The sweet sound of silence as Bolt gunned down

I don't think it is too long a bow to draw between Andrew Bolt eschewing political comment today.....

News Ltd issuing a statement and apologizing across a number of its banner heads.....

Clive Mathieson, editor of The Australian, said in a statement: ”We’re investigating the Prime Minister’s claim of inaccuracies in the story. As the correction points out, we regret that the PM was not given any chance to respond to the allegations. Glenn Milne remains a contributor to The Australian.”

and this yesterday.........

PM a lost cause for warring unions

The Australian - 16 hours ago

THE real import of the alleged brothel creeping scandal surrounding Craig Thomson has been missed. And it is this: key factions and unions within the Labor ...

Milne appears to have drawn on a Bolt blog for some of his 'ínformation'.

North Coast Voices Petering Time  predicted  a rocky road for Bolt in a 25 August post and it seems he was correct.

2011 may well be the year in which this so-called journalist is finally stripped of his Teflon ® coating.

UPDATE:

The disappointment is profound - Bolt promises to be back tomorrow ;-)

UPDATE
Afrer discussions, I now feel free to speak my mind. So I shall. In tomorrow’s column. I apologise for the mysteriousness, but I did not want to act in anger or before matters had been resolved. I had to be fair to my employer and to my readers, and I apologise if you think I’ve had the balance wrong over the past 24 hours.
Thank you to everyone who has rung, emailed or commented on this post, here and on radio.

Liar, liar?

“Thanks for all the support. I believe what happened today is completely unfair .. And I am seeking advice on the matter” tweets CamPriceBris after being sacked for lying about where he was reporting from during ‘live’ television coverage.

According to his now former employer “Cameron Price joined WIN Television in Toowoomba after graduating with a BA of Journalism from the University of Queensland. After a two year stint there, Price joined the Nine Network in 2008”.

I would’ve thought that Queensland Uni would have taught him that indulging in fakery to ginger up the nightly news is just not on.

It's all about E*T*H*I*C*S, Cam.

Pic from The Age story

News footage video here.

How low did Lamo go?

Sometime around 21 May 2010 self-identified hacker Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning began a series of private online conversations. These chats Lamo reported to the FBI , then allegedly sent a full log of these conversations to WIRED and subsequently gave numerous media interviews embellishing his storyline.

Two entries in a three-day transcript from the alleged full log titled Manning’s alleged chat logs diff at CablegateSearch:

(10:23:34 AM) info@adrianlamo.com: I’m a journalist and a minister. You can pick either, and treat this as a confession or an interview (never to be published) & enjoy a modicum of legal protection.
(1:55:10 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: i told you, none of this is for print.

In a much earlier interview on 1 December 2001 Lamo answered the question What is your real name?:

Adrian Lamo. . if you want to be technical, its the Doctor Reverend Adrian A. Lamo, Ph.D . . Doctor of Divinity and minister through the Universal Life Church, the grandma of all diploma mills everywhere. . .i don’t take those seriously, and don’t expect anyone else to, but i put them on my resume and my business cards to make a point of my disdain for the certification and educational process.

Earlier yet in 2003 he allegedly admits to drug abuse.

To date I can find no evidence that he was a bona fide journalist.

This is Salon commentator Glenn Greenwald’s opinion on 14 July 2011:

In sum, the full chat logs -- in particular the parts Wired concealed for over a year -- prove that Adrian Lamo is a serial liar whose claims are inherently unreliable. But Wired's selective editing prevented this from being proven -- served to shield from critical scrutiny the person the BBC accurately described as Poulsen's "long-time associate" -- and thus enabled Lamo to run around for a full year masquerading as a reliable source, making claims that were fabrications and driving much of the reporting about the Manning and WikiLeaks investigations. Enabling false claims to be disseminated to the public on a vital news story -- by withholding plainly relevant information that proves those claims false -- is the opposite of the purpose of journalism, as is needlessly withholding key context to the events one is purporting to describe; yet that's exactly what Wired did here, and continued to do despite growing calls for the release of this information.

The Australian, Rintoul and the truth about recent research into regional mean sea level rise deceleration

Snapshot from Google search index on 23 July 2011

Stuart Rintoul is variously described as a senior journalist and/or author currently working for News Ltd’s The Australian newspaper.

On Friday 22 July 2011 he wrote an front page article loosely based on interview with Phil Watson, from the Coastal Unit in the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water.

As soon as I read the article I began to wonder at the level of misrepresentation by The Australian this article by Rintoul might involve, given the stable from which it sprang.

