropy is not restricted to the objective physical world of thermodynamics. There are many other processes that inevitably devolve into chaos; and, whether we like it or not, political discourse may be one of those processes.

That devolution of entropy is achieved by, among other means, diffusion; so we should not be surprised that politics at its most irrational should diffuse across geographical boundaries so readily, particularly in the world the Internet has made. The tragedy is less that it has diffused at all but that it has diffused to a country that gave refuge to so many of the persecuted as recently as during the Second World War. On the other hand signs of the flip side of this coin have been emerging for some time. Anyone who saw the 1973 Italian film Pane e Cioccolata, about the treatment of Italian "guest workers" in Switzerland, knows that this emergence has been coming for at least a quarter of a century.

The Complexity of the Abuse Problem

This morning the BBC NEWS Web site ran an interesting report about the problem of abusive practices, particularly towards children, in the brave new world of social software on the Internet. Given that the undiscriminating embrace of this technology may be equaled only by the mindless evangelizing that continues to promote it, these stories are valuable. Nevertheless, this particular account reflects a bias that may not be particularly productive. Here is how the story opens:

Major social networking websites have been criticised for not introducing a help button for children to report concerns about grooming and bullying.

Jim Gamble, from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), hit out at the sites as one site, Bebo, adopted the button.

He said there was "no legitimate reason" why other sites like MySpace and Facebook had not done the same.

As Bill Clinton would have put it, I feel Gamble's pain. I have long argued that the Internet is a hazardous place whose dangers have been consistently overlooked or downplayed by social software evangelists, and most of my attention has been towards hazards to adults. By all rights the risks to children should be even greater, and we need voices like Gamble's to raise consciousness about those risks.

Nevertheless, I fear that Gamble may not entirely grasp the nature of the technology. The Bebo "button," which is illustrated on the BBC NEWS Web page, is an instance of what tends to be called reporting technology. Most of us have encountered it in some setting or another. Indeed, anyone reading this should be aware of the technology, because it is at the top of the page. If I write something that offends, then a reader can click on the "Report Abuse" hyperlink to notify the Blogger support team that I have done so; and, whatever my past rants and inquiries into the dark side may have been, I have tried very hard both to edit my text before submitting it and to stay on the right side of the boundary of normative social practices.

The rub, however, resides in that second infinitive phrase. Where is that "boundary of normative social practices?" When reporting technology is engaged, it is basically a request for a judgment on where a particular item sits with respect to those practices. How does such judgment take place? More importantly, in the midst of the heavy volume of content flowing through the Internet pipes, how can each such judgment be made both effectively and efficiently?

The bottom line is that there are no good answers to these questions, so Gamble's indignation has missed the point. Where MySpace and Facebook are concerned, the question is not whether or not they choose to adopt a simple button-based reporting technology. The real question has to do with what happens when the button is clicked? What sort of account (and, once again, the concept of λόγος from Plato's investigation into the nature of knowledge in "Theaetetus" rears its head in the world of Facebook) is elicited when abuse is reported? Then, what happens to that account (even if it is nothing more than "the abuse button was clicked") after it has been submitted? To offer a reductio ad absurdum example of just how vulnerable this process is, I recently learned of a situation in this brave new world of outsourcing in which reports of abuse were being read by individuals who did not understand the language of either the content or the account very well.

So, while it may distress Gamble, there is, indeed, a "legitimate reason" why MySpace and Facebook have not jumped on the reporting technology bandwagon. Worse yet, it is unclear that Bebo is quite the paradigm of vigilance that Gamble would like it to be. Consider the following excerpt from a BBC Panorama report that I cited this past March:

Internet ratings company Nielsen claims that Bebo, with its one million Irish users, was the most popular site in Ireland after Google in 2007.

Sectarianism on the site hit the headlines after threatening posts surfaced following the 2006 murder of Catholic school boy Michael McIlveen in Ballymena.

Three years on, and some pages on Bebo brazenly continue to promote violence.

Has this situation changed since March; and, if so, was the change the result of the adoption of the reporting technology that Gamble so admires?

As I see it, the real problem with social software is that problems of offense and abuse are human problems for which humans have to be in all parts of the loop from the very beginning. The most dangerous consequence of Internet volume has been the gradual erosion of person-to-person "Contact Us" mechanisms in favor of alternative technologies, such as blogs in which users can discuss problems among themselves (which may or may not be monitored my the technology support team) or FAQ pages (where one may be able to vote on how informative they were without any confidence that one's vote counts for very much). The erosion is, of course, understandable. There are just not enough individuals available for "contact" to keep up with the load of users trying to make contact.

