DOCSLIB.ORG

SCIENCECHRONICLES December 2011

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
SCIENCECHRONICLES December 2011 SCIENCECHRONICLES December 2011 Image: Long- tailed tit (fledgling). Image credit: nutmeg66/Flickr The Holiday Books Issue 2011 Jeff Opperman: Let’s Not Be the Last Book on the Shelf 3 28 Book Reviews by Karen Anderson, Charles Bedford, Susanna Danner, Joe Fargione, Jon Fisher, James Fitzsimons, Eddie Game, Sara Gottlieb, Jon Hoekstra, Helen Hooper, Peter Karevia, Bob Lalasz, Craig Leisher, Lynn Lozier, Matt Miller, Jensen Montambault, Jen Newlin, Bryan Piazza and Sheila Walsh 6 ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas...at TNC 33 1 The 2011 Holiday Books Issue Table of Contents Essay December 2011 3 Jeff Opperman: Let’s Not Be the Last Book on the Shelf Fiction CHRONICLES 6 Eisler: The John Rain Series (Reviewed by Charles Bedford) 7 Shteyngart: Super Sad True Love Story (Bedford) 8 Stephenson: Reamde (Susanna Danner) 9 Patchett: State of Wonder (Sara Gottlieb) SCIENCE 10 Fox: News from the World and Desperate Characters (Helen Hooper) 11 Torres: We the Animals (Hooper) 12 Ondaatje: The Cat’s Table (Bob Lalasz) 13 Harrison: The Great Leader (Matt Miller) 14 Allende: La Ciudad de Las Bestias (Jensen Montambault) 15 Collins: The Hunger Games Trilogy (Jen Newlin) 16 Meloy: Wildwood (Newlin) Non-Fiction 17 Lawler and Worley: Built to Change (Reviewed by Karen Anderson) 18 Phillips: Wealth and Democracy (Joe Fargione) 19 Cooney: Change of Heart (Jon Fisher) 20 Hyland: Kinglake-350 (James Fitzsimons) 21 Fleming: News from Tartary (Eddie Game) 22 Leigh and Harding: Wikileaks (Game) 23 Mann: 1491 (Jon Hoekstra) 24 Spiegelman: The Complete Maus (Hooper) 25 Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature (Peter Kareiva) 26 Quammen: Song of the Dodo (Craig Leisher) 27 Wilkerson: The Warmth of Other Suns (Lynn Lozier) 28 DeBuys: A Great Aridness (Patrick McCarthy) 29 Everett: Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes (Miller) 30 Conniff: The Species Seekers (Miller) 31 Kingsolver, et al.: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Bryan Piazza) 32 Frank: The Darwin Economy (Sheila Walsh) 33 Poem: ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas...at TNC 2 Essay Let’s Not Be the Last Book on the Shelf By Jeff Opperman, senior advisor for hydropower, Global Freshwater Team, The Nature Conservancy December 2011 CHRONICLES SCIENCE Driving with my kids the other day. I saw a sign announcing: “Borders’ Books Going Out of Business: 90% Off!” We headed in with great enthusiasm, thoughts of nearly free books dancing in our heads. The place was swarming with bargain hunters. The remaining inventory had been moved to the front; the rest of the cavernous box store was gloomily empty behind Image credit: Martin movable partitions. Deutsch/Flickr through a Creative Though there were still thousands of books, I quickly realized the store had been Commons license. picked clean, like a carcass where all the soft parts were long gone and just the hide, hoofs, horns and bones remained. Like those ungulate parts, the titles left behind were mostly undigestible. 3 Jackal-like, I joined the others sniffing among the store’s skeletal shelves for some overlooked palatable morsel. There were literally no books for kids — those sections simply didn’t exist anymore. “Sorry guys, I guess there’s nothing left,” I said to the dejected pair shuffling along behind me. December 2011 But just then I turned a corner and stumbled upon the “Nature/Environment” section. It had books. Lots of books. New hardcover books, including four for which I’d recently read reviews and mentally filed away as potential reads. Two were on the future of water, and two were on the climate crisis. CHRONICLES My elation at finding such great bargains soon waned as I realized what their presence indicated. SCIENCE Here were brand new books on some of the most important challenges facing society today — now truly priced to move at about $2.50 — and they’d been left behind by the swarming scavengers, lingering on the shelves in the company of the odd, obscure and obsolete. What I found to be intriguing evidently had as much appeal to the general public as Getting to Know Your Commodore 64, Knitting with Dog Hair, and Nasal Maintenance Made Easy. Nature as the last of the remainders: It made real for me the now ubiquitous adage that conservation must strive to be more relevant to people. But relevant in what way? Major conservation organizations have responded to the need to increase their relevance by placing most of their money on…money. With an undercurrent suggesting that nature’s beauty, majesty and mystery are perhaps frivolous, our dominant themes now emphasize the economic returns from nature. “Conservation organizations must Don’t misunderstand me: I think that quantifying and demonstrating the economic find the words to value of natural ecosystems have great potential to improve decisions and increase convey how nature investments in conservation. While we must pursue such opportunities for progress, I is