Five years into President Bush's global war on terror, the management consultants advising al-Qaida deliver their latest report

Amnesty International is seeking to broaden its humanitarian ambitions. Maryann Bird reports from the launch of its 2006 report in openDemocracy.

OpenDemocracy's Paul Rogers makes the case that the United States military is preparing for the "long war" by shifting its tactics and expanding its ambitions.

this tactical reorientation and the rapid evolution and newfound freedom of action of special-operations forces act as warning-signals of the manner in which the global war on terror – rebranded as the long war – will be fought.

They indicate a likelihood of a number of small, "dirty" wars fought in a range of countries where US security is considered to be affected, combined with larger-scale actions using the overwhelming firepower advantage held by US forces. The experience of the past four years – including the problems the United States faces in Afghanistan, Iraq and with the al-Qaida movement – suggests that the probable result is increasingly embittered opposition to the US and intensified conflict rather than security and settlement.

Its interesting that this mode of warfighting was developed in the early 90s. Take this RAND document, for example:

The information revolution is leading to the rise of network forms of organization, with unusual implications for how societies are organized and conflicts are conducted. "Netwar" is an emerging consequence. The term refers to societal conflict and crime, short of war, in which the antagonists are organized more as sprawling "leaderless" networks than as tight-knit hierarchies. . . . traditional notions of war and low-intensity conflict as a sequential process based on massing, maneuvering, and fighting will likely prove inadequate to cope with nonlinear, swarm-like, information-age conflicts in which societal and military elements are closely intermingled.

openDemocracy: The mass protest in Nepal against the royal dictatorship looks unstoppable – but making democracy will be hard, reports Maya G Kumar Anuj Mishra traces the bitter roots of a grassroots revolution in A breaking wave of democracy. "I want to be back on the streets, to be part of this history-making tide." Prominent Nepali editor Kanak Mani Dixit writes from a Kathmandu detention centre, & detained Nepali civil-society representatives pen an open letter to foreign ambassadors.

The pundits who embrace or reject globalisation too often live in an eternal present and ignore the lessons of the phenomenon’s deep past, says Alex MacGillivray in openDemocracy.

The amnesiac approach is particularly marked in relation to globalisation, where breathless noting of the latest awesome statistic can replace a search for the historical context and meaning that can alone make sense of it.

If this is true of news journalism, it is less so of the background analysis of experts like Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) and John Ralston Saul (The Collapse of Globalism). The publication of these two books at the moment I was finalising my own book on the subject (A Brief History of Globalization) may be healthy evidence that the balance of understanding is shifting.

Steven Mufson writes in the Wasington Post about the myopia of internet evangelists, a phrase coined by James Mulvenon

to describe those who cling to the belief that the Internet "leads to 'tulip' and 'orange' and every other possible color and flower of revolutions around the world."

Take China, for example. Sure, China is being gradually transformed by the Internet, although not in the way many the majority of observers would have predicted -

The Chinese Communist Party, long expected to be a victim of economic modernization and the transformative powers of technology, has instead been learning how to use those powers to its own ends. This isn'merely a matter of the widely publicized blocking of the Internet; the CCP has been learning how to use the Internet as a tool for surveillance.

In an interview with de Groene Amsterdammer's Richard de Boer [129(47) van 25 november 2005, pp.20-23.] I expressed frustration that media coverage of China's Internet experience focuses on state censorship (when it isn't breathless over the potential of 1 billion consumers logging on) at the expense of analysis of dataveillance:

"Westerse ngo's moeten begrijpen welke rol de staatssurveillance speelt in de onderdrukking van afwijkende meningen", zegt freelance onderzoeksconsultant Greg Walton: "De aan obsessie grenzende nadruk in het Westen op de Chinese internetcensuur leidt de aandacht af van complexere vraagstukken."

meanwhile China is itself transforming the Internet. China, the U.S., everyone is co-evolving within this framework. As I said in 2001,

The self-interested high-tech discourse promises that new information and telecommunication technologies are inherently democratic and will foster openness wherever they are used. China’s Golden Shield...debunks this myth. Technology is embedded in a social context and, in this report, it has been shown to bolster repression in a one-party state in the name of expanding markets and exponential profits.

U.S. corporate capitalism in the service of the security apparatus of Chinese communism ... baffled?!