I went to the quoted peer-reviewed article and found that all was not as The Australian would have us believe and this NSW Government Office of Environment & Heritage letter to the editor bore out my suspicions:

Letter to the Editor - Sea-level rises slowing: tidal records
Media release: 22 July 2011
I refer to today's article titled, Sea-level rises slowing: tidal records.
Your article has misrepresented our Mr Phil Watson's research paper by saying that "global warming is not affecting sea levels". This is untrue and misleading and it is not what Mr Watson told your journalist. Mr Watson’s research looked only at measurements of historical data. It specifically did not consider predicted linkages between sea level rise and global warming predicted by climate models.
Our organisation is committed to open scientific investigation. This important research will help us understand the different contributions of the El Nino-La Nina Southern Oscillation and of climate change to sea level change. The research and underlying data is entirely consistent with the rate of global average sea level rise for the 20th century advised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was of the order of 17 +/- 5 cm.
There is strong national and international evidence that sea levels will increase substantially in this century. The world is warming and this includes the ocean. When water warms, it expands and sea level rises.
Sea level rise is a slow process but it has serious medium and long term impacts. The projections are for a rise of 40 cm by 2050 and 90 cm by 2100 in NSW, and this data is reflected in NSW policies. Our scientists are working with others to increase understanding of what and where the impacts may be, so that we can better plan for and help local communities adapt. If we are prudent now, we can substantially reduce future costs.
Yours sincerely
Mr Simon A Y Smith
Deputy Chief Executive - Environment and Heritage Policy and Programs
Contact: Public Affairs

This is a brief outline taken from Watson’s actual article published in The Journal of Coastal Research:

Is There Evidence Yet of Acceleration in Mean Sea Level Rise around Mainland Australia? by P.J. Watson

There is unequivocal measured evidence of a global average rise in mean sea level during the 20th century on the order of 17 +- 65 cm (IPCC, 2007)
….. Satellite altimeters that have been measuring changes in the world’s ocean water surface since late 1992 with improved global accuracy and reliability have focussed attention on measured global trends that appear to be increasing at rates exceeding 3 mm/y, generally in line with the upper bound projections of global average sea level rise (IPCC, 2007).
It is, however, important to understand that there will be specific localised or regional variations compared with the global average sea level rise projections. In addition to international scientific endeavours, it is imperative to analyse and understand the trends emerging from the longest Australasian tide gauge records to improve the picture of ‘‘regional’’ sea level rise to augment forecasting capabilities.
Very long, continuous records from Fremantle (1897), Auckland (1903), Fort Denison (1914), and Newcastle (1925) have been analysed to investigate whether there is evidence of acceleration in the rise of mean sea level over the longer term at these particular locations…..
The longest continuous Australasian records, Fremantle and Auckland, situated on the western and eastern periphery of the Oceania region, respectively, exhibit remarkably similar trends in the relative 20-year moving average water level time series after 1920. Both time series show a rise in mean sea level of approximately 120 mm between 1920 and 2000 with strong correlation (R2 $ 0.93) to fitted second-order polynomial trend lines that reflect a tendency toward a general slowing in the rise of mean sea level (or deceleration) over time on the order of 0.02–0.04 mm/y2. The Fort Denison water level time series after 1940 similarly reflects a decelerating trend in sea
level rise at a rate of 0.04 mm/y2 based on a strongly correlated fit (R2 5 0.974) to the second-order polynomial function.
This decelerating trend was also evident in the detailed analysis of 25 U.S. tide gauge records longer than 80 years in length (Dean and Houston, pers. comm.) and a general 20th century deceleration, driven predominantly by the negative inflexions around 1960 evident in many global records, are well noted in the literature (Douglas, 1992; Holgate, 2007; Woodworth, 1990; Woodworth, Mene´dez, and Gehrels, pers. comm.).
In considering shorter term recent accelerations, it is evident that there is a high rate of relative sea level rise averaged over the decade centred around 1994. Although average decadal rates of rise in relative ocean water levels are clearly high during the 1990s, they are not remarkable or unusual in the context of the historical record available for each site over the course of the 20th century. Similar conclusions have been drawn by Holgate (2007) in examining global data and by Hannah (2004) examining long-term sea level records for New Zealand. These recent post-1990s short-term accelerations fit within the overall longer term trend of deceleration evident in these long Australasian ocean water level records.
Using a 20-year moving average (10 y either side) water level time series limits the current analysis to the year 2000 (although the year 2000 uses data up to 2010). It is probable that if there is any longer term increase of significance in the rate of sea level rise embedded within the latter portion of the record, as distinct from a cyclical short-term attribute, this may take a further 10 to 20 years to influence the longer term time series.
Further research is required to rationalise the difference between the acceleration trend evident in the global sea level time-series reconstructions and the relatively consistent
deceleration trend evident in the long-term Australasian tide gauge records. These differences are likely to have a significant bearing on the global average and ‘‘regional’’ projections for sea level rise into the future.

One Man's Opinion: News Corporation is sorry.....

Advertisement placed in The Guardian newspaper in Britain and other media
during the week ending 16 July 2011
Click to enlarge

Rupert Murdoch and his sons Lachlan and James in happier days

What is the Murdoch family and the News Corporation media conglomerate it dominates sorry for?
Why, for being caught of course.

Who will the family and corporation blame for the unfolding scandal? Inevitably, everyone and anyone other than members of the Murdoch family.