intertwined with question the extent to which those concepts will expand the appeal of conservation to the things people new audiences or galvanize the broad level of support that can undergird tough political care most deeply choices on climate change, for instance. about: their connections to family, community Why am I skeptical? Because of the letter D and the number 35. and sense of place.” The letter D is the grade given by the American Society of Civil Engineers for the condition of, and investment in, infrastructure in the United States. This grade includes a D- for both levees and water-treatment plants. Seeing as flood-risk reduction and clean water are two of the best horses in nature’s stable of ecosystem services, these near-failing grades offer a sobering reality check. 4 While I believe strongly that demonstrating nature’s benefits will resonate with certain key audiences, and thus advance our mission, when it comes to expanding the relevance of nature to broader audiences, establishing nature’s bona fides as infrastructure may produce underwhelming results. “Hey, nature,” says the levee, “congratulations on joining a woefully underfunded club!” December 2011 The number 35 is the percentage of U.S. charitable dollars going to religious organizations, considerably ahead of categories such as education (14%), human services (9%), health (8%), and environment/animal welfare (2%). Philanthropic giving flows first and foremost to something that provides people with CHRONICLES a sense of connection, spirituality and refuge. Giving to categories focused on advancing economic growth or material well-being for the poor and disadvantaged lag behind. SCIENCE Nature as infrastructure may be important. Nature as NGO calendar scenery may be inspiring. But nature’s most essential relevance may be in its intimate connection with our daily psychological, spiritual and physical well-being. I just heard a speech by Martin Palmer, leader of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (a wonderful speaker, by the way). He said: “No one has ever been converted by a pie chart” — and added that, when trying to connect with people, we should only use words that are “sufficiently understood, indeed sufficiently loved, to have been used in a poem.” I can’t imagine a sonnet that contains “green infrastructure” or “ecosystem services” — or even “nature’s benefits.” Yet nature is the etymological raw material of poetry. Conservation organizations must find the words to convey how nature is intertwined with the things people care most deeply about: their connections to family, community, sense of place and love of country. The next time some big bookstore goes out of business, what will be the last book on the shelf? Something about wastewater treatment plants or highways? Or books about God, yoga, food or how to stay connected with your children? Nature has deep relevance for everything on that second list, and we should not forget to write those books, too. SC 5 Books: Fiction Make it Rain Killing Rain, Hard Rain, Rain Fall, Rain Storm, etc. -- The John Rain Series. By Barry Eisler. Reviewed by Charles Bedford, deputy managing director, North Asia, The Nature December 2011 Conservancy One of the many unfortunate problems of traveling so much that I know the flight attendants’ names on the PEK-SFO United 889 CHRONICLES route is that I tend to get suckered into trashy spy novels to pass the 13 hours in the air and countless others in transit. I can blast through SCIENCE one of these genre fictions in around 2-3 hours (they are written at the 7th grade level — which, coincidentally, is about my emotional maturity....) And, on planes, they are as engaging as meditation — empty mind and stiff back. Barry Eisler’s John Rain series is perfect for these situations. Occasionally, the hero/anti- hero even grapples with complex issues of morality, not something one expects in a professional assassin for hire who specializes in deaths that look natural. But over the arc of the seven-book series, Rain turns from an automaton assassin for hire (created by serving in the U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam) into a more rounded human being through his association with other likable characters, like a Southern cracker sniper and a beautiful Mossad agent who seduces and kills the enemies of Israel. And ultimately, he begins to kill only for the good guys, even foregoing snuffing out the new boyfriend of his son’s mother. Truly a triumph of good over evil that can warm the heart this holiday season. But the books do raise questions of free will and choice, albeit in a comic book context. These are questions that we all deal with on a daily basis, though not usually of the direct life-or-death type. Should I be driving this much? Why can’t TNC get good video-conferencing so our carbon footprint can be reduced? And, will this project really change the trajectory of global climate policy so that our species (my grandkids especially — after all, they have my genes!) makes it through the climate keyhole? Maybe we should hire John Rain...