Christopher R Hughes (reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE) in oD on China's “socialist spiritual civilisation”:

The overall result is a peculiar globalisation of nationalism that allows some sense to be made of oxymoronic concepts like the “socialist market economy”. It also provides an ideological justification for the emergence of an elitist techno-nationalism appropriate for the current generation of leaders. This was systematically formulated as party orthodoxy when the theory of the “Three Represents” – coined by then-CCP general secretary Jiang Zemim – was put alongside Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory as an element of the party line at the Sixteenth Party Congress in November 2002. The Resurgence of Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era

How can China's security apparatus keep track of people in a country as vast as China?

By using much the same methods that the United States uses to track terrorist cells. Although the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program has attracted a lot of attention here, in China listening-in is an old habit. It's the way the NSA most likely identified the thousands of people it chose to listen in on -- through a program called Novel Intelligence from Massive Data -- that is the source of real hope for China's communist mandarins.

Can you still draw a line between China and U.S. agencies applying data mining to social control? MSNBC:

Holding the line at privacy invasions that “makes sense” is the most subtle of standards, a fine line that police, governments, and citizens will now try to walk in the post Sept. 11 world. Libertarian cries of absolute privacy sound empty these days, with the knowledge that Khalid al-Midhar and other plane hijackers exploited America’s lax security measures. At the same time, what’s to keep overzealous investigators from using the Anti-terrorism Act to create America’s version of Golden Shield? Sullivan, the techno-savvy police investigator, says the Supreme Court will play the crucial role in picking through those issues.

“The crux of the difference (between the U.S. and China) is the Supreme Court,” said Sullivan. “Ultimately they will decide what’s Constitutional and what’s not. We have the ability as U.S. citizens to cry foul. In China, citizens do not.”

WorldVoteNow & Aidworld are researching the infrastucture for a Global Human Referendum. They want to connect with individuals, groups, schools, institutions, organizations, administrations, countries and companies in every part of the world. They are especially interested in working with collaborators who want to participate in the GLOBAL E-VOTING SIMULATION. All that is required is a functioning internet connection and the desire to participate in the field test on May 15, 2006. To get involved with the World Vote Field Test, please contact the coordinating office in Madrid.

There has been a debate about the Chinese translation for "CC" -- now it's formally "zhishi gongxiang". China, welcome to the Creative Commons.

I got hold of a copy of People Power and Protest since 1945 last week. Really recomend this compendium. Writing in openDemocracy, Prof. Paul Rogers describes what

could well be one of the most significant books to be published in this decade. It reviews over 900 sources of information on non-violent social change, covering a huge range of movements across the world and bringing together a wealth of experience that will be an eye-opener for many people.

Michael Geist's weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, BBC version, homepage version) looks back at last week's announcement of changes to the Chinese domain name system. While Chinese officials have clarified that this does not involve an alternate root, Geist argues that the developments are significant since they reinforce the mounting frustration with ICANN's failure to develop multilingual domain names. Moreover, China's ability to implement its own IDN system without ICANN support is likely to serve as a model for many other countries around the world.

The UN is building a new platform for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue, The Internet Governance Forum (IGF). The mandate of the IGF is set out in Paragraph 72 of the Tunis Agenda. Mr. Nitin Desai, the Secretary-General's Special Advisor for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held consultations on the convening of the IGF in Geneva on 16-17 February. In advance of the event, the Internet Governance Project released a new discussion paper explaining how the Forum could work. The paper proposes three design criteria for the Forum:

1) It must be as open as possible and give all stakeholders equal participation rights;
2) its deliberations must be wide-ranging and resist politically motivated barriers to discussion; and
3) its products must feed into other, more authoritative Internet governance forums. We proposed a structure and process for the realization of these objectives. We also set out three policy problems that exemplify the kind of issues the Forum should take up: spam, Internet free expression, and public policy principles for the coordination of Internet resources.