Thus, conditions are such that technology providers search frantically for bandages because no one seems to have the resources to analyze the nature of the problem and think about solving it. One would think that there are plenty of educated people out there who would be more than happy to work the problem. Is it then a question of not wanting to put budget into those resources? If so, then we are back in the days of the Ford Pinto, when managers decided that the cost of settling with the victims of a defective product was lower than the cost of repairing the product. I wish I could say that this is another instance of a farcical repetition of history; but, where the safety of children is concerned, this just is not the case.

The CHUTZPAH to Believe in Representative Democracy

In the wake of yesterday's rant over our obsession with universalist ideals that can only lead to irreconcilable differences and destroy any pragmatic hope of getting things done, I was pleased to see that at least British Foreign Secretary David Miliband prefers getting things done to getting stuck in ideological mud. Consider the beginning of a report that Al Jazeera English compiled from their wire sources:

Britain's foreign secretary has suggested that senior Taliban figures be given positions in the Afghan government to bring an end to the violence in the country.

At a meeting of Nato's parliamentary assembly in Edinburgh, Scotland on Tuesday, David Miliband said that history suggested many Taliban members could be persuaded to stop fighting.

Miliband said the Afghan government would need to reach out to "high-level commanders that can be persuaded to renounce al-Qaeda and pursue their goals peacefully".

"This will be far from straightforward. But the historical lessons are clear," he said.

"Blood enemies from the Soviet period and the civil war now work together in government. Former Talibs already sit in the parliament.

"It is essential that, when the time is right, members of the current insurgency are
encouraged to follow suit," he said.

In the midst of all the current hand-writing over corruption in an Afghan government that, for all intents and purposes, was installed by the United States as part of the War on Terror, here is someone with the chutzpah (I suppose the British would prefer to call it "temerity") to suggest that, if we want to spread our love of democracy to Afghanistan, then we should not impede their forming a government that would be truly representative. He also made his case with an appeal to history, which, as far as I can tell, is a concept that remains alien to prevailing American culture. This is a gesture that is almost guaranteed to induce considerable aggravation in Washington, which makes it perfect for the Chutzpah of the Week award!

Franken-Style CHUTZPAH

As a comedian Al Franken was no stranger to the rhetoric of chutzpah, and he took that rhetoric with him when he moved into the talk show circuit. So it was not so much a question of whether he would bring chutzpah to the Senate floor as of when he would do so. On the basis of Emily Douglas' latest blog post to The Notion, Franken has found the right opportunity. Here are Douglas' opening paragraphs:

In April of 2008, KBR employee Dawn Leamon went public. A few months earlier, she had been raped and sexually assaulted by co-workers while deployed at Camp Harper, in Iraq, and after weeks of being pressured not to report the incident, forced to work alongside her attackers, and medically neglected, Leamon brought the story to a Houston attorney and to The Nation. Leamon joined a slowly building chorus of female defense contractor employees who'd been raped or sexually assaulted by co-workers while in Iraq, to utter impunity on the part of their assailants. In response, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called a hearing to investigate why the Justice Department had not prosecuted any sexual assault allegations in Iraq since the going to war in the country.

When it turned out that defense contractors often required employees, as a condition of employment, to submit to binding private arbitration in disputes with the contractors (including allegations of sexual assault), instead of bringing complaints to public courts, and that the Department of Defense claimed they couldn't prosecute for this very reason (even though these clauses only prevented civil suits), Senator Ben Nelson, who called the hearing, offered a simple solution: "This might be something you want to require and include in your contracts--before you award them," Karen Houppert reported in The Nation.

Freshman Sen. Al Franken took Nelson's suggestion seriously, and has pushed through an amendment to a Defense Appropriations bill that would prevent the Pentagon from doing business with contractors who force employees into binding arbitration over rape and sexual assault charges.

I like to think of this as the chutzpah of shining a light where no one particularly want to look. As Douglas observes later in her post, opposition is already lining up against Franken from the usual suspects; so this may be his first sobering lesson in how things get done (or fail to get done) in the Senate. However, politics is all about picking the right battles; and this is one whose campaign may be served with chutzpah. So Franken gets the Chutzpah of the Week aware, and I anticipate that he will have to make shelf space for more of them!

Insulting the Victim?