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Myth of Portlandia
    Portland State University PDXScholar Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies Publications Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies Winter 2013 The Myth of Portlandia Sara Gates Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/metropolitianstudies Part of the Television Commons, and the Urban Studies and Planning Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Citation Details Gates, S. (2013) The Myth of Portlandia. Winter 2013 Metroscape, p. 24-29. This Article is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies Publications by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. The Myth of Portlandia Portlandia, Grimm, Leverage An interview with Carl Abbott and Karin Magaldi by Sara Gates arl Abbott is a professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State C University and a local expert on the intertwining relationships between the growth, urbanization, and cultural evolutions of cities. Since beginning his tenure at PSU in 1978, Dr. Abbott has published numerous books on Portland itself, as well as the urbanization of the American West; his most recent is Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People (2011). Karin Magaldi is the department chair of Theatre & Film at PSU, with extensive experience in teaching screenwriting and production. In addition to directing several PSU departmental productions, she has also worked with local theatre groups including Portland Center Stage, Third Rail Repertory, and Artists Repertory Theatre. Recently, Metroscape writer Sara Gates sat down with Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Wikileaks and the Institutional Framework for National Security Disclosures
    THE YALE LAW JOURNAL PATRICIA L. BELLIA WikiLeaks and the Institutional Framework for National Security Disclosures ABSTRACT. WikiLeaks' successive disclosures of classified U.S. documents throughout 2010 and 2011 invite comparison to publishers' decisions forty years ago to release portions of the Pentagon Papers, the classified analytic history of U.S. policy in Vietnam. The analogy is a powerful weapon for WikiLeaks' defenders. The Supreme Court's decision in the Pentagon Papers case signaled that the task of weighing whether to publicly disclose leaked national security information would fall to publishers, not the executive or the courts, at least in the absence of an exceedingly grave threat of harm. The lessons of the PentagonPapers case for WikiLeaks, however, are more complicated than they may first appear. The Court's per curiam opinion masks areas of substantial disagreement as well as a number of shared assumptions among the Court's members. Specifically, the Pentagon Papers case reflects an institutional framework for downstream disclosure of leaked national security information, under which publishers within the reach of U.S. law would weigh the potential harms and benefits of disclosure against the backdrop of potential criminal penalties and recognized journalistic norms. The WikiLeaks disclosures show the instability of this framework by revealing new challenges for controlling the downstream disclosure of leaked information and the corresponding likelihood of "unintermediated" disclosure by an insider; the risks of non-media intermediaries attempting to curtail such disclosures, in response to government pressure or otherwise; and the pressing need to prevent and respond to leaks at the source. AUTHOR.