The IGP summed up the consultations on the convening of the IGF in Geneva on 16-17 February:

At the conclusion of the meeting, Desai summarized the results as follows:
* A date for the first IGF will be announced in a few days.
* The Forum will have open participation.
* The first IGF meeting in Athens will take 4 days
* There will be a plenary and space for smaller meetings.
* Participants were asked to fix their ideas on three major themes and transmit them
to the Secretariat by March 31.
* It will be a UN process and thus will need a host country agreement
* There was no consensus on a management structure, or even on what to call
the representative decision making body. Desai did, however, rule out separate bureaus.
He asked participants (especially governments) to consider this issue and respond by
Feb. 28. Once the UN process constitutes it, they will solicit names from the various
stakeholders and that will take several weeks.
* In a victory for the civil society advocates, Desai concluded that the text of the
WSIS Agenda doesn't rule out any topic. What the Forum discusses, he said, is
just a matter of priorities.
...
All in all, the outlines of the new Forum are still hard to discern, but in those areas
where consensus was reached the results were not bad. IGP encourages civil society
actors to submit preferred "themes" such as human rights, freedom of expression
and privacy, as few governmental or business entities are interested in those topics.
Submissions should be sent to wgig@unog.ch.

In another article Milton Mueller [academic, lead voice of the Internet Governance Project] goes on to say: "I think it went pretty well. But we do believe the forum should integrate online collaboration into the process in a more radical way than people here can even understand." ®:

With the programme decided, the most controversial aspect of the forum will be the extent and depth of online collaboration between parties.

There was broad agreement that an Internet Governance Forum should have an online equivalent. However, many governments are hoping to keep the level of collaboration down to mere preparation for the annual meeting, while business, academic and civil society all want internet technology to be used to help build consensus, find and discuss issues, and effectively become the IGF.

Already there have been several offers to build and host online tools - one of the most comprehensive from a collaboration between Harvard and Stanford universities going under the name Geneva Net Dialogue. One of the key staff on the IGF's secretariat, Chengetai Masango, is also very knowledgeable about online collaboration tools.

However, governments are still uncomfortable with online interaction and are keen to limit its influence on the process.

Civiblog Central- Is there a possibility of an alternate internet source? Apparently yes.

Milton Mueller in Icannwatch:

This is being widely described as an "alternate root." Technically, this is true: it functions the same way as an alternate root. But in reality it is something more interesting (and dangerous?): it is a national root, a way of keeping the Internet bounded to a political jurisdiction so that it can be regulated more easily. China is not attempting to replace ICANN's root globally. It is not interested in adding TLDs for markets and users outside of China. It is interested in locking Chinese-speaking users within China into a DNS root under its own control.

openDemocracy hosted an evening of debate at the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research,

China ruthlessly represses free speech online, and has developed the most
sophisticated Internet censorship practise in the world. What does this mean for
100 million Chinese Web surfers, and for the international technology companies
who court their custom? Can the West really persuade China to open up to the
World Wide Web, or will China teach the world how to lock down the Internet,
and its promise of global freedom of speech?

Speakers included, Isabel Hilton China expert and editor, openDemocracy.net, Kenneth Cukier, Technology and public policy correspondent, The Economist, Bill Thompson, Freelance writer and commentator, and Becky Hogge, Technology editor, openDemocracy.net

In a seperate article published today Isabel Hilton sums up the dilemna China's censors face Beijing's media chill

This series of incidents presents a sharp question for China's censors: what is the greater danger for China, to allow official corruption and abuse to continue unchecked, or to allow a free press to investigate such abuses? The current government in Beijing appears to have decided that the price of holding on to power is increased repression. The warnings that are now coming from inside as well as outside China say this policy is dangerously self-defeating.

The promise of e-government is a transparent, accessible, efficient state in a new partnership with its citizens. But, asks Giovanni Navarria, could it be the model of an invisible model of political control?

To comprehend this new environment of invisible power, George Orwell's Big Brother allegory is inadequate, as it rests upon the notion of the visibility of the control mechanism. A far better guide is Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality.
...
Citizens are learning to comply with the requests and the soft-diktats of the new environment, and – in the name of protection or in search of a better quality of life – giving up their right to privacy by allowing government to collect and retain data about every aspect of their lives. From their experience as consumers, they regard this as perfectly normal. As subjects always connected to the system, they become permanently surveyable and controllable: indeed, they become data shared on a computer's database that is always easily accessible and retrievable. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, their position and identity is always known.

....

The Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio, in his classical study The Future of Democracy, addresses the risks hidden beneath the surface of what he called a "computerocracy". "(The) ideal of the powerful has always been to see every gesture and to listen to every word of their subjects (if possible without being seen or heard)", Bobbio wrote; but nowadays, in the information age, the ideal is realised. Bobbio went on to argue that the old question running through the history of political thought ("who guards the guards?") can now be reformulated ("who controls the controllers?"). "(If) no adequate answer can be found to this question, democracy in the sense of visible government is lost."

