http://www.inthesetimes.com/archives/tags/technology/ In These Times features award-winning investigative reporting about corporate malfeasance and government wrongdoing, insightful analysis of national and international affairs, and sharp cultural criticism about events and ideas that matter. en-us Expression Engine jessica@inthesetimes.com seamus@inthesetimes.com Fri, 14 Feb 2003 16:30:01 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/427/the_proof_is_in_the_padding/ The country has been put on high alert, and I too have heightened my alertness—for balderdash masquerading as bald facts. I’d urge everyone to adopt the same attitude. We can start by going back for a more careful look at Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Security Council address on February 5, which pundits and politicians—and, according to a new poll, a majority of the American public—are calling a powerful argument for an assault on Iraq. Among other things, Powell praised a British intelligence report on Iraq that was later revealed to be based on plagiarized material from magazine articles and someone’s old doctoral thesis. Even more telling was the section of Powell’s presentation that came closest to revealing the long-sought… technology war in iraq Kari Lydersen Mon, 24 Feb 2003 01:30:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/430/the_first_stone/ Iraqis dissent Many exiled Iraqis are speaking out against the looming war with Iraq. Three Iraqi dissidents, members of Iraqis in Exile Against the War and Sanctions, write in the current issue of Red Pepper: “Iraqis are not being allowed the space to develop their own resistance or to rebuild their country and institutions with their own resources. They are confronted with a stark choice between Saddam’s dictatorship and a U.S. war. Iraqis are aware of the interaction between domestic and external factors, and many would argue that the regime could be gradually stripped of power if there was a real desire in the outside world. This would mean supporting and empowering the people and placing the emphasis on human… civil liberties social justice technology war in iraq Kari Lydersen Fri, 04 Apr 2003 17:20:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/441/virtual_war_and_reality/ The technology of smart-bomb war transports death and destruction to the virtual realm. With one hand on a joystick and eyes on a video screen, a bomb can be dropped here, a cruise missile targeted there. The vaunted accuracy of these weapons (and they can be accurate) make the splattered guts of what once were human beings (in those too-common instances when a market or hospital is bombed) the fault of a technical glitch, an unfortunate failure in a system that otherwise delivers surgically precise mayhem. Time to reboot and accept that what was lost is no longer there. This distancing of cause and effect takes advantage of the natural human propensity to disconnect ourselves from the results of our… government: military technology war in iraq Kari Lydersen Wed, 28 May 2003 16:36:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/448/biowar_and_the_apartheid_legacy/ Just as the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction now seems a neocon-concocted mirage, word has begun leaking out about the spread of bioweapons far more threatening than anything in Saddam Hussein’s purported arsenal. A two-part story in the Washington Post on April 20 and 21 revealed that biological agents developed by the South African government during its apartheid days have fallen into private hands. Written by Post reporters Joby Warrick and John Mintz, the piece noted that unique, race-specific strains of biotoxins were available on the world market—for the right price or the right ideology. Wouter Basson, the man who directed South Africa’s clandestine bioweapons program, “spoke candidly [to federal officials] of global shopping sprees for pathogens and… technology africa Kari Lydersen Tue, 17 Feb 2004 14:55:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/513/homegrown_terrorists/ When the deadly toxin ricin was found February 3 in the mailroom of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), there was no change in Homeland Security colors. Although biological attacks on the apparatus of government are a veritable shortcut to domestic insecurity, they don’t register on the chromatic terrorism scale. Americans have been trained to disassociate such attacks from the war on terrorism. Many experts make this distinction because they believe that homegrown terrorists likely mailed the ricin. And because our domestic haters tend to be Christian rather than Muslim, they don’t fit the “terrorist” mold. Experts also believe that an individual or a domestic terrorist group was responsible for the anthrax attack of 2001 that killed five and injured… technology Kari Lydersen Fri, 27 Feb 2004 16:06:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/710/who_owns_the_sky/ Former Interior Secretary Walter Hickel once explained: “If you steal $10 from a man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight. But if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he may not even notice.” Not since the Gilded Age of the 1890s has so much public wealth been shoveled into private hands with such brazen efficiency. Timber companies, corporate ranchers and foreign mining companies with cheap access to public lands are plundering our national patrimony. Congress obligingly turns a blind eye to the accompanying pollution, soil depletion and habitat destruction. Companies are rushing to patent our genes, privatize agricultural seeds and stake private claims on plots of the ocean. Broadcasters—who for decades enjoyed… activism economy environment politics social justice technology Kari Lydersen Sat, 13 Mar 2004 01:55:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/403/watergate_redux/ The Senate Judiciary seems poised to recommend further, possibly criminal, investigation of pilfered Democratic computer files to the Department of Justice (DOJ), after a report by the Senate sergeant-at-arms revealed that at least two Republican staffers inappropriately accessed more than 4,000 records during an 18-month period. As In These Times went to press, committee members were still wrestling over which course to pursue. Some Republicans indicated a desire to take the unusual step of asking the Secret Service to decide whether the matter warranted a criminal investigation, while Democrats pushed for a special prosecutor to be appointed. A likely compromise would be a recommendation that the DOJ open a criminal investigation. It seems unlikely that the matter will be dropped.