    [Show full text]
  • The Authorised History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew (Book Review)
    Lobster 58 The Defence of the Realm The Authorised History of MI5 Christopher Andrew Page 134 Winter 2009/10 Lobster 58 London: Allen Lane, 2009, £30 Covering the same area as the Hennessy/Thomas book but with access to more recent MI5 documents, Andrew does at least refer to the dissenters named in the preceding paragraph. This is a thousand pages long and will be of major interest to academic students of British intelligence and political history for years to come. Discounted from sellers like Amazon, this is a seriously good buy. But I’m not an academic and my interests are political. I looked initially at two areas: what it said about MI5’s relationship with the British left since WW2, and particularly the role of the CPGB in British politics; and the so-called Wilson plots. Let’s take the left first. Elsewhere in this issue is my contribution to the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom’s book on the 1984 miners’ strike. In that I repeat for the umpteenth time Peter Wright’s story in Spycatcher that MI5 knew about the covert Soviet funding of the CPGB in the 1950s and neither exposed it nor tried to stop it. Wright is rubbished repeatedly by Andrew and he does not refer to this claim of Wright’s. However on p. 403 he writes this: ‘The Security Service had “good coverage” of the secret Soviet funding of the CPGB, monitoring by surveillance and telecheck the regular collection of Moscow’s cash subsidies by two members of the Party’s International Department, Eileen Palmer and Bob Stewart, from the north London address of two ex-trainees of the Moscow Radio School.’ This isn’t dated but from the context it is the early 1950s.
    [Show full text]
  • Wildwoodchronicles.Mobi Or Text WILDERNESS to READIT U.S
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR COLIN MELOY once wrote Ray Bradbury a W ILDW OOD letter, informing him that he “considered himself discussion guide an author too.” He was ten. Since then, Colin has gone on to be the singer and songwriter for the band the Decemberists, where he channels all of his weird ideas into weird songs. This is his first Autumn Autumn de Wilde time channeling those ideas into a novel. As a kid, CARSON ELLIS loved exploring the woods, draw- ing, and nursing wounded animals back to health. As an adult, little has changed—except she is now the acclaimed illustrator of several books for children, including Lemony Snicket’s The Composer is Dead, Dillweed’s Revenge by Florence Parry Heide, and The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. Colin and Carson live with their son, Hank, in Portland, Oregon, quite near the Impassable Wilderness. ENTER THE WORLD OF ON YOUR SMARTPHONE Download the free app at WILDWOODCHRONICLES.MOBI or text WILDERNESS to READIT u.s. residents only; message and data rates may apply www.wildwoodchronicles.com For exclusive information on your favorite authors and artists, visit www.authortracker.com. To order, please contact your HarperCollins sales a forbidden wilderness representative, call 1-800-C-HARPER, an epic journey or fax your order to 1-800-822-4090. a new classic Discussion guide created by Connie Rockman, youth literature consultant and adjunct professor of children’s and young adult literature. ABOUT THE BOOK rue McKeel’s life is ordinary. At least until her brother is abducted 9.