Ina Fried has continued to track the Sidekick data-loss story for CNET News. However, as I tried to indicate on Sunday, this is a case where we need to go beyond the "facts of the story," so to speak, and interpret those facts in an effort to derive useful lessons-learned. Such interpretation is often facilitated by trying to align the evidence we have with models from the past (along the lines of the "thinking in time" strategy of Richard Neustadt and Ernest May); so we can then draw upon those models to draw inferences and make decisions. I proposed two such models on Sunday, the narrative of Robert Heinlein's 1940 story "Blowups Happen" and the Northeast Blackout of 1965. The former was a fictitious account of how to deal with the problem of a technology failure having catastrophic consequences for an unexpectedly large number of people. The second involved a failure that affected 25 million people but probably not on the catastrophic scale that Heinlein had considered. I neglected to mention 9/11 as a possible model, primarily because, from a narrative point of view, this is still very much a narrative-in-progress; so it would be hazardous to reason from a model that has not yet reached a point of closure.

Nevertheless, our experiences since 9/11 may help us focus on the sorts of questions we should be asking in planning our actions. Two questions stand out as worthy of consideration:

1. How do we compensate for the physical damage to "get things working again?"
2. How do we compensate for the personal damage to the victims of the physical damage?

Last night Fried ran a follow-up report, which indicates that these questions are being addressed by T-Mobile, if not by Microsoft. Regarding the first question:

T-Mobile said late on Monday that it may yet be able to recover Sidekick users' information that it had previously thought was lost as part of a massive server failure by Microsoft's Danger subsidiary.

"Recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible," it said.

As Fried observes, this "marks a significant change in tone." I would characterize that change as a shift from "What's done is done" to "We're working on it." From the point of view of recognizing that "customer relationship" is a social, rather than technical, matter, this is definitely a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of how the second question has been addressed:

Those who do suffer permanent data loss will get a $100 "customer appreciation card" good toward T-Mobile service or products, the carrier said in a statement.

"For those who fall into this category, details will be sent out in the next 14 days - there is no action needed on the part of these customers," T-Mobile said. "We however remain hopeful that for the majority of our customers, personal content can be recovered."

Granted that it is never easy to put a price on pain and suffering, $100 sounds like a pretty cheap way to deal with personal reactions to this problem; and providing that compensation through a "customer appreciation card" just rubs salt in a wound whose pain is highly subjective. One can imagine that there are going to be customers who would like nothing better that to sever entirely their connections to T-Mobile, and it is hard to imagine their opinion being changed by the prospect of doing another $100 worth of business with the carrier at that carrier's expense.

The intrusion of impersonal technology into making decisions about people has been the latest swing of the pendulum in business attitudes towards customers. We have seen the two extremes of "the customer is always right" and "the customer be damned;" and we know that the pendulum will continue to swing. These days the basic attitude it that dealing with customers is no longer a matter of skill, because training procedures now tend to presume that all relevant activities may now be facilitated, if not entirely assumed, by Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. This is not to suggest that CRM technology puts a price on buying back the favor of an offended customer, but the technology does encourage the mindset that any personal problem can be solved by writing a check. There are probably many irate customers out there who would like nothing more than to see T-Mobile crash and burn, not realizing (or not caring) that none of the alternatives are likely to be any better (or, for that matter, worse). The best we can hope is that this whole affair will kick the pendulum back in the direction of treating the customer as "subject, rather than object;" but this seems about as unlikely as the prospect of engineering practices that design for recovery as much as for functionality!

Presence of Malice?

Chief U. S. District Judge Vaughan Walker has introduced a new twist in the dispute here in California over the legitimacy of same-sex marriage. Here is how Bob Egelko reported the matter for this morning's San Francisco Chronicle:

A federal judge has ordered sponsors of California's Proposition 8 to release campaign strategy documents that opponents believe could show that backers of the same-sex marriage ban were motivated by prejudice against gays.

Plaintiffs in a federal suit seeking to overturn Prop. 8 - two same-sex couples, a gay-rights organization and the city of San Francisco - contend that the measure's real purpose was to strip a historically persecuted minority group of rights held by the majority.

If the courts find that the ballot measure was motivated by discrimination, they could strike it down without having to decide whether gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry.

"The intent or purpose of Prop. 8 is central to this litigation," Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker declared Thursday in requiring backers of the November 2008 measure to give the opposing side their internal campaign communications.

Backers' argument

A day earlier, Prop 8's sponsors told Walker in a court filing that their opponents' claim of anti-gay motivation is legally irrelevant.

In a final round of arguments seeking to uphold the measure without a trial, defenders of the ballot measure said California voters were entitled to amend their Constitution to preserve the traditional, male-female definition of marriage for numerous reasons - including a belief that "extending marriage to same-sex couples carries a risk of weakening the institution of marriage."