… government: congress politics technology Kari Lydersen Mon, 22 Mar 2004 09:00:01 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/407/first_amendment_problem/ I understand there’s a new Palast Investigative Fund, which suggests you’re in trouble again. What’s up? There’re two suits I’m dealing with. One is from the Bush family’s former gold mining company. Most people don’t realize that Poppy Bush had a gold mine: Barrick Gold Mining Corp. Just before Mr. Bush left office at the request of two-thirds of the American people, he changed the rules for gold mine claims, allowing one corporation named Barrick to lay claim to a $10 billion gold mine, the biggest in the United States, and pay the U.S. Treasury $10,000. They then gave President Bush a lucrative job as their senior international advisor. Barrick got the gold mine, the public got the shaft and… elections politics technology election 2004 Kari Lydersen Wed, 12 May 2004 12:27:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/735/fear_for_sale/ September 11, 2001, was Derek Smith’s lucky day. There were all those pieces of people to collect—tubes marked “DM” (for “Disaster Manhattan”)—from which his company would extract DNA for victim identification, work for which the firm would receive $12 million from New York City’s government. I have no doubt that Smith, like the rest of us, grieved, horrified and heartsick, at the murder of innocent friends and countrymen. As for the 12-million-dollar corpse identification fee, that’s chump change to the $4 billion corporation Smith had founded only four years earlier, ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. For ChoicePoint, with its 15-billion-plus records on every living and dying being in the United States, Ground Zero would become a profit… civil liberties international affairs technology Kari Lydersen Tue, 24 Aug 2004 07:01:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/978/sum_of_a_glitch/ In the Alabama 2002 general election, machines made by Election Systems and Software (ES&S) flipped the governor’s race. Six thousand three hundred Baldwin County electronic votes mysteriously disappeared after the polls had closed and everyone had gone home. Democrat Don Siegelman’s victory was handed to Republican Bob Riley, and the recount Siegelman requested was denied. Three months after the election, the vendor shrugged. “Something happened. I don’t have enough intelligence to say exactly what,” said Mark Kelley of ES&S. When I began researching this story in October 2002, the media was reporting that electronic voting machines are fun and speedy, but I looked in vain for articles reporting that they are accurate. I discovered four magic words, “voting machines and… elections politics technology election 2004 Kari Lydersen Fri, 10 Dec 2004 07:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/1742/was_the_2004_election_stolen/ Did the Bush-Cheney campaign engage in electronic vote fraud to ensure that George W. Bush would be president for another four years? That is a question every small-d democrat should be asking. Much has been written on the Internet alleging that the election was stolen. Some writers are members of the tin-foil hat brigade, but others provide sober analysis of the election results that raise disturbing questions. Unfortunately, thanks to the herd instinct in our current media culture, anyone who publicly raises this question is immediately labeled a conspiracy theorist. In the December 6 Nation, Alexander Cockburn dismissed such speculation, writing, “As usual, the conspiracy nuts think plans of inconceivable complexity worked at 100 percent efficiency.” Dan Thanh Dang of… elections politics technology election 2004 Kari Lydersen Thu, 16 Dec 2004 07:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/1750/questioning_the_frame/ Terms such as “ mapping,” “borders,” “hacking,” “trans-nationalism,” “identity as spatial,” and so on have been popularized in recent years by new media theories’ celebration of “the networks”—a catch-all phrase for the modes of communication and exchange facilitated by the Internet. We should proceed with caution in using this terminology because it accords strategic primacy to space and simultaneously downplays time—i.e., history. It also evades categories of embodied difference such as race, gender and class, and in doing so prevents us from understanding how the historical development of those differences has shaped our contemporary worldview. Technocentric fantasy The rhetoric of mapping and networks conflates the way technological systems operate with modern human communication. According to this mode of thought we… media politics technology Kari Lydersen Mon, 18 Apr 2005 07:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2071/is_low_cost_wi_fi_un_american/ We have Big Media to thank for saving Americans from themselves. Just as the notion of affordable broadband for all was beginning to take hold in towns and cities across the country, the patriots at Verizon, Qwest, Comcast, Bell South and SBC Communications have created legislation that will stop the creeping socialism of broadband community Internet before it invades our homes. And to think that Americans might want to support high-speed access at costs below the monopoly rates set by these few Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Today, monthly broadband packages offered by the national carriers hover above $30, barring access to millions of Americans who can’t afford the sticker price. Telecommunications giants have mobilized a well-funded army of coin-operated think… media technology Kari Lydersen Mon, 18 Apr 2005 