Is this the end of Rupert Murdoch's political influence?
Only if Britain, the United States and Australia all refuse to support the argument that the international media empire he heads is too big to be allowed to fail.

Who or what will be the losers if Murdoch's political balls aren't removed?
Without a doubt, democratic institutions in every county in which News Corp, its subsidiaries and affiliates, operate.

But News Corp isn't behaving badly in Australia is it?
Oh yes it is. In the absence of world war, widespread civil conflict, country-wide famine or desperate national financial crisis driving a need, the Murdoch press has broadly stated an aim of destroying one minor democratic political party and repeatedly calls for an early election (beginning within days of the 2010 ballot results) with the aim of regime change at federal level.
It deliberately misquotes and misrepresents those public figures or scientists who do not support its skewed views.
It is known to have attempted to charge at least one political party for favourable published comment (Page 1 & Page 2) by its journalists during an election campaign and patently wouldn't recognise its own (or indeed any other) Professional Conduct Policy if it fell over a tattered copy on the footpath.

A bit of background courtesy of The Guardian UK and Granny Herald AUS:
Phone hacking: Murdoch goes on defensive over 'total lies' by MPs
Les Hinton sacrificed, but the worst is yet to come for News Corp
Rebekah Brooks's resignation letter
Phone hacking: Met police put pressure on Guardian over coverage
Phone hacking: Murdoch paid US anti-bribery law lobbyists
Rebekah Brooks's belated resignation intensifies spotlight on James Murdoch
News of the World phone hacking - interactive timeline
Murdoch's strange hunt for a handout

Pics found at Google Images

UPDATE:

Staying true to the lack of ethics displayed by its parent company, News Ltd's Herald Sun published this incitement to murder in a comment section, according to @heraldsunreader:

The three amigos who dragged international jouralism ethics through the lowest of noisome gutters

The two editors and owner of Britain's 168 year-old News of the World online and print newspaper Andy Coulsen (top left)Rebekah Brooks (top right) Rupert Murdoch (centre) in church in 2005 - during a period in which they allegedly oversaw sytematic unlawful hacking of the phones of public figures and ordinary people, as well as alleged suspect payments to police, and who between them managed to close the 168 year-old Sunday tabloid this month as the scandal broadens and more arrests are expected.
If old Sir Keith were still alive even he would probably give his son a right-old bollocking.
Thank heavens Rupert renounced his Australian citizenship - officially he's not our blacksheep now!

http://youtu.be/v1AJjnl2y8U

And then there's young James.......
From Granny Herald on 8th July in "The wrong redtop goes"
"There were a few noble politicians prepared to go where others would not and criticise the News of the World despite the likelihood of offending Britain’s most powerful media companies.
But there are plenty of villains. Andy Coulson, who replaced Brooks as editor and was there when the paper appears to have been its most hack-happy; after resigning twice over the affair, once from the Prime Minister's office, he is reportedly close to being arrested. Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who did much of the hacking and served time in jail for it. The many others who surely knew what was going on, sanctioned it and so far have gone unpunished.
And there is still Rebekah Brooks. As then editor and now chief executive, the buck stops with her. As long she keeps her job, her immediate boss, James Murdoch, is a villain too. Without her departure, he will be the man who sacked scores who had no responsibility, and saved the neck of one who did."

UPDATE:
The Guardian UK Friday 8 July 2011 13.16 BST
Andy Coulson arrested over phone-hacking allegations
"Andy Coulson, the prime minister's former press spokesman, has been arrested and is being held in custody at a police station in south London.
Scotland Yard said that at 10.30am on Friday officers from Operation Weeting – the phone-hacking inquiry – and a team investigating illegal payments to police officers within the Metropolitan force arrested a 43-year-old man who had arrived by appointment.
Scotland Yard said he was being held in custody and would be questioned in connection with allegations of corruption and phone hacking.
The arrest came after Operation Weeting officers were handed further information from News International three weeks ago which detailed allegedly illegal payments to a handful of officers at the Yard.
It is understood Coulson, a former editor of the News of the World, will be held for several hours for questioning. Officers will take him through documentation, much of it handed over by his former employer News International.
He will be questioned on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, contrary to Section 1 (1) Criminal Law Act 1977 and "on suspicion of corruption allegations" contrary to Section 1 of the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906."

Memo to Federal Minister Joe Ludwig: Australian Meat Industry Council and I agree

When I left my local butcher shop yesterday I came home with more than the modest amount of meat I can afford to purchase - I came home with a pamphlet from the Australian Meat Industry Council (AMIC) calling for the immediate suspension of all live cattle exports to Indonesia and that this suspension should not be lifted until there are assurances that animal welfare standards are applies to all live exported Australian cattle.

If all Argriculture Minister Ludwig and the Indonesian Government can offer is a vague hope that live export cattle will be stunned before slaughter, then I concur with the Council's call to ban live export to Indonesia.