Because there is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage, it wouldn't matter if the plaintiffs could show that Prop. 8 "was also accompanied by irrational attitudes such as animus," or prejudice against lesbians and gays, said attorney Charles Cooper.

The bottom line is that Walker ruled against Cooper's argument, and this can have implications far beyond the scope of Proposition 8 and gay rights. California has a reputation for being overly enthusiastic (to put it politely) when it comes to proposing initiatives to be settled on state ballots. Walker decided that Proposition 8 was a clear example in which such an initiative was being used for discrimination, if not more the more extreme practice of hate speech; and he concluded that this was an abuse of the right of citizens to propose such initiatives.

The reaction from the Proposition 8 camp has been "fascinating" (as in Spock raising his eyebrow) in an ironic sort of way. Another of their lawyers, Andrew Pugno, declared:

This will make any citizen group think twice before attempting a ballot initiative.

Indeed, it will, Mr. Pugno; and those of us who believe in "liberty and justice for all" should take that as a good thing! Injecting even the slightest hint of hate speech in something as serious as a ballot initiative is tantamount to shouting "Fire!" in a crowded room, the classical example of "free speech" not protected by the First Amendment. Walker's ruling amounts to declaring that Proposition 8 should never have gone on the ballot in the first place (which would have spared us all a truly ugly advertising campaign, which really did test the boundaries of legitimate free speech); and, if all goes as Pugno anticipates, those who try to use the ballot box in the future for discriminatory practices will be obliged to think twice (or perhaps just once, for the more reflective and prescient).

"People are always the weakest link."

Jane Wakefield, Technology Reporter for BBC News, ran an interesting study of the current state of the art in data theft in the form of a profile of Colin Greenlees, an independent consultant, who, in many ways, is the real-world version of Robert Redford's Marty Bishop character in the 1992 film Sneakers. Greenlees' mantra embodies the simple precept that, no matter how strong the objective technology deployed to protect data resources may be, malice takes place in the social world; and the most effective strategy in the social world is, as it has always been, the confidence game. Greenlees offers a representative example that Bishop could have pulled off just as effectively:

It is all about confidence. I walked into the building [of the FTSE-listed firm] having an imaginary conversation on my mobile and the swipe-card operated lift was held open for me by what turned out to be the managing director.

I remained there for five days working from a third floor meeting room.

As I have suggested, the game has been around for some time. The only variations arise in where and how it is played.

I have always felt that one of the best players was Howard Morland, who decided to write an article on how easy it was for him to learn classified material about the H-bomb. His article appeared in the May 1979 issue of The Progressive after considerable legal machinery was engaged to halt its publication. Ironically, the case was not resolved in the courts, because a Berkeley student found the same information publicly available in his campus library and disclosed that information (through a letter to the editor of a local newspaper, as I recall). Once the genie was out of the bottle, there was no longer a disclosure case against Morland and The Progressive.

The focus of that case, however, was on whether, by virtue of his article, everyone would now know how the H-bomb worked; and that missed the real point of Morland's research. That point was captured in the subtitle of his article: "Learning it is easy, once you know the handshake." His key point is that one did not even need to use Greenlees-style techniques to breach a restricted area. Once could remain outside the protected premises and apply one simple rule: People like to talk about their work. If, as a listener, you give the right signs of understanding, then the speaker will assume that such a display of understanding is as good as a clearance; and the conversation will proceed under the same "ground rules of discourse" that would apply within the restricted area.

This, of course, is the "dark side" of a key story of the rise of Silicon Valley. This is the story of the Wagon Wheel, where pioneers of semiconductor technology would go for drinks at the end of their long (and frequently frustrating) work days. The Wagon Wheel was a bar like any other, but the conversations were different. Instead of "My wife doesn't understand me," they would revolve around the latest technical problem; and the participants would come from different companies (which may or may not have been competing). The Wagon Wheel was the ultimate example of a rising tide lifting all boats; and all those boats eventually became the Silicon Valley "marina."

My point is that the only difference between the conversations in the Wagon Wheel and those Morland conducted had to do with the devastating power of the product, so to speak. If "information wants to be free," then it exercises its freedom through our human need for conversation, regardless of how it gets secured in heavily protected databases on even more heavily protected servers. Greenlees has become a successful consultant because, unlike all his technology-savvy customers, he has concentrated his own perceptions on the social world. If his customers were less myopic about the social world, they might realize that they could come up with the same insights; but I suppose today's world of work no longer encourages workers to cultivate such general views of what they do and how they do it!