    [Show full text]
  • Infographics in Booklet Format
    SWITZERLAND CHINA 243 535 ITALY AUSTRALIA 170 183 State of Corporate pOWER 2012 Toyota Motor Exxon Mobil Wal-Mart Stores $ Royal Dutch Shell Barclays plc 60 USA Capital Group Companies 28 Japan 20 China Carlos Slim Helu Mexico telecom 15000 T 10000 op 25 global companies based ON revenues A FOssIL-FUELLED WORLD 5000 Wal-Mart Stores 3000 AUTO Toyota Motor retail Volkswagen Group 2000 General Motors Daimler 1000 Group 203 S AXA Ford Motor 168 422 136 REVENUES US$BILLION OR Royal C Group 131 OIL Dutch powerorporationsFUL THAN nationsMORE ING Shell 2010 GDP 41 OF THE World’S 100 L 129 EC ONOMIE Allianz Nation or Planet Earth Company 162 USA S ARE C China F Japan INANCIAL 149 A Germany ORP France ORatIONARS Corpor United Kingdom GE 143 Brazil st Mobil Exxon Italy Hathaway India Berkshire 369 Canada Russia Spain 136 Australia Bank of America Mexico 343 BP Korea Netherlands Turkey 134 Indonesia ate Switzerland BNP 297 Paribas Poland Oil and gas make Belgium up eight of the top Group Sweden 130 Sinopec Saudi Arabia ten largest global Taiwan REVENUES World US$BILLIONS 273 corporations. Wal-Mart Stores Norway Iran Royal Dutch Shell 240 China Austria Petro Argentina South Africa 190 Exxon Mobil Thailand Denmark 188 BP Chevron 176 131 127 134 150 125 Total Greece United Arab Emirates Venezuela Hewlett Colombia Packard other Samsung ENI Conoco Sinopec Group Electronics Phillips PetroChina E.ON Finland General Malaysia Electric Portugal State Grid Hong Kong SAR Singapore Toyota Motor http://www.minesandcommunities.org Egypt http://europeansforfinancialreform.org
    [Show full text]
  • The Wikileaks Illusion
    WQ16-21 6/28/11 11:36 AM Page 16 THE WILSON QUARTERLY The WikiLeaks Illusion WikiLeaks’ tsunami of revelations from U.S. government sources last year did not change the world, but it did change WikiLeaks. BY ALASDAIR ROBERTS Late last November, the antisecrecy group casualties and “friendly fire” incidents. In October came WikiLeaks achieved the greatest triumph in its short his- a similar but larger set of documents—almost tory. A consortium of major news media organizations— 400,000—detailing U.S. military operations in Iraq. including The New York Times, The Guardian, Der WikiLeaks’ boosters said that the group was waging Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País—began publishing a war on secrecy, and by the end of 2010 it seemed to be excerpts from a quarter-million cables between the U.S. winning. The leaks marked “the end of secrecy in the old- State Department and its diplomatic outposts that Wiki- fashioned, Cold War–era sense,” claimed Guardian jour- Leaks had obtained. The group claimed that the cables nalists David Leigh and Luke Harding. A Norwegian constituted “the largest set of confidential documents politician nominated WikiLeaks for the Nobel Peace ever to be released into the public domain.” The Prize, saying that it had helped “redraw the map of Guardian predicted that the disclosures would trigger information freedom.” “Like him or not,” wrote a Time a “global diplomatic crisis.” magazine journalist in December, WikiLeaks founder This was the fourth major disclosure orchestrated by Julian Assange had “the power to impose his judgment WikiLeaks last year. In April, it had released a classified of what should or shouldn’t be secret.” video showing an attack in 2007 by U.S.
    [Show full text]
  • Wikileaks, Twitter, and Information Activism
    International Journal of Communication 8 (2014), Feature 2679–2692 1932–8036/2014FEA0002 “Oh, WikiLeaks, I would so love to RT you:” WikiLeaks, Twitter, and Information Activism LISA LYNCH Concordia University, Canada On July 30, 2011, WikiLeaks passed 1 million Twitter followers, becoming only the 436th user of the messaging service to receive that distinction. As a radical group dedicated to information transparency, WikiLeaks was an outlier in the million-plus club, which was otherwise comprised almost entirely of celebrities broadcasting updates to fans and media outlets providing general information services. Even more remarkably, several hundred thousand of these followers had subscribed to the WikiLeaks feed after a U.S. court order was issued mandating that information about WikiLeaks’ Twitter followers be made available for purposes of a legal investigation. As WikiLeaks weathered legal investigation by the U.S. government, an international financial blockade, and a sexual scandal involving the group’s founding member and spokesperson, Twitter evolved into a primary information source for both the group’s followers and media outlets reporting on WikiLeaks-related events. This article will trace the evolution of WikiLeaks’ use of Twitter, from the modest beginnings of WikiLeaks’ feed in 2008 to its exponential growth in 2010 and 2011, at the height of WikiLeaks’ popularity and renown. I explore how the group’s use of Twitter was both exemplary, taking advantage of the particular qualities afforded by Twitter, and problematic, using Twitter in ways which were ethically questionable or which alienated former supporters of the organization. More broadly, I consider what we might learn about Twitter’s potential as a tool for information activism by studying the social media strategy (or absence thereof) of an activist movement premised on developing and deploying innovative approaches to the publication of suppressed documents.