Indeed I would go further and say that all live animal export should be permanently banned across the board. This ban to be implemented over a three year period to allow for some export industry adjustment.

The AMIC website states:

The Australian Meat Industry Council (AMIC) is committed to the highest level of animal welfare and the humane treatment of livestock. Our mission is to ensure acceptable animal welfare standards are implemented and effectively verified. AMIC affirms that livestock processing in Australia is conducted in accordance with national laws and international requirements, and enforced accordingly by State, Territory and Commonwealth inspectors to ensure that high standards of animal welfare are maintained at all times. In 2005, AMIC proactively developed and implemented the AMIC ‘Industry Animal Welfare Standards for Livestock Processing Establishments’ which integrate the national Codes of Practice, relevant State and Commonwealth legislation and other commercial requirements. These Standards are verified by Commonwealth and State inspectors and commercial auditors on behalf of customers. The Standards were developed by a national committee, comprising representatives from Government, science, animal welfare organisations, as well as technical experts and representatives from industry. As part of the Standards meat processors are required to ensure personnel are trained and competent when handling livestock. In the last three years over 300 personnel have undertaken the “Animal Welfare Officer Skill Set” course. Approximately 150 new livestock handlers undertake the ‘Livestock Handling’ course each year.

In summary
The Australian Processing Industry
• is committed to the highest level of animal welfare
• operates under strict state and federal animal welfare regulations which are verified by Commonwealth and State inspectors and commercial auditors on behalf of customers.
• has developed and implemented worlds best practice animal welfare standards
• invests in ensuring its employees are trained and competent in animal welfare

Update:

The Sydney Morning Herald 25 June 2011
Excerpt from Meat industry knew of Indonesian cruelty last year
[Please note this article contains video images which may distress the reader]

Meat and Livestock Australia and LiveCorp have repeatedly claimed that both bodies were unaware of the extent of animal welfare problems in Indonesia before the airing of a Four Corners program on May 30.
How much they knew is now the subject of a Senate inquiry.
Yet a report, commissioned by MLA and LiveCorp and handed to the bodies early last year, extensively documents every aspect of the abuse revealed last month.
The report makes repeated references to the shortcomings of the Australian-made restraining boxes, warns about the non-compliance with World Organisation for Animal Health standards, and says only four abattoirs in Indonesia had stun guns.
Most damning are accounts of slaughtering fully conscious animals, which suffered protracted, agonising deaths.
''At an abattoir in Sumatra the neck was struck with a knife using a hard impact to sever the skin above the larynx and then up to 18 cuts were made to severe the neck and both arteries,'' the report says.
''Bleeding was impaired in 10 per cent of cattle … possibly resulting in extended consciousness … In some instances where stunning was not used, the delay between restraint and slaughter was significant.''
On the performance of the restraining box, ''finding better methods of restraint with higher animal welfare outcomes is essential'', the report concludes. The ''mark 2'' box, designed to solve the problems, makes the plight of the animals even worse, the report says, to the point of being ''not acceptable''.
Thrashing, prostrate animals bashed their heads on the box's concrete plinth an average of 3.5 times before death. The report says: ''Where the severity of the fall was severe and head slapping occurred, significant animal welfare issues were identified that should be addressed.''
The halal practice of dousing the thrashing animal with water requires ''revision'', as ''disturbed behaviour … was particularly apparent when buckets of water were thrown over the animal before slaughter''.

Hear Us, Julia!

Talk is cheap and hindsight easy when it comes from Meat & Livestock Australia on June 6 2011:

“I would like to apologise to the Australian livestock industry and the broader community for the hurt and anger caused by the recent footage of horrendous acts of cruelty to our cattle in Indonesia.
“No section of our community was more distressed than those of us whose life’s work is the caring and raising of livestock.
“I can assure you that if this disgusting cruelty had been witnessed by any Australian industry representatives before now, action would have immediately been triggered to bring it to a halt.
“This issue has made it clear that we must only allow our cattle to reach those facilities where we can be absolutely confident they will be handled in line with internationally accepted welfare practices...."

The only animal welfare solution that is guaranteed to be 100% effective is a total ban on live export.
Find out how to stop this live trade here at Ban Live Export.

A Bloody Business video on demand*
* Warning this ABC Four Corners video contains graphic images

When social media goes wrong: Does Glaxo Smith Kline know where their anti-smoking campaign is turning up on Facebook?

We’re encouraging Aussies to Pledge to Quit smoking for World No Tobacco Day on the 31 May. Take our pledge and share it with your friends, maybe we’ll even set an Australian record for Pledge to Quit! states Glaxo Smith Kline’s Nicabate Pledge to Quit team on Facebook.

Unfortunately one of the Facebook accounts which advertises the pledge campaign is Grafton Goss (online since 12 May 2011) which carries what has been described by The Daily Examiner as “vile” gossip.

Snapshot taken 25 May 2011

In fact unsubstantiated allegations made concerning the sexual activity of named young people are so unpleasant and language employed so crudely graphic that I have omitted a direct link.