It is far from my intention to advocate a romantic return to a pre-technological age in government's activities. That, in my view, is neither possible nor desirable. Yet, given the present and strong convergence between government and technological means of control, more than ever we should – at least – try not to forget Bobbio's warning.

The latest stage of Google's move into China has proved controversial, but Bill Thompson believes it has made the right decision

But if we in the West, with our liberal political culture and our attempts to build open societies, do not engage with China then we lose the opportunity to influence them and convince them of the benefits that this brings. If the Chinese government fears instability then we should offer help and advice and support, not closed borders and locked doors. Different circumstances require different responses, and just because sanctions were the right way to put pressure on apartheid South Africa does not mean that a technology blockade is the way to influence China. Constructive engagement in a way that respects but also challenges local law seems a far better option, and that, for all its risks, is what Google is attempting to do. They may make some money out of it, but that's fine, because they may also show the Chinese leadership that openness can bring benefits as well as pose threats.

Google's announcement this morning that it has launched a Chinese version (Google.cn) of its hugely successful search engine may seem like no more than a footnote in the fast-moving history of the internet, writes The Guardian in today's leader. Backlash as Google shores up great firewall of China reports Johnathan Watts in Jinan. The world's favourite search engine admits inconsistency with its corporate ethics. Meanwhile, Google remains at loggerheads with US justice department says Julian Borger in Washington.

On the flight from Paris I read an International Herald Tribune article by Nicolai Ouroussoff (As Israeli barrier goes up, views harden on all sides). The article focuses on Eyal Weizman's critique of the concrete barrier that is encircling Palestinian terriroty:

on a fundamental level, it is also a piece of architecture. And its construction has generated an architectural debate as charged as any in the political realm.

That debate has pitted strategists who mine the leftist architectural theories of the 1960s for ideas on contemporary urban warfare against architects who see the barrier as a perversion of those ideas, along with the utopian visions of Modernists who believed society's problems could be solved with concrete, glass and steel. It is not only unfolding in the halls of academia but in Israeli and American military circles. And it presents a vision of the wall as a system of complex, interweaving spaces - some concrete, some invisible - that is far from our normal perception of an international border.

At the center of this debate is Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect and activist who has been a controversial figure in his homeland since 2002, when he published a report for a local human rights organization that essentially accused Israeli architects of being collaborators in colonizing the West Bank.

Building is never a neutral act, of course, and Weizman, 35, makes no distinctions between architecture and politics.

I first understood Eyal Weizman’s extraordinary cartography of Israeli control over the West Bank through a series of essays in openDemocracy and it really allowed me to see the Israel-Palestine conflict in a new way. What is rather interesting is that IDF's Operational Theory Research Institute has been reading into Deleuze:

Among the most provocative counterpoints for Weizman's analysis is Shimon Navez, a retired brigadier general in the Israeli Army. Navez, who revels in the kind of jargon heard in architecture studios, directs the Israeli Defense Forces' Operational Theory Research Institute, which trains senior military staff in innovative war tactics.

"We were looking for new modes of thinking that could be suitable to military strategy," he said. "The Americans were looking for technological solutions; we wanted to understand the whole depth of the problem. It struck us that architecture could be a very helpful metaphor."

Navez has little faith in the barrier, which he called "too simplistic, too vulgar" to accomplish its task. "It is a tragic regression in terms of strategy," he said. "It derives from a necessity, but in the longer range it will create a lot of damage - a lot of antagonism. It is a huge violation of space that will be hard to remove."

Navez speaks of "striated" and "smooth" spaces - of a world shaped by solid walls and a more fluid one virtually without boundaries. In his view, the West Bank is an example of smooth space.

It is segregated into carefully defined zones, some of them controlled by the Israeli military and others jointly with the Palestinian Authority. Satellite and aerial surveillance has become ubiquitous.
And an Israeli company is developing a handheld thermal-imaging machine that will let soldiers detect human figures through concrete.

Navez does not direct Israeli military policy. But his views have exerted an influence over a small group of Israeli generals whom he refers to as his "disciples."

