Month: February 2009

Canada's Parliament Press Gallery gets precisely two questions for Obama: What should they be?

President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper give a joint news conference at 1445 Tuesday. It will be held in Parliament's Centre Block. Though there are roughly 300 or so members of Canada's Parliamentary Press Gallery, just 40 will be allowed inside the press conference room. And even though (or so we are told) there are 70 members of the White House Press Corps travelling with Obama tomorrow, they too, will only get 40 seats.

I can tell you that dozens upon dozens of Canadian journalists from outside Ottawa asked for accreditation for this event, most of which will be disappointed.

Blame the PMO or the White House if you will. The PMO is supposed to be calling the shots here but we suspect the White House is pulling many of the strings.

In any event, the 80 journalists in the room will get precisely four questions before the leaders leave. Two questions will be asked by the American journalists and two questions will be asked by the Canadians. Of course, as we are a bilingual country, that means one question goes to English language journalists and one to the other solitude.

So here's the quandary: What question do you think Global National, National Post, the Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Citizen, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, CTV, CBC, the Canadian Press and others can all agree on? Something about the economy? Cross-border trade? Afghanistan? Omar Khadr?

I won't be in that room (I'm tasked with some other Obama-related work tomorrow) and won't have any input on that discussion but, if I if I did get a chance to ask the new Prez a question, I would argue that we should ask Obama about Maher Arar.

Our government, after all, paid Arar $10 million after a judicial inquiry established he did nothing wrong and suffered grievously because of the mistakes of our security services and those of the United States. Prime Minister Harper apologized to Arar. Today, the New York Times says Obama ought to do the same. So why not invite President Obama to do just that during his visit to the Centre Block of Canada's House of Commons. That’s not just a “Canada” question. The Times also reports today that though Obama’s administration may close Gitmo, it looks to continue the ethically dodgy practice of rendering — the very practice that led to Arar’s torture. Asking about Arar, then, would give some insight as to just how far this new president is prepared to distance himself from the often controversial anti-terror policies of his predecessor. And that's something the whole world would like to know about.

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Harper, Cannon, Flaherty, Prentice lead Obama luncheon guest list

Minutes after saying I was inching back towards Twitter, I'm almost ready to declare I'm a believer. That's because Carl Meyer, the Ottawa Bureau Chief of the Canadian University Press, just tweeted to say that Obama's luncheon guests tomorrow are all set and they include:

  • Prime Minister Stephen Harper
  • Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon
  • Finance Minister Jim Flaherty
  • Environment Minister Jim Prentice
  • Clerk of the Privy Council Kevin Lynch
  • PCO Foreign and Defense Policy Advisor Claude Carrière
  • Canada's Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Wilson
  • PMO Chief of Staff Guy Giorno
  • PMO Director of Communication Kory Teneycke

Carl's tweet prompted me to pick up my BlackBerry and, lo and behold, there was the whole PMO-controlled itinerary. Here's the airport welcoming party:

  • Governor General Michaëlle Jean
  • Her husband Jean-Daniel Lafond
  • Cannon
  • Wilson
  • U.S. Embassy Deputy Chief of Mission Terry Breese
  • DFAIT Chief of Protocol Robert Peck

At Parliament Hill's Centre Block, Obama will be welcomed by:

  • House of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken
  • Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella
  • House of Commons Clerk Audrey O'Brien
  • House of Commons Sergeant-At-Arms Kevin Vickers
  • Usher of the Black Rod Kevin MacLeod
  • Clerk of the Senate Paul Bélisle

Now the PMO won't tell you, of course, that when Obama heads back to the Ottawa airport at around 3:30 pm or so, he'll be heading to a half-hour or so meeting with Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff (and his foreign affairs critic Bob Rae, apparently.)

Then, when Iggy and Barack are done, Transport, Infrastructure and Communities Minister John Baird will lead the farewell party to bid the president on his way.

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Inching back to Twitter

A few weeks ago I declared that I was de-Twittering.

As I wrote then: “Basically, there's nothing I'm getting from the Twitter folks I follow that I can't get in person, via e-mail, via RSS or via the good old-fashioned phone.”

Plenty of folks in my business and outside my business begged to differ and, various fora, had some helpful and constructive comments.

My old friend Bill tweaked my nose a bit but his post got me thinking a bit more:

If he didn't get much out of Twitter, it's possible that's because he didn't put much in.

But I think he's right. One needs to focus their time and energy on things that provide the most return. Akin values Facebook, Google Reader and Google Notebook — along with old skool email.