This webpage will soon come undone as Grafton Goss’ creator is not as anonymous as first appearance suggests.

In the meantime Facebook users can make Zuckerberg live up to his social media site’s undertakings regarding privacy and appropriate content by going to the Help page and following the prompts to report Grafton Goss and its posts.

What can one believe when reading online?

From Science News on 11 May 2011:

Dense networks, on the other hand, such as many social networks, were much easier to control: Influence roughly 20 percent of the nodes and the whole network responds.
“I found that very shocking,” says Magnus Egerstedt, director of the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory at Georgia Tech. “Social networks, which seem to be these random, ad hoc collections of people freely expressing information and sharing their thoughts — those were much easier to control than other networks.”

This finding probably explains why Facebook thought it worthwhile to hire a public relations firm to further its interests by selectively placing 'information' before individuals active on social networks.

In one instance it backfired and this email exchange was promptly posted at PasteBin on 3 May 2011, detailing an alleged Facebook smear campaign against Google:

*************************

From: Christopher Soghoian [mailto:chris@soghoian.net]

Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2011 10:11 AM

To: Mercurio, John

Subject: Re: Op-Ed Opportunity: Google Quietly Launches Sweeping Violation of User Privacy

Who is paying for this? (not paying me, but paying you)

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 10:08 AM, Mercurio, John <John.Mercurio@bm.com> wrote:

Mr. Soghoian,

I wanted to gauge your interest in authoring an op-ed this week for a top-tier media outlet on an important issue that I know you’re following closely.

The topic: Google’s sweeping violations of user privacy. Google, as you know, has a well-known history of infringing on the privacy rights of America’s Internet users. Not a year has gone by since the founding of the company where it has not been the focus of front-page news detailing its zealous approach to gathering information – in many cases private and identifiable information - about online users.

Despite an unprecedented rebuke from the Federal Trade Commission last month forcing Google into a government mandated two-decade privacy review program, Google is at it again – and this time they are not only violating the personal privacy rights of millions of Americans, they are also infringing on the privacy rules and rights of hundreds of companies ranging from Yelp to Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn in what appears to be a first in web history: Google is collecting, storing and mining millions of people’s personal information from a number of different online services and sharing it without the knowledge, consent or control of the people involved.

The Federal Trade Commission made it clear last month that Google had agreed to change its ways, and in so doing, the United States government gave Google an imprimatur of credibility and trust amongst the American people. As FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz stated not four weeks ago: “When companies make privacy pledges, they need to honor them…This is a tough settlement that ensures that Google will honor its commitments to consumers and build strong privacy protections into all of its operations.”

Unfortunately the ink was barely dry on the settlement before Google rolled out its latest tool designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users – in a direct and flagrant violation of its agreement with the FTC.

In light of the recent agreement between the government and Google, Congress and the FTC must immediately investigate this latest violation of online privacy. The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day– without their permission.

I’m happy to help place the op-ed and assist in the drafting, if needed. For media targets, I was thinking about the Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, Roll Call or the Huffington Post.

Please let me know your thoughts. Also, I’m available to discuss this by phone, if you’re available.

Many thanks,

John

LESS THAN ONE MONTH AFTER FTC PRIVACY VIOLATION SETTLEMENT, GOOGLE QUIETLY LAUNCHES SWEEPING VIOLATION OF USER PRIVACY

About Google Social Circles

Recently, Google quietly introduced its latest attempt to enter the social space with a new feature called Google Social Circles. The idea behind the feature is to scrape and mine social sites from around the web to make connections between people that wouldn’t otherwise exists and share that information with people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to it. All of this happens without the knowledge, consent or control of the people whose information is being shared. Here is how Google Social Circles works:

1) Google’s robots scour the web for people’s social connections on different websites. These connections are then stored in a collection people’s connections on different websites. This collection is then mined, creating connections between people on different websites, that those people never intended and can’t control.

2) This information is then shared with anyone who has a Google account, whether it is Gmail, Chat or another Google service that includes a personal profile -- more than 146 million people have Gmail accounts alone, and some estimates say as many as 400 million people have at least one Google account.

3) Google Social Circles automatically enables people to trace their contacts' connections and profile information by crawling and scraping the sites you and your contacts use, like Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Yelp, Yahoo and many others, likely in direct violation of the Terms of Service for those sites, unless those sites have partnered with Google on this “service,” something else users ought to be aware of.

4) Even if you are not a Google account holder, your information is still mined, stored and shared as long as you have some connection on any site Google scrapes to someone who has a Google account. You don’t even have to have a direct connection to the person with a Google account. If someone you are connected to is connected with someone with a Google account, your information will be shared.

5) To find out if your own Social Circles direct and secondary connections that Google has indexed to your account, visit: http://www.google.com/s2/u/0/search/social#socialcircle, and https://profiles.google.com/u/0/connectedaccounts

Privacy Violations

The ability to abuse this information and violate the privacy rights of millions of Americans is clear:

No notice: Google does not notify people that their information is being used in a way that the person would not expect—to connect different groups of people within an Internet-wide database Google created.