He has also met with officials at the Pentagon and American military research groups like Rand to discuss urban warfare in the Middle East, where "swarming" - the idea that soldiers infiltrate enemy space like "clouds" in small, loosely coordinated groups - has become a catch phrase. In such a scenario, the traditional command structure does not apply. Urban soldiers communicate directly with one another in a fluid, amorphous world, free to react to whatever situation arises.

Compared to such a dystopian vision, a concrete barrier erected to separate Israelis from Palestinians can seem like an apparition from antiquity, a counterpart to the crude wooden barrier Trajan built to keep out warring tribes - to separate civilization from barbarity.

Yet to Weizman, these are simply two forms of the same evil. Navez, he said, "is simply trying to replace one form of control with another that is less visible."

At the initiative of Reporters Without Borders, 25 US, Canadian, Australian and European investment funds managing around 21 billion dollars in assets said they are committed to online freedom of expression in a joint statement issued a news conference today in New York. As part of their commitment, they are undertaking to monitor the activities of Internet sector companies in repressive countries. The statement is above all targeted at companies such as Yahoo !, Cisco Systems and Microsoft that help the Chinese authorities censor the Internet or operate online surveillance systems.

The text of the statement and list of signatories

The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, York Zimmerman Inc. and BreakAway Ltd. have been collaborating on A Force More Powerful � The Game of Nonviolent Strategy, set for release in early 2006.   more »

From nuclear weapons to climate change, the Vietnam war to urban segregation, the prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling�s leaps of lateral thinking are weapons of enlightenment, says The Undercover Economist.   more »

Free from judicial shackles, the retired law lord is speaking his mind as the new chairman of Justice. The Guardian profiles Lord Steyn . . .   more »

Oct. 24, 2005 marks pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi�s 10th year under house arrest.   more »

Nominet votes for Argentinian solution to net ownership.   more »

The Human Security Centre announces the launch of the 2005 Human Security Report.   more »

Leading loyalist paramilitary Jim Gray has been shot dead in east Belfast.   more »

For the first time in its history, the Internet is running a real risk of fracturing into multiple and perhaps even incompatible networks. That's why the next few weeks before the final meeting in Tunisia will be crucial.   more »

Stephen Howe, 28 - 9 - 2005

Behind recent violent unrest in Loyalist working-class communities in Northern Ireland is a story of promiscuous cultural borrowings attempting to shore up a collapsed political identity, says Stephen Howe. In the first part of a two-part essay, he examines their manifestations in music, visual display and political rhetoric.

A dramatic last-minute deal drawn up by the EU may mark the end of the US government's control of the internet.   more »

"It is now 2:33am. I can hear gunshots. Put, put, put. I hear them every year at this time."

Why do you blog? A question that's asked both in a ...   more »

Tom Wright in Geneva for the International Herald Tribune

GENEVA An effort by the European Union to break a deadlock in talks here on changing the way the Internet is governed drew an angry reply on Thursday from the U.S. delegation, underlining how far apart nations remain on the issue.

...

Without consensus, some experts say countries may move ahead with setting up their own domain name system, or DNS, as a way of bypassing Icann. The United States, however, says a single addressing system is what makes the Internet so powerful, and moves to set up multiple Internets would be in no one's interest.

"The EU position seems to be a compromise solution between two extreme factions," said Robert Shaw, a policy adviser at the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body based in Geneva.

www.chinaview.cn 2005-09-23 13:26:18: BEIJING, Sept. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- A Paris-based media watchdog released a free guide Thursday to help bloggers and cyber-dissidents avoid political censorship in countries as far apart as Iran, Vietnam and Cuba.

The guide, published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and partly financed by the French Foerign Ministry, identifies bloggers as the "new heralds of free expression" and offers advice on how to set up a blog and run it anonymously.

"Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure," wrote Julien Pain, head of RSF's Internet Freedom Desk.

"Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest."

The 87-page "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents" was launched at the Apple Expo computer show in Paris on Thursday. It can be downloaded from the RSF website (www.rsf.org), and is available in English, French, Chinese, Arabic and Farsi . . .

As part of the BBC's Who Runs Your World? series, Mark Almond, Lecturer in Modern History at Oriel College, Oxford University, assesses the myth and reality of "People Power".   more »

If e-government seems to be mainly about doing tax returns online, then e-democracy is its more exciting cousin, promising to put citizens at centre stage of the political process, writes ...   more »