…. I really confesss to shaking my head about how he finds the search capabilities of Twitter lacking when compared to, say, Google.

Bill certainly makes sense when he suggests you don't get much out of a social network if you don't put much in. Good point.

In a listserv I'm on (isn't it quaint that there are still listservs? 🙂 ) Peter Panepento, the Web editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy noted that Twitter makes good sense from a publisher's perspective:

For the past month, our Twitter feed is our 8th-largest traffic source. Our followers are finding our content interesting and are clicking through to the site — and they’re passing along the most interesting stuff through “re-Tweets”, which means that we’re getting our headlines broadcast to a much larger audience than we reach on our own.

And Aron Pilhofer, who is the editor of interactive news technologies at The New York Times, also chimed in:

If you go into Twitter thinking it will be a scalpel-like one-way magic source/story generation tool, you'll be sorely disappointed.

What I love about Twitter is the serendipity you almost never get online. Think about it: For the most part, community on the web is about grouping people with people who are exactly like they are. Amazon recommends books others just like me liked. Facebook helps me create communities of people just like me. Etc, etc. Twitter is a community in a different way. For a very low price (click follow), and commitment (boy, it is the 140 character limit nice sometimes), you get to eavesdrop on folks — collectively and individually — you might never run into online any other way.

I'm following PR people, companies, UI gurus, academics, friends, family, comedians, filmmakers, programmers … and, yes, journalists.

Twitter is like riding a subway car with a bunch of interesting people all talking on their cell phones at once. Some conversations will be kind of uninteresting or over your head. Most, you'll ignore. Occasionally, you'll hear something that makes you laugh, or you'll get a “hey, did you hear about….” that intrigues you enough to click through or talk back. Sometimes, I'll post something that resonates with other people the same way.

Sometimes, you get a picture of Hartnett's cat.

What I get out of it on the whole far, far exceeds what I put into it. A lot of it is pointless, but a lot of it is kind of interesting or fun.

So all of that discussion was tipping me back towards another look and effort at Twitter when, today, our editor said all of the reporters at Canwest News Service would be serving up a community Twitter feed Thursday when we cover President Barack Obama's first international visit. [Find our tweets at #obamawa]

That prompted me to quickly look at some tools more efficiently monitor and generate tweets. And I'm pleased to say there's lots of tools out there which go a long way to addressing some of my initial signal-to-noise concerns about Twitter.

First, I've been playing with Twitterific (a geek note here: My home machines and my work machines are running either Mac OS X.4.x or .5.x My mobile computing device/phone is a BlackBerry) and I like it. But I really want to monitor “hashtags“. Maybe I'm dumb but I can't figure out how to “follow” hashtags in the same way I'd follow username. I tweeted about this and most replies told me to follow my hashtag subject using RSS. Yeah, yeah. I know that. But I wanted something that would, like e-mail on BBerry, get pushed to me – in real time.

Don't have anything yet for my BlackBerry that does that but I do for the desktop:

• TweetDeck works great in my work environment where I'm running two monitors (TweetDeck is great if you have a second monitor that you can devote to it) running off my OS X.5 Intel Powerbook. TweetDeck needs Adobe's Air platform which you must install first. That's kind of a drag but what the heck. At home, where I've an Intel-based iMac running OS X.4, TweetDeck doesn't seem to want to install the trick is running the install for Adobe Air first and then going back and running the install for TweetDeck. Works great. In any event, TweetDeck is still a beta product so no complaining is allowed.

• Then one of Evil Geniuses who does technology for the Conservative Party messaged me to try out Monitter, a Tweetdeck-like Web app which also looks good. Very nice.

• Other suggestions I've had: Twhirl and Twitterfox.

OK so with these new tools, how has that changed as a journalist?

Well, journalists approach Twitter, I assume, as both publisher and as newsgatherer. As publisher, I want to be quick, I want to post photos, and I want my tool to deal with link length issues. Tweetdeck does all of that. Very nicely. As a newsgatherer, I really don't know, to be honest, who I want to follow. I do know, however, I want to follow certain topics or subjects. So I need a tool that lets me monitor, in real-time if possible, whatever conversations I'm interested in. Again: I come back to Tweetdeck but Monitter is a good backup. RSS feeds of Twitter hashtag conversations is a distant backup only because I need to fire up my RSS reader; hit refresh and even the, I'm not sure the RSS feed is being generated with the immediacy I require.