The Bush Legacy Endures

When The Wire invoked the metaphor of a "new day" for a radical reformist shift in the power structure of the Baltimore Municipal Government, the ensuing narrative wasted no time in undoing that metaphor. As an assiduous student of the poetic wisdom of such narratives, I have subsequently taken a very jaundiced view of that metaphor, most recently with regard to our State Department (for which, incidentally, I have also appropriated the bowl of shit metaphor from The Wire). However, while the new Administration of Barack Obama may be making positive advances on our country's reputation in the global arena, there remains an Augean pile of dirty laundry left behind by George W. Bush on the domestic front; and our current economic mess is just the stuff at the top of the heap. Buried deep in that pile remains the disgrace of Hurricane Katrina. Not only may that be the blackest blot on the Bush escutcheon (particularly since it involves other members of the family); but also it is a "gift that keeps on giving" (or taking away, as the case may be), even as there are those today still trying to clean up the mess.

One of the more interesting clean-up efforts involves a claim made by six New Orleans homeowners that, in the words of Jon Wiener's recent post to The Notion, one of the blog sites for The Nation, the Army Corps of Engineers "failed to heed environmental laws in building and maintaining the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shortcut for large ships between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, which led to the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans during Katrina." Federal Judge Stanwood Duval will rule on this claim in a trial scheduled to begin on April 20. This will not be an easy case for the Judge; but it will be made more difficult by the possibility that the "well of evidence" has been poisoned. Worse yet, the poisoning can probably be traced back to the influence (if not direct actions) of the Bush Administration.

This is the basic story as Wiener reported it:

Louisiana State University is firing a leading hurricane scientist who was scheduled to testify as an expert witness in a case against the Army Corps of Engineers for their pre-Katrina work in New Orleans. Ivor van Heerden, who had been deputy director of LSU's Hurricane Center, says the school's former president, previously a Bush appointee, had earlier threatened to fire him if he testified.

Tenure exists, we are told, to protect the expression of views that are unpopular with the powerful. This is another case where the person who needed the protection of tenure didn't have it. LSU was able to fire van Heerden because he is an untenured Associate Research Professor.

Van Heerden was the leader of "Team Louisiana," the official independent state-funded investigation of the Katrina flooding. That panel found that the levee failures reflected poor design, bad science and shoddy engineering on the part of the Corps. The Bush Administration had held the levee failures were an "act of God."

When van Heerden was first asked to testify in spring 2007, he said in an interview Sunday with Harry Shearer on KCRW's "Le Show," LSU's then-president, Sean O'Keefe, told plaintiffs' attorneys that if van Heerden testified against the Corps he would be fired. O'Keefe had been appointed to high offices by both Presidents Bush – George W. Bush named him head of NASA in 2001, and George H. W. Bush had named him acting Secretary of the Air Force in 1992.

According to van Heerden, the LSU president said that "nobody from LSU was going to embarrass the Bush administration or upset the major Republican companies that benefit from Corps of Engineers contracts."

The second clause in that final quote is the real reminder of the extent to which the legacy of the Bush Administration is still with us. Whether or not this emerges as an embarrassment, the more important victims are those "major Republican companies that benefit from Corps of Engineers contracts;" and that is why New Orleans remains stuck in all that mud created by Katrina. The good news, however, is that van Heerden may still get his day in court. Whether or not he is an "expert witness," he can still be called to testify as a "fact witness;" so claims such as those van Heerden published in his book, The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why during Hurricane Katrina – the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist, may still be presented as evidentiary "facts" and subjected to cross-examination like any other such evidentiary facts. This trial may thus provide an excellent opportunity for van Heerden to rehearse his presentation, because he is likely to present it again in a second trial, which will decide, as Wiener put it, "a massive class action suit seeking hundreds of millions in damages from the Corps." The people of New Orleans will thus be facing quite a few days in court over the coming months. Let's hope that the decisions turn out in their favor.

The CHUTZPAH to Rage Against the Machine

It is part of the "nature of the beast" that Chutzpah of the Week awards tend to go to high-profile individuals in high-profile situations. Indeed, it is often that elevated status that boosts the merely remarkable to echt chutzpah (if the spirit of Yiddish will permit such a German incursion)! However, every now and then something will happen in the backyard (or, in this case, front yard) of an ordinary citizen; and he rises to the occasion with both the spirit and the action of chutzpah that could be a model for us all.

Paul Jacobs is such an ordinary citizen. He lives in the village of Broughton, a place unknown to most of us (with the possible exception of seriously thorough scholars of the Doomsday Book, in which it is recorded). You might say that his chutzpah would put Broughton on the map, were it not for the fact that his actions were intended to keep his little village off the map. At the very least it brought him to the attention of Andy Dolan, a reporter for the Daily Mail; and Dolan's story is now available on the Mail Online Web site.