No consent: Google Social Circles does not ask “permission” from individuals who will have their profiles, connections and other personal data shared in the new network. Google will simply “scrape” their information from dozens of sources and compile the data into one massive dossier aligned directly with user’s personally identifiable information.

No control: On all of the sites Google scrapes, you can change your mind. You can delete your account. You can make or break connections to other people. How do you remove this information from the database that Google is sharing with hundreds of millions of people? You can’t.

Serious real world risks: Google is taking different parts of people’s lives—parts they deliberately separated onto different sites—and presenting the collage Google created to other people. Reminiscent of Google Buzz, Google’s latest plan totally disregards the intimate and potentially damaging details that could be revealed, including sexual orientation, political affiliation, personal connections, etc…

Steals from other sites: Dozens of private companies will have their own privacy rules and regulations violated by the Google information fishing intrusion.

Disregards FTC agreement: Despite the clear direction from the FTC to the contrary, Google has again created a program without a clear path for users to “opt out”.

References

· FTC Statement on Google Settlement

http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2011/03/google.shtm

· Google Shows Off How Well It Knows Your Social Circle

Switched.com (HuffingtonPost Tech)

http://www.switched.com/2010/08/09/google-shows-off-how-well-it-knows-your-social-circle/

· “Do you feel like big brother is watching you now?”

About.com

http://marketing.about.com/b/2011/03/31/google-wants-you-to-1.htm

· Google’s Social Circle & Social Search May Not Violate Any Privacy Laws But It Gives Me The Creeps

LibrarianByDay.com

http://librarianbyday.net/2010/03/30/googles-social-circle-social-search-may-not-violate-any-privacy-laws-but-it-gives-me-the-creeps/

*************************

Mercurio, John <John.Mercurio@bm.com>

to Christopher Soghoian <chris@soghoian.net>

date Tue, May 3, 2011 at 10:38 AM

subject RE: Op-Ed Opportunity: Google Quietly Launches Sweeping Violation of User Privacy

mailed-by bm.com

Thanks for the prompt reply. I’m afraid I can’t disclose my client yet. But all the information included in this email is publicly available. Any interest in pursuing this?

*************************

David Penberthy stands reality on its head in an effort to avoid a rap over the knuckles from the Press Council

This was David Penberthy on 1 April 2011 in Penberthy: Waking up from the Green dream:

Screen snapshot

To the enduring disgust of the Labor Party, the Greens chose to direct preferences to the One Nation founder ahead of the ALP, and she may now creep into the Upper House courtesy of their support.

This is David Penberthy on 4 April 2011 in Sorry Greens, we’re not apologising:

Screen snapshot

The Greens are taking The Punch to the Press Council over my column of last Friday accusing them of pushing Pauline Hanson ahead of the ALP by refusing a preference swap with Labor at last weekend’s NSW election.

The story has definitely changed - from preference being officially identified by The Greens to no preferences being identified. This journalist obviously thinks that readers are fools with little short-term and no long-term memory.

The Punch should be ashamed of allowing this cowardly wriggle to be published online. Definitely not Australia’s best conversation by any definition of that term.

Over 100,000 Twitter users were psychologically assessed - without their knowledge or consent?

Social networks tend to disproportionally favor connections between individuals with either similar ordissimilar characteristics. This propensity, referred to as assortative mixing or homophily, is expressed asthe correlation between attribute values of nearest neighbour vertices in a graph. Recent results indicate thatbeyond demographic features such as age, sex and race, even psychological states such as “loneliness” canbe assortative in a social network. In spite of the increasing societal importance of online social networksit is unknown whether assortative mixing of psychological states takes place in situations where social tiesare mediated solely by online networking services in the absence of physical contact. Here, we show thatgeneral happiness or Subjective Well-Being (SWB) of Twitter users, as measured from a 6 month record oftheir individual tweets, is indeed assortative across the Twitter social network. To our knowledge this is thefirst result that shows assortative mixing in online networks at the level of SWB. Our results imply that onlinesocial networks may be equally subject to the social mechanisms that cause assortative mixing in real socialnetworks and that such assortative mixing takes place at the level of SWB. Given the increasing prevalenceof online social networks, their propensity to connect users with similar levels of SWB may be an importantinstrument in better understanding how both positive and negative sentiments spread through online social ties.Future research may focus on how event-specific mood states can propagate and influence user behavior in“real life”…….We collected a large set of Tweets submitted to Twitter in the period from November 28, 2008 to May 2009.The data set consisted of 129 million tweets submitted by several million Twitter users. Each Tweet contained aunique identifier, date-time of submission (GMT+0), submission type, and textual content, among other information…We complemented this cross-section sample of twitter activity by retrieving the complete history of over 4 millionusers, as well as the identity of all of their followers. The final Twitter Follower network contained 4,844,430users (including followers of our users for which we did not collect timeline information). Armed with the socialconnections and activity of these users we were able to measure the way in which the emotional content of eachusers varied in time and how it spread across links. [Happiness is assortative in online social networks,Johan Bollen, Bruno Gonçalves, Guangchen Ruan, & Huina Mao,March 2011]

The 4,844,430 users (whose tweets were scanned in 2008 for the aforementioned study) would work out at about eighty per cent of the estimated 6 million Twitter accounts in existence during that year. Although only those who posted at least one tweet daily over a six month period were retained in the study, which ended up formally assessing 102,009 users.