After all of two days on #obamawa has it made a difference? Not a big one but some little stuff. There's some anecdotes and trivia that I did not know about that might make it into stories I'll be writing tomorrow. Like most reporters, I may not need every factoid I'm given but I'd rather have them than not.

So we'll see how Twitter and its associated apps get road-tested tomorrow. I'm still a little sceptical but I'm curious and I wish the service well.

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B.C. Government's wireless networks has holes: Auditor General

British Columbia's Auditor General tabled a report today that concludes that there's a lot of holes in the government-run wireless networks:

The Auditor General conducted a high-level security assessment of government wireless access points in the Victoria area. Two-thirds of scanned wireless access points near government buildings used only modest encryption, or none at all, to ensure secure transmission of information. In one particular location, it was possible to accessinformation transmitted over an unsecured link from several hundred metres around the building.

Doyle commented, “Given that wireless technologies are becoming increasingly popular, it is essential that government ensure appropriate levels of security for wireless communication.”

Read the press release [PDF]

It's my tartan!

Akins_Red

Now I'm not nearly as Scottish as my good friend and colleague John Ivison. While I was born in Montreal, both my grandfathers — John Cedric Leith Akin and John “Jack” Lang — arrived in Canada as wee babes from old Stony. John C.L. Akin is my paternal grandfather and through him, I assume, my father and his children inherit their clan affiliation.

Now all along I thought 'Akin' was merely part of Clan Gordon but today I ran across a business in Scotland — House of Tartan — that suggests that 'Akins' has its own tartan. Indeed, we've got not one but two — and they're both mighty sharp, if you ask me.

And I'm even more chuffed to note that 'Akins Red Family Tartan”(pictured on the left) was designed by a Canadian – Steven L. Akins of Alberta. Beauty, eh?

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Canada's access to information regime needs an overhaul: Commissioner

Ripped from our site: Canada's information commissioner says existing access-to-information laws are too weak. and lack measures that would force the federal government to hand over the records Canadians have a right to see.

Commissioner Robert Marleau will table “a shopping list of legislative amendments” next month for MPs to consider. But he says it's vital Treasury Board President Vic Toews take steps to force individual government departments to give their access-to-information offices the money and staff to fulfil their legal obligations under Canada's Access to Information Act.

Marleau said the decision by Canada's Foreign Affairs Department to systematically prevent the release of hundreds of thousands of government records, as first reported by Canwest News Service on Monday, is a symptom of a much broader problem, where bureaucrats are trying to use every administrative trick in the book to avoid a mounting workload.

“There is a systemic problem; it's not just a departmental performance issue. The centre, like Treasury Board Secretariat, has to exercise some leadership to turn this ship around,” Marleau said Tuesday.

Canwest News Service reported Monday that, since January 2008, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) has prevented the release of more than 160,000 pages of government records on everything from the mission in Afghanistan to new free-trade deals to the NATO briefing materials Maxime Bernier left at his girlfriend's home . . . [ Read the rest of the story]

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"As illegal as stink" DFAIT'S application of ATI laws

A story we have up now:

Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department has systematically prevented the release of hundreds of thousands of government records on everything from the mission in Afghanistan to the NATO briefing materials Maxime Bernier left at his girlfriend’s, to new free trade deals, Canwest News Service has learned.

Two legal experts say the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) violated Canada’s Access to Information (ATI) laws when it decided to systematically charge “preparation fees” before responding to Access to Information requests, effectively creating a barrier to government records being sought by ordinary Canadians, academics, businesses, and journalists.

An official with the Office of the Information Commissioner, Parliament’s ATI watchdog, said it is investigating complaints that have been filed over the policy.

“There is an issue there over possible denial of access,” Andrea Neill, the assistant commissioner of information, said Friday.

DFAIT is the only major federal government department insisting “preparation fees” be paid before releasing records under the Access to Information Act.

Preparation fees cover the cost of the censors — the actual act of blacking out sensitive government information. They do not cover the cost of searching for the documents or photocopying.

Ironically, Canwest News Service learned about DFAIT’s policy to charge preparation fees for Access to Information requests through records disclosed because of an Access to Information request.

“This is illegal as stink,” said Amir Attaran, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who has sued the federal government over its disclosure policies. Attaran has used ATI laws to force the federal government to turn over important information about the way Canada was treating prisoners captured in Afghanistan . . . [Read the rest]

Some Throne Speech pics


I try to keep my digital camera handy as I go about my business on the Hill and I do snap some pics from time to time but it can often take a while to publish them. So my apologies for getting around only now to some pics from Throne Speech I – the long version we heard in November. That occasion, which opened the 40th Parliament, was replete with all the pomp and circumstance and Laureen Harper you'd expect. We would see a second version — a Note from the Throne, as that wag Senator Jim Munson would call it — a few months later.