07:00:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2077/broadband_internet_unhappily_ever_after/ Few people blink these days when some Chicken Little somewhere announces that the virtual sky is falling. The Internet has long been subject to such dire pronouncements, and no doubt both Turkey Lurkey and Henny Penny have set up blogs to give new life to old predictions. But when Chicken Big sounds worried (and in the online world, the poultry doesn’t get much bigger than Amazon.com), it’s time to listen. Such is the case with the current battle over the regulatory status of broadband Internet, now before the Supreme Court in the form of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services. Oddly named and replete with narrow legal distinctions——“Brand X” is the Santa Monica-based Internet service… media technology Kari Lydersen Wed, 06 Jul 2005 10:03:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2203/network_neutrality_now/ And then there were two. That, at least, is the stark prospect facing us in the area of broadband communications, with the Supreme Court's decision in National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services setting the stage for just two companies--the local cable monopoly and the incumbent telephone giant--to control the "last-mile" broadband connections to our homes and businesses. This broadband "duopoly" stands in sharp contrast to the vast numbers of Internet service providers (ISPs, some 7,000 of them at their peak) who plied their trade during the '90s. The dial-up connections they offered may have been slow in comparison to the swift cable and DSL networks of today, but competition and innovation online were fast and furious… government: judiciary technology Kari Lydersen Wed, 06 Jul 2005 10:04:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2202/split_decision_on_file_sharing/ The Supreme Court's June 27 decision in MGM v. Grokster is not quite as bad as the tech companies feared it would be, and not nearly as good as the content companies hoped it would be. Unfortunately, the decision also lacks the clarity that the rest of us hoped it would have. As a result, we can reasonably expect more litigation for some time to come. In Grokster, the Court reversed lower courts' summary judgment on the issue of whether the current software offered by defendants Grokster and Streamcast was lawful, and then went on to adopt a new theory for liability--the intentional "inducement of infringement." The new rule marks a departure from the two-decade old "bright line" test of… government: judiciary technology Kari Lydersen Tue, 23 Aug 2005 07:59:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2293/the_whiteness_of_wi_fi/ W.E.B. DuBois wrote at a time of breathtaking social change, a time not unlike our own. The black social critic, activist and writer documented how African Americans fled the bitter roots of sharecropping in the Jim Crow South only to find themselves at the margins of the bustling industrial economy of cities in the North like Philadelphia. The railroad ushered in dramatic change and Philadelphia, a mercantile and industrial powerhouse, had taken its place as the center of the U.S. railroad industry. In books written in the 1890s and early 20th century, DuBois captured how railroad barons and white labor union leaders forced African Americans into densely populated brick row homes on sewage-filled streets on the wrong side of the… race technology Kari Lydersen Tue, 11 Oct 2005 10:26:00 -0500 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2348/opening_the_lines/ During a September 27 House hearing, discredited ex-FEMA chief and one-time horse-whisperer Michael Brown was asked about the profound failures of communication among those supposedly in charge of responding to Katrina. Many first responders were cut off from communication for days, and local elected officials were reduced to using TV and radio network appearances to communicate with the federal government. What he was supposed to do, he retorted, "Drop a whole phone and radio system into New Orleans, lock, stock and barrel?" Well, that's just what Paul Smith and about a dozen fellow wireless technicians did. With just a modest amount of equipment, their all-volunteer team managed to get wireless internet and phone service into a dozen shelters in northern… technology Kari Lydersen Mon, 06 Feb 2006 06:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2485/can_blogs_revolutionize_progressive_politics/ We have no interest in being anti-establishment," says Matt Stoller, a blogger at the popular Web site MyDD.com. "We're going to be the establishment." That kind of flamboyant confidence has become the hallmark of blog evangelists who believe that blogs promise nothing less than a populist revolution in American politics. In 2006, at least some of that rhetoric is becoming reality. Blogs may not have replaced the Democratic Party establishment, but they are certainly becoming an integral part of it. In the wake of John Kerry's defeat in the 2004 presidential elections, many within the Democratic leadership have embraced blog advocates' plan for political success, which can be summed up in one word: netroots. This all-encompassing term loosely describes an… politics technology Kari Lydersen Thu, 23 Mar 2006 05:00:00 -0600 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2575/barbarians_at_the_helm/ First they ignore you," opens Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga's new book Crashing the Gates, "then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." If the choice of this epigram from Ghandi seems immodest, its confidence isn't unwarranted. Moulitsas' blog, DailyKos, gets 600,000 page views a day; Democratic congressmen regularly post on his blog and Armstrong's, MyDD; and original netroots hero Howard Dean now runs the Democratic National Committee. The barbarians, then, are already well inside the gates. Hell, they're practically picking out drapes for the palace. Armstrong and Moulitsas present themselves as outsiders and iconoclasts, but CtG is best understood in the context of the rapidly-growing genre that might be called: "What's the Matter With… elections technology Kari Lydersen