It turns out that Broughton has a strong sense of community, and their community sentiment takes a rather angry view of Google Street View. As Dolan put it, they fear that "the images could be used by burglars to scout for suitable homes to raid;" and they were furious at the prospect of Google collecting such images and making them so easily available to just about anybody. The result was an impromptu protest against one of the camera-equipped cars Google had dispatched to collect such images. This is where Jacobs enters the story, according to Dolan:

Villager Paul Jacobs told how the impromptu protest unfolded on Wednesday when he spotted the car - which was unmarked but featured the tell-tale 360 degree-rotating camera fixed atop a pole on its roof - cruising slowly down his lane in the Buckinghamshire village.

He dashed outside, confronted the driver and told him that he was not allowed to continue before alerting police.

Mr Jacobs, 43, then knocked on his neighbour's doors and a crowd of mutinous residents surrounded the black Opal Astra forcing it to make a U-turn and quickly leave.

Furthermore, Dolan included a statement from the Thames Valley Police indicating that one of the protesters had the good citizenship sense to let them know what was happening:

A squad car was sent to Broughton at 10.20am on Wednesday to reports of a dispute between a crowd of people and a Google Street View contractor.

A member of the public had called us to report that he, along with a number of others, were standing in the middle of the road preventing the car from moving forwards and taking photographs.

They felt his presence was an intrusion of their privacy. When police arrived at the scene, the car had moved on.

Here is a case where "nothing to see here" is a happy ending to what could have been a crime scene!

Needless to say, Google holds to the premise that they were doing nothing illegal. Their official reply, however, has its own ring of chutzpah to it:

Householders are entitled to request their property is removed from the site but only after the picture has appeared.

In other words Google recognizes your right to close your barn door but only after the horse has been stolen! That is enough to make Google a contender for this week's chutzpah award.

Nevertheless, I always prefer the positive connotation to the negative. Acting as a synthesis of the shepherd David and his first-namesake Paul Revere, Jacobs rallied his neighbors to stand up to an intrusion by the Goliath Google; and the village prevailed. As I said, this is chutzpah that can serve as a model for the rest of us; and I hand Jacobs his Chutzpah of the Week award with sincere delight.

Learning from al-Qaeda

Once again it may be time to smash the rose-colored glasses of social software evangelists, or at least subject them to a new refraction is see if the prescription needs changing. The "war on terror" movement still seems to have considerable trouble viewing an organization like al-Qaeda as a loosely distributed organization, which, as Lawrence Wright had observed in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, can be highly sloppy and therefore error-prone. Those who still strive for "zero-level probability of a terrorist attack" also fail to see the extent to which social software platforms are highly conducive to such loose organizational structures. They will not get this insight from the technology evangelists, because those who evangelize tend to spend so much time promoting the "software" that they have little time to think about the "social."

Nevertheless, according to an investigation by Tom Marchbanks for BBC Panorama, that technology that is so conducive to "the way of al-Qaeda" may have now been enlisted in the support of sectarianism in Northern Ireland. Here are some of his findings:

Internet ratings company Nielsen claims that Bebo, with its one million Irish users, was the most popular site in Ireland after Google in 2007.

Sectarianism on the site hit the headlines after threatening posts surfaced following the 2006 murder of Catholic school boy Michael McIlveen in Ballymena.

Three years on, and some pages on Bebo brazenly continue to promote violence.

Guns and bombs

One page dedicated to the Real IRA, removed recently, contained a post which claimed a new "cell" had been formed.

While another, promoting the 32 Sovereign Continuity Movement (32CSM), the political wing of the Real IRA, contains pictures of people holding what appears to be a pipe bomb.

One user, calling himself a member of the Irish Republican Socialist Movement, even discusses buying a gun and the bargain price of ammunition.

But the pages are not just used to brag about violence or weaponry. Fundraising events are also promoted.

A page on Bebo recruiting for the Republican Sinn Fein - widely thought to be the political wing of the Continuity IRA (CIRA) - advertises a £5 entry for a fundraiser event alongside a press release from CIRA prisoners.

'Revenge is a dish best served cold'

The sites are not just from the republican side, loyalist pages on Bebo are also widespread, including what appears to be the official internet sites for outlawed terrorist groups, such as the Orange Volunteers.

Although these particular sites have few registered friends and show little sign of activity, other loyalist pages on Bebo which have sprung up in the last six months, use similar names, and are much more active.