One of those harvested appears to be a co-founder of ISP/telco Sonic.net who happens to be ‘followed’ by Barack Obama.
The wife of a co-founder of SDMOMfia.com was caught up in the tweet trawl and she is also followed by the U.S. President.
Obama was found again following a PR person from the Detroit area whose name cropped up in connection with the study.
One male who has no public Twitter bio is yet another who is identified by this study. He links back to Obama through an account the President follows.
However, it is highly unlikely that Barack Obama’s official tweets were assessed for Subjective Well-Being aka general happiness as he didn’t tweet daily.
There are a number of other tweeters mentioned in the study who can be easily identified by the general public or by their own followers.

What on earth was Indiana University's School of Informatics and Computing thinking in allowing any persons used in this study to be identified either directly within the text or in presentations undertaken later by one of the authors (and in one instance assigned an emotional state)? Did no-one realise the power of Twitter and Google to disclose identities to the idly curious?

These tweets may be in the public domain, but surely there are limits to the uses to which others may put them.

Boltas of the Month

Clever clogs pseudo-journalist Andrew Bolt baldly said on ABC TV’s “Insiders” program last Sunday that there were between 400-500 people at the anti-carbon tax rally and 800 at the pro-carbon price rally held last Saturday.
On his own blog post on Saturday night he seems to agree with the higher pro-price rally figure of more than 8,000 reported in the MSM and in Sunday update apologizes for his so-called misremembering on the aired program.
Not good enough Bolta! Even you had seen the 12^th March pics by the time you settled your backside into that studio chair early the next day and it's hard to avoid the tag great big fib to get the last word in an argument.

Teh Four Hundred going its hapless 'half a league onwards'

Teh Eight Thousand filling the wide lens and then some

Wait. There's more.......
On the very same day Bolt was playing fast and loose with rally numbers he also had a go at Grog's Gamut in his Daily Tele post "Exit, laughing".
To which Grog replied:
"But here’s the thing, while I can understand Bolt wanting to label me as a public servant, and also a third generation one, and also a third generation Canberran one (laziest of the lot they are!) there’s just one slight problem:
It is not true.
You see the statement that I am a third-generation Canberra public servant is an untruth, a falsehood, a fiction, a furphy. In short, a lie."
So within a space of hours Teh Bolta is on record as fibbing about rallies, Chenobyl and a public servant.
Here's laughing at you, Andrew.

An interesting dilemma for one local newspaper

One of the persistent news items recently in a local newspaper has been the question of Wooli village and the potential effects of ongoing beach/land erosion.

What is interesting about this coverage is the fact that at least one senior staff member is reputed to own property there and, at the time of writing this post, one journalist (currently on leave) is listed as part of the 10 member media team on the Save Wooli website.

Readers could rightly suspect the motives of any published article on the subject which does not carry a byline and, when appropriate, a declaration of interest.

Your personal privacy and Australian politicians' get-out-of-gaol-free card

It is well-known that browsing the Internet often brings down unwelcome types of cookies onto a personal computer. However, one does not always think of this possibility when clicking onto politicians’ websites.

The Sydney Morning Herald reminds us:

Politicians are letting foreign-owned companies covertly gather information about voters.

The websites of Barry O'Farrell, Kristina Keneally, Tony Abbott and the Greens plant spying devices on visitors' computers, which can track them as they browse the internet.

Information gathered about a user's online behaviour can be used to build detailed profiles to help target advertisements - a practice many believe is a threat to privacy.

Online tracking is done mainly by cookies (text files) and beacons (invisible images)…….

The devices allow a third-party company to see which elements of a page the user has clicked on, potentially identifying information held in the URL, such as an email address.

A tracking device, owned by Yahoo! and dated to expire in 2037, was planted on this website's test computer when visiting the website of the federal Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.

The site of the Premier, Kristina Keneally, placed devices owned by ShareThis, a company that collects information about online habits.

All four websites planted YouTube cookies, even though this website's computer did not play any videos.”……

The websites of Ms Keneally, Mr Abbott and the Greens also planted flash cookies which can hold more data than standard cookies. They also have no expiration date and are stored on an external server, which makes them difficult for users to detect or delete…….

The Australian Privacy Commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim, said aggregated data might enable identification of individuals.

Now at the time of writing the stated privacy policies of Tony Abbott, Kristina Keneally and Barry O’Farrell did not spell out the extent of information gathering they were allowing on their websites.

