Very interesting Abib titbits......

This has not been Australian Senator Mark Arbib's week for positive media coverage. Abib is the current duty senator for the NSW North Coast seat of Lyne, which must - ahem - reassure the sitting federal member and his electorate.

• In recent months there have been media reports that Senator Arbib has been undermining Ms Gillard but Labor insiders deny this.
  
  
• Secret US embassy cables obtained by WikiLeaks and made available exclusively to The Age reveal that Senator Arbib, one of the architects of Kevin Rudd's removal as prime minister, has been in regular contact with US embassy officers.
  His candid comments have been incorporated into reports to Washington with repeated requests that his identity as a ''protected'' source be guarded.

• Mark Arbib: otherwise known as CIA Agent 007.
  Visitors to the senator's Wikipedia page this morning may have been surprised to learn his role as Minister for Social Housing and Homelessness, among other portfolios, had been usurped by some decidedly more colourful titles.
  CIA agent, US Mole, Traitor, and US Embassy Hero were listed below the right-wing Labor powerbroker's photograph on the popular online encyclopedia following revelations by WikiLeaks today that Mr Arbib was as a confidential contact of the United States embassy in Canberra.
  
  Which leads one to wonder - did then U.S. Ambassador to Australia Robert McCallum, who had such a negative opinion of the Australian prime minister in office, encourage Arbib to consider deposing Rudd?

TwitDef: Getting close to checkmate?

TwitDef continues in the Land of Oz and Mitchell appears to have lost his queen and be close to having his king in mate........

From Posetti’s legal rep to Mitchell’s legal rep on 9^th December 2010:

“We are instructed to act for Ms Julie Posetti in relation to the matters raised by your client, Mr Chris Mitchell, in your letter dated 29 November 2010 sent to our client on 1 December 2010.

Our client denies Mr Mitchell's assertion that she has defamed him.

The Twitter posts by our client about which your client complains were a fair and accurate summary of matters stated by Ms Wahlquist at the Journalism Education Association Conference on 25 November 2010. Whether or not the matters stated by Ms Wahlquist were right or wrong, they were matters that nevertheless related to a matter of public interest, namely, the conduct of journalism and the editorial policy of a major national newspaper in relation to climate change, being in itself a significant question of public interest, especially in the lead up to a Federal election. Our client in her Twitter posts gave a fair summary of the matters stated by Ms Wahlquist and clearly held out those posts as being reports of statements attributed to Ms Wahlquist and not our client's own views.

Your letter does not attempt to suggest that the Twitter posts were not a fair summary of what Ms Wahlquist said and, indeed, your client acknowledges that his initial conclusion that the posts did not reflect Ms Wahlquist's statements was a conclusion that he was misled into adopting. We note also that, while we appreciate that what is published in The Australian (of which your client serves as editor in chief) may not necessarily always reflect your client's own personal views and is not determinative of the position, it is nevertheless somewhat telling that the "Media diary" article titled “The Posetti tapes” appearing in the online version of The Australian on 30 November 2010 suggested that the "Tweets are a fair summary of what Wahlquist said".

As a fair report of proceedings of public concern (in particular, proceedings of a public meeting held in Australia related to a matter of public interest - see section 29(4)(l) of the Defamation Act 2005 (NSW) and its equivalents in other states), our client is entitled to the defence available under section 29(1) of the Defamation Act.

For similar reasons, our client is likely also entitled to a defence of common law qualified privilege.”

Copy of entire Posetti 9 December letter here in PDF

Copy of Mitchell 29 November letter here in PDF

Jonathan Holmes on the subject of TwitDef

Good news for the frail aged and carers in the NSW Northern Rivers region

Federal Member for Page Janelle Saffin’s media release on 9 December 2010 brings some good news for older residents in the Northern Rivers region and their families :

Older people in Page will benefit from a total of 80 new aged care places allocated across the electorate by the Australian Government.

Page MP Janelle Saffin said the new places allocated under the Aged Care Approvals Round for 2009-10 include 39 residential care places and 41 community packages for care in the home.

“The new allocations reflect the need for varied types of aged care in our local community.

“While there is a growing demand for residential places, there are also many people who prefer to remain in their own homes.

“The allocations are for 32 high care residential places, 7 low care residential places, and 41 community aged care packages,” Ms Saffin said.

Local providers receiving the new allocations:

Baptist Community Services Northern Rivers: 5 Community Aged Care Packages

Ex-Services Home Ballina; 32 Residential Places High Care

Southern Cross, St Catherine’s Villa, Grafton: 2 Residential Places Low Care

St Michael’s Apartments, Casino 5 Residential Places Low Care

Frank Whiddon Homes Grafton 13 Community Aged Care Packages

Frank Whiddon Homes Kyogle 13 Community Aged Care Packages

Uniting Care Yamba 10 Community Aged Care Packages

The Aged Care Approvals Round for 2009-10 for Page is worth an estimated $2.34 million.

In addition, the Australian Government will provide the aged care sector nationally with $147 million in zero interest loans to build 819 places, along with more than $41.6 million in capital grants.

One perspective on the Great Information War of 2010

From The Human Network in The Blueprint post on 5 December 2010:

A few months ago I wrote about how confused I was by Julian Assange’s actions. Why would anyone taking on the state so directly become such a public figure? It made no sense to me. Now I see the plan. And it’s awesome.

You see, this is the first time anything like Wikileaks has been attempted. Yes, there have been leaks prior to this, but never before have hyperdistribution and cryptoanarchism come to the service of the whistleblower. This is a new thing, and as well thought out as Wikileaks might be, it isn’t perfect. How could it be? It’s untried, and untested. Or was. Now that contact with the enemy has been made – the state with all its powers – it has become clear where Wikileaks has been found wanting. Wikileaks needs a distributed network of servers that are too broad and too diffuse to be attacked. Wikileaks needs an alternative to the Domain Name Service. And Wikileaks needs a funding mechanism which can not be choked off by the actions of any other actor.

We’ve been here before. This is 1999, the company is Napster, and the angry party is the recording industry. It took them a while to strangle the beast, but they did finally manage to choke all the life out of it – for all the good it did them. Within days after the death of Napster, Gnutella came around, and righted all the wrongs of Napster: decentralized where Napster was centralized; pervasive and increasingly invisible. Gnutella created the ‘darknet’ for filesharing which has permanently crippled the recording and film industries. The failure of Napster was the blueprint for Gnutella.

In exactly the same way – note for note – the failures of Wikileaks provide the blueprint for the systems which will follow it, and which will permanently leave the state and its actors neutered. Assange must know this – a teenage hacker would understand the lesson of Napster. Assange knows that someone had to get out in front and fail, before others could come along and succeed. We’re learning now, and to learn means to try and fail and try again.