    [Show full text]
  • [711.Book] Download Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles) PDF
    Download: Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles) PDF Free [711.Book] Download Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles) PDF By Colin Meloy Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles) you can download free book and read Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles) for free here. Do you want to search free download Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles) or free read online? If yes you visit a website that really true. If you want to download this ebook, i provide downloads as a pdf, kindle, word, txt, ppt, rar and zip. Download pdf #Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles) | #431471 in Books | Colin Meloy | 2014-02-04 | 2014-02-04 | Format: Deckle Edge | Original language: English | PDF # 1 | 7.75 x 1.73 x 6.00l, 1.78 | File type: PDF | 592 pages | Wildwood Imperium | |0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.| A Steady, Decent, Still-Imaginative and Exciting Finale | By The Kid Book Reviewers |Thoughts: I read this book about a year and a half ago, before I started reviewing books for my blog, Kid Book Reviewer, and only recently decided to reread it - not because I was freaking out over it or anything, but because I was curious to see what my reaction would be nearly two years later to | .com | The Official Wildwood Imperium Playlist - Created by Colin Meloy |1. “Mermaid Parade,” Phosphorescent |I listened to this song over and over while I wrote the last major scene of the book From Colin Meloy, lead singer of the Decemberists, and Carson Ellis, acclaimed illustrator of The Mysterious Benedict Society, comes the stunning third book in the New York Times bestselling fantasy- adventure series the Wildwood Chronicles.
    [Show full text]
  • Harboring Wikileaks: Comparing Swedish and American Press Freedom
    Corneil: Harboring WikiLeaks: Comparing Swedish and American Press Freedom HARBORING WIKILEAKS: COMPARING SWEDISH AND AMERICAN PRESS FREEDOM IN THE INTERNET AGE TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION ........................... ..... 477 II. BACKGROUND ........................................ 484 A. Brief Overview of WikiLeaks ............ ......... 484 B. Overview of Media Regulation ............. ..... 487 III. THE STATE OF DIGITAL PRESS FREEDOM IN SWEDEN..............489 A. The History of Swedish Press Freedom ......... ........ 490 B. WikiLeaks'Presence in Sweden .................. 491 C. Lessons from the PirateBay Trial ........... ..... 497 D. WikiLeaks'Future in Sweden and PossibleAlternatives .. 501 IV. THE STATE OF DIGITAL PRESS FREEDOM IN THE UNITED STATES ...................................... ....... 503 A. Developing Exceptions to the Freedom of the Press ......... 504 B. PriorRestraint and the PentagonPapers ...... ....... 505 C. Reporter'sPrivilege and Whistleblower ProtectionLaws 513 D. Bank Julius Baer v. WikiLeaks .............. ..... 515 V. PROPOSED LEGISLATION: THE DIGITAL WHISTLEBLOWER PROTECTION ACT .................................... 517 VI. CONCLUSION. .................................. ...... 521 I. INTRODUCTION "Today, with authoritarian governments in power around much of the world, increasing authoritarian tendencies in democratic governments, and increasing amounts of power vested in unaccountable corporations, the need for openness and transparency is greater than ever. WikiLeaks is a tool to satisfy that need."'