As I see it, this is yet another consequence of those who are so wrapped up in technology that they see no need to set aside time for less objective matters, such as the subtleties of governance. As Anthony Lewis pointed out in the title of his book, our own Constitution addresses the question of "freedom for the thought that we hate" in its First Amendment; but the history (or, as Lewis called it, "biography") of the First Amendment makes it clear that our judicial system has always recognized the distinction between hatred in thought and hatred in action. As those actions cross the line into the pathological, we are likely to see an increasing number of court cases and rulings that explicitly address the role of social software in the pathology under question. Such cases are likely to depend heavily on "expert witness" testimony; but I hope that the presiding judges will be astute enough to recognize that any such expert witness in the support technology may be far from an expert on the impact of that technology in the social world!

In Pinochet's Company

Judge Baltasar Garzon is at it again. For those who are not big on following or remembering details, he was the Spanish judge who had ordered the arrest of Augusto Pinochet, thus escalating the Chilean dictator's atrocities to the level of crimes against humanity in violation of international law. This led to a massive investigation and prosecution, which was never brought to closure because of Pinochet's death; but what was important was that Garzon started the ball rolling at a time when everyone else seemed content to let the memory of the Pinochet years fade away while Pinochet himself enjoyed the benefits of being a senator-for-life.

As we know, Pinochet would never have come to power without the assistance of our Central Intelligence Agency, presumably with the support of President Richard Nixon and (then) National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger; but Garzon never pursued the case far enough to investigate the causal chain in greater detail. This time, however, he has key members of the Bush Administration squarely in his sights, according to a story released by Reuters yesterday afternoon:

A top Spanish court has moved toward starting a probe of six former Bush administration officials including ex-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in connection with alleged torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, The New York Times said on Saturday.

…

The complaint, prepared by Spanish lawyers with the help of U.S. and European legal experts, also names John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who wrote secret legal opinions saying the president had the authority to circumvent the Geneva Conventions, and Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy.

Spain can claim jurisdiction in the case because five Spanish citizens or residents who were prisoners at Guantanamo Bay say they were tortured there.

The other Americans named are William Haynes II, former general counsel for the Department of Defense; Jay Bybee, Yoo's former boss at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel; and David Addington, chief of staff and legal adviser to ex-Vice President Dick Cheney.

Thus far, we have had no comment from any of those named in the complaint. Now I am sure that there are many who would like to see someone (if not Garzon) go after the biggest fish in the pond; but, like Hugo Chávez, Garzon seems to have learned from the Tao Teh Ching (of Mao Zedong's Little Red Book) that the thousand-mile journey begins with the single step. This seems like as good a choice of a first step as any.

Madoff's Chutzpah Ploy Fails

Bernard Madoff's appeal to be released from jail while awaiting sentencing has been denied. The "due course" of the Appeals Court did not take very long. The basis for denial was that he posed a flight risk. Whether or not the Court recognized "flight into cyberspace" as part of that risk, as I had suggested, is irrelevant. I had also suggested that the Court would make their decision in a way that would "make sure that he does not do further damage;" and they have done so. Madoff can keep his Chutzpah of the Week award. I think it will be the first to decorate a prison cell!

What Part of "Guilty" Don't You Understand?

Bernard Madoff has not made the cut for any of my Chutzpah of the Week awards basically because, regardless of the magnitude of his fraud, there was a certain banality (or, perhaps, to avoid connotations of Hannah Arendt, I should turn to Daniel Mendelsohn's latest New York Review piece and call it banalisé, as in "rendered quotidian, everyday, normal") about his actions. It has only been with the rendering of a verdict that his true capacity for chutzpah has surfaced. Here is how the story broke on the BBC NEWS Web site:

Last week, Madoff, 70, pleaded guilty to all 11 charges against him when he appeared in a New York court last week

He was remanded to jail until his sentencing in June.

But Madoff's lawyers have argued to a US appeals court he should be released as he had not fled while under house arrest at his Manhattan penthouse.

This bears some family resemblance to one of the classic paradigms of chutzpah: the man who kills both his parents and then throws himself at the mercy of the Court on the grounds that he is an orphan. It goes without saying that, having been found guilty, Madoff should not take the comfort of his penthouse for granted. However, that penthouse offers more than comfort; it also offers virtually uncontrolled connectivity. As prosecutors try to investigate who else (including immediate family) may have been involved in Madoff's scheme, we have been treated with accounts of his efforts to move around large assets through his computer without ever having to leave the penthouse. Having established Madoff's guilt, the Court has a certain responsibility to his victims to make sure that he does not do further damage; and confining him in a way that deprives him of his connectivity resources seems like a step in the right direction. The Appeals Court probably appreciates this factor by replying that they will make a decision "in due course." Meanwhile, Madoff finally gets his Chutzpah of the Week Award for his last-minute ploy to maintain business as usual in the face of his guilty verdict!