Perhaps it’s time they did – even if a loophole in the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988 apparently allows the collection and compilation of digital and tracking data on the grounds that Members of Parliament, local government councillors and their respective contractors and sub-contractors (as well as political party volunteers) are exempt from this act’s provisions when participating in the political process.

Privacy protection is obviously a one-way street in this country and internet users are playing in the path of oncoming traffic.

FSANZ and the Food Labelling Law & Policy Review: intending to keep consumers ignorant for international biotech companies' benefit?

Hat tip to MADGE for pointing out the fact that the Food Labelling Law & Policy Review March 2010 Issues Consultation Paper seems to suggest that it would be acceptable for the general public and individual consumers/shoppers to be deliberately kept in the dark concerning certain food ingredients and/or preparation processes:

3.16 Certain technological developments in food production – genetic modification (GM), irradiation and nano-technology – have raised consumer concerns relating to these technologies that have led to calls for disclosure on food labelling. However, caution needs to be exercised in order that the development and application of these and other innovative technologies are not unduly inhibited.

If you have any concerns about this attitude now is the time to raise your voice.

Review of Food Labelling Law and Policy website with online submission page. Submissions closing date is 14 May 2010.
A public consultation is scheduled for Sydney on 29 March and one can register here.

Political evolution NSW-style

I don't think anyone has missed the metamorphosis undergone in the media recently by one murder victim - from wealthy "property developer" to "loan shark and standover man" and worse.
But how many people have noticed that the person or persons allegedly named on that rumoured tape recording have now gone from the very vague "persons connected to NSW Labor" or somewhat vague "state government MPs" to the more specific "senior NSW politicians" or "NSW ministers"?
By yesterday the chatter mill had developed belt and braces, with bribed "senior NSW bureaucrat", "federal Labor politicians" and "police officer" thrown into the mix for good measure.
Seemingly without any print, radio or television journalists (or the NSW Opposition for that matter) having ever listened to this audio tape.
And I thought the local bowlo was good at gossip - the Aussie meeja leaves it for dead! One gossipy whiff and they're off like a Bondi tram.
Given the collective histories and conflicting stories of those non-journalists who have actually said that they heard the tape or knew details of the alleged recorded conversation; is it any wonder that I keep hearing the words 'hysterical beat-up' echoing in my head?

A word about bureaucratic corruption in 2009

Next week Brisbane is hosting the Australian Public Sector Anti-Corruption Conference 2009 over four days from 28 July to 31 July.

It is held in Australia every two years, and is a joint initiative of the Crime and Misconduct Commission (QLD), the Independent Commission Against Corruption (NSW), and the Corruption and Crime Commission (WA).

This is a significant opportunity for Australian and international public officials to learn about contemporary anti-corruption trends and strategies, and to network with senior representatives of leading Australian public sector agencies. This year's conference will also be of particular interest to health administrators, tertiary institutions and agencies providing services in remote locations, with sessions focussing on each of these areas.

Given the vastly enlarged data bases that the Rudd Government is envisioning as vital for the so-called digital information age, one has to hope that some senior public servants attend this conference on behalf of the Federal Minister for Medical ID Cards in 2010, Chris Bowen and the Minister for Let's Revive Howard Government Lame Ideas, Nicola Roxon.

Let us also hope that local government bureaucracy receives more than just a mention in the last day's hijinks:

The conference will conclude with Kerry O'Brien hosting an entertaining and informative hypothetical with an anti-corruption bent exploring the topic 'Queensland — beautiful one day and desperate for the developer dollar the next!'

Oops! Where did that soldier come from? Another reminder that News Ltd is not quite the bastion of journalistic integrity it likes to proclaim it is.

In the wake of News Ltd CEO John Hartigan's attack on blogs and praise of newspapers, a number of bloggers have pointed out that newspapers from this stable are not renown for factual reporting of late if one remembers the Steve Lewis-sanctioned 'scoop' report on that government email (quickly proven to be faked) and publication of those equally fake revealing photographs of a certain political candidate.

Here is another little gem to add to the list. The Herald-Sun getting rapped over the knuckles by the Australian Press Council for doctoring a photograph - Adjudication No. 1420 (May 2009).

Newspaper porkies for sale in the Clarence Valley

Oh dear, The Daily Examiner editor is at it once more.

On Tuesday 30 June 2009 he proclaimed he never did it - yet again.

Forgetting established chronology (the first published article appeared on 11 June and the first letter some four or five days later) he blames the Grafton-based APN newspaper's readers.

Unfortunately for Peter Chapman his previous words and those of the newspaper's journalists live on and show the heavy-handed, hearsay-ridden attempt to link crime, Beachside, Ngaru Village and "men of aboriginal appearance" as well as "Young people running around the streets staging break and enters and smashing property".

Here are two of those The Daily Examiner articles from 11 June and 12 June 2009:

Click on images to enlarge