So here's a pic I snapped of Governor General Michaëlle Jean reviewing the troops just before entering the Centre Block of the House of Commons.

I used to publish photos like this here but I'm now going to send you off to Google's PicasaWeb. It's just plain easier to publish them, tag them, and provide other info about them using a service like that.

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Do we need a new Internet? Or just new users?

The Times' John Markoff has a long piece in the paper today to make the point that:

… there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.

What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.

Now, I think Markoff is a tremendous reporter. Indeed, in at least one job interview, but probably more, when asked what reporters I admire I list Markoff and John Fraser — but when you write a story about how dangerous the Internet has become and cite as your sources for that observation people who will sell you software to protect you against that danger, well, I begin to wonder. Markoff also cites some researchers at Stanford, which is certainly a school that's produced a lot of computer and telecom innovations but it's also the school Markoff teaches at. (That point is not disclosed in the piece.)

Now, to be fair, Markoff interviews Purdue's Gene Spafford for the piece and he should — I would if I was writing about the state of Internet security — but Markoff — for whatever reason (the piece is in the Times' Review section — maybe the editors there forced him to take all the geek-speak out. It's happened to me before …) we don't learn much about Spafford's diagnosis of the problem, a diagnosis which, it seems to me, doesn't require a completely new Internet where I have to give up my anonymity for safety:

OSes, overly-permissive email, firewalls, anti-virus that is unable to keep up with the threat, and on and on. Not only are most of these poorly thought out from a security point of view, they are all designed to provide too many generic, permissive services to the widest possible client base. That may be good business but poor security planning. And much of the security solution space is limited responses to specific threats that continue to prop up the rest of the poorly-designed base.

…

The number 1 change we need to make is to understand that issues of security, safety and reliability are not easily measured and deploying the cheapest upfront solution is not consistent with trusted systems. The impact of that would go deep, including into the design of the software we run on our systems. Note that this is true of any security — airport, computer, home or national security. There is a cost involved, and always residual risk.

We have chosen to standardize on a small set of very complex items because some people think they are cheaper to acquire and maintain….based on experiences gained 15-20 years ago with different platforms. Those estimates also don't bear in mind the costs of security, reliability, and other important factors. But until we change the mindset about up-front cost trumping all else, we can't win.

We have to change the way we educate software designers, and the way we hold companies accountable for flaws in code.

We must do a better job investigating and prosecuting computer crime.

These are not fundamentally big shifts in technology — we have the technology for many of these issues now. We simply lack the will to apply it.

I'm not going into detail, because I doubt there are many who really want the answers. They want their Windows machines, on-line games, animated WWW apps, iPods and universal connectivity.

That's from a rant of Spafford's that Dave Farber put out on his list on Dec. 11 (and I'm almost positive Markoff is on Farber's list). It's a shame Markoff didn't explore some of those ideas a bit further and question the assumptions of the Stanford researchers — and others — a bit further.

But back to the basic problem as I see it: It ain't the Internet that's the problem so much as its users.

I had my first e-mail account in (I think) 1987 or 1988. Since then, I have been running around the Internet using machines running DOS, Windows, and Mac operating systems. My home machines have never — never! – been infected with a virus and, so far as I know, no one's stolen my credit card number or my identity. I'm a liberal arts grad, not an electrical engineer, and all I'm pretty sure I've done to enjoy such good fortune is exercise a little common sense.

On the corporate networks I've been on, I've seen one security problem hit home. A virus knocked out the network for a company I once worked for for a few weeks. (That company, incidentally, was running Microsoft server products and a Microsoft operating system on its desktops. If you're running a server, why wouldn't you run OpenBSD? That, my friends, is what the Pentagon uses for its mission-critical, ultra-sensitive servers. The price for that server product: Nuthin'. It's open source.) My point here is: Time and time again, we've heard, mostly from companies who sell computer security products, that the world is ending, that there is a monster virus out there that's about to pull the whole thing down. I'm not convinced. Exercise a little common sense when you compute and I'm sure we'll all be fine.

In any event: If you build a new Internet and you want me to get a license to drive on it, sorry. I'm hanging out here in v.1.

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CFP: Democracy and Technology: Canadian Citizenship in the Information Age

FYI …

Call for