Chief Apology Officer

Would you buy a used insurance policy from this man? For those who do not recognize the face, he is Edward Liddy, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the American International Group (AIG); and today he will be in Washington facing members of Congress who will most likely provide faithful representation of the "tidal wave of rage" of American voters over his company's business practices. Needless to say, he will begin by delivering a prepared statement, which can be previewed on the BBC NEWS Web site:

The chief executive of AIG has admitted that fundamental mistakes were made at the US insurance giant.

"Mistakes were made at AIG on a scale that few could have imagined possible," Edward Liddy will tell a Congressional hearing later on Wednesday.

He will also admit that AIG is "too complex, too unwieldy and too opaque".

Mr Liddy also calls the $165m (£119m) bonuses paid by AIG "distasteful" after the insurer took about $170bn of aid from the US government.

…

In a prepared testimony, Mr Liddy says the company "strayed from its core competencies in the insurance business".

Nowhere was this more evident than in "the creation of what grew to become an internal hedge fund, which then became substantially overexposed to market risk," he adds.

He also addresses the contentious issue of excessive bonuses.

"I am mindful of the outrage of the American public and of the president's call for a more restrained compensation system," he says.

Mr Liddy said that he would never have approved the $165m bonuses if he had been chief executive at the time the contracts were signed.

"It was distasteful to have to make these payments," he says.

Since Liddy only became CEO last September, I am not surprised to see that he plans to fall back on a not-on-my-watch defense. More to the point, however, is whether it had occurred to him that, in a time of crisis for so many businesses in the financial sector, it would make some sense to do some "due diligence investigation" of what he might face in his new job. Had that been the case, such "due diligence" would have benefited from a conversation with Robert J. Arvanitis as serious as the one Joe Nocera had conducted in preparing his recent Talking Business column for The New York Times. I am thinking particularly of the internal view of AIG business practices, of which, as I documented in my own recent analysis, Arvanitis said, "they never thought of it as abuse."

I got a sampling of some of the wrath that Liddy is likely to face by watching a bit of C-SPAN yesterday. As a matter of fact, the specific wrath I encountered was a Republican suggestion that it might be a good idea to let AIG fail after all. So much for "the party of big business" (although it is a nice reminder that laissez-faire has a dark side, too)! My guess is that Congressional decorum will prevail over preparing any tar and feathers and then riding Liddy out of town on a rail; but I would hope that Liddy is smart enough to realize that heartfelt apologies are not going to get him very far (particularly among any who doubt that he has a heart at all).

The real benefit of having the text of his prepared statement is that those who will question him will have a point of departure for more productive conversation. I, for one, want to hear someone ask, "The buck now stops at your desk; what are you doing to clean up the mess, even if that mess happens to be inherited?" As we used to say in the Sixties, if Liddy cannot make a clear case that he is part of the solution, then he is just another part of the problem. Perhaps a faint whiff of boiling tar in the Committee Chambers might help inspire him to shift from apologies to productive proposals!

The Brave New World of Accountability

This just in from a Reuters report: Banks are having second thoughts about taking our Government's money if strings of accountability are attached. Here are a few tidbits from that report:

Northern Trust Corp (NTRS.O), which has been faulted for treating clients to concerts and fancy food at a recent golf tournament, will return $1.6 billion it took from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said.

"The public has the right, for us, to be very tough on how recipients of TARP money spend it," Frank said at a briefing with reporters.

Frank also said U.S. Bancorp (USB.N), the eight-largest U.S. bank, will return $6 billion. The bank received $6.6 billion from the fund.

…

A growing number of U.S. banks are finding that participating in the bailout program designed to spur lending is more troubled than it is worth.

Three smaller lenders, TCF Financial Corp (TCB.N), Iberiabank Corp (IBKC.O) and Sussex Bancorp (SBBX.O), have in the last week decided to give back TARP money.

Banks have complained about new rules being imposed on them under the new economic stimulus law.

One new rule can limit pay for a bank's 20 top executives, which banks say would make it harder for them to hire and retain top talent.

Horrors! The age of the blank check from Washington is officially over! Presumably, the recognition that the Government would do something in response to that failure of the banking sector to provide the Government Accountability Office with the data necessary to monitor the bailout money they have received, not to mention the eagerness of the New York Attorney General to prosecute such matters before his state's Supreme Court, has put the fear of Barney Frank (a bit more substantive than God) into the banks. Perhaps we are experiencing changes we can believe in!