    [Show full text]
  • How Spies Think.Pdf
    David Omand H O W S P I E S T H I N K Ten Lessons in Intelligence Contents Introduction. Why we need these lessons in seeking independence of mind, honesty and integrity PART ONE: AN ANALYST SEES: FOUR LESSONS IN ORDERING OUR THOUGHTS Lesson 1: Situational awareness. Our knowledge of the world is always fragmentary and incomplete, and is sometimes wrong Lesson 2: Explanation. Facts need explaining Lesson 3: Estimations. Predictions need an explanatory model as well as sufficient data Lesson 4: Strategic notice. We do not have to be so surprised by surprise PART TWO: THREE LESSONS IN CHECKING OUR REASONING Lesson 5: It is our own demons that are most likely to mislead us Lesson 6: We are all susceptible to obsessive states of mind Lesson 7: Seeing is not always believing: beware manipulation, deception and faking PART THREE: THREE LESSONS IN MAKING INTELLIGENT USE OF INTELLIGENCE Lesson 8: Imagine yourself in the shoes of the person on the other side Lesson 9: Trustworthiness creates lasting partnerships Lesson 10: Subversion and sedition are now digital PART FOUR A final lesson in optimism Acknowledgements Notes and further reading Index About the Author David Omand was the first UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter-terrorism strategy and ‘homeland security’. He served for seven years on the Joint Intelligence Committee. He was Permanent Secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to 2000, and before that Director of GCHQ. For Keir, Robert, Beatrice and Ada, in the hope that you will grow up in a better world Introduction Why we need these lessons in seeking independence of mind, honesty and integrity Westminster, March 1982.
    [Show full text]
  • Wikileaks and the Guardian Epilogue CSJ-11-0041.2
    CSJ‐ 11 ‐ 0041.2 Friend or Foe?: WikiLeaks and the Guardian Epilogue On Sunday, November 28 at 6:13 p.m. GMT, the Guardian website went live with the diplomatic cables.1 Besides its stories, the Guardian provided readers with a searchable database of redacted cables, video, blogs, photographs, links, graphics, timelines and more. The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El País released their stories simultaneously on their websites. Ironically, the original 9:30 p.m. GMT embargo was broken inadvertently by Der Spiegel when copies of the magazine mistakenly were delivered to a small town on the Swiss‐German border, where a radio editor bought one and broadcast the headlines. A Twitter user picked it up, and the embargo went down the drain. The November 29 Guardian paper edition displayed cables stories across the front page. Investigations Editor David Leigh wrote the round‐up piece, which headlined the US order to spy on diplomats, as well as the Saudi king’s request that the US bomb Iran. In an explanatory note to readers about the origins of the leaked documents, Leigh wrote that “what will emerge in the days and weeks ahead is an unprecedented picture of secret diplomacy as conducted by the planetʹs sole superpower. There are 251,287 dispatches in all, from more than 250 US embassies and consulates.”2 He also gave readers a hint of the story behind the story of the WikiLeaks cables: Freedom of information campaigner Heather Brooke obtained a copy of the database through her own contacts and joined the Guardian team.
    [Show full text]
  • Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assanges War on Secrecy PDF Book
    WIKILEAKS: INSIDE JULIAN ASSANGES WAR ON SECRECY PDF, EPUB, EBOOK The Guardian,David Leigh,Luke Harding | 304 pages | 03 Oct 2013 | Guardian Faber Publishing | 9781783350179 | English | London, United Kingdom WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assanges War on Secrecy PDF Book His site included various videos and accounts from soldiers in Afghanistan, at the time, these videos being posted on Youtube were making front page news. His request for asylum was granted and he remained a resident in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since A fascinating read, I thought it provided a balanced account of WikiLeaks, and of Assange as somewhat aloof, arrogant and gregarious. So lets stick to the book itself. This book written by editor and war correspondent in Guardian leading UK Newspaper. Aug 17, Tulonga rated it it was amazing. The school system didn't hold much interest for him. Verified Purchase. But Assange never knew him until the age of British journalist and the author of several books on international affairs. International Business Times. The magazine had an exclusive readership: its circulation was just three, the hackers themselves. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks is a American independent documentary film about the organization started by Julian Assange, and people involved in the collection and distribution of secret information and media by whistleblowers. He told potential supporters about his secret new plan: "This is a restricted internal development mailing list for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-. International Business Times. Assange drafted on his bravely named blog, IQ. The subject of the book is "politically motivated information leaks So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them.
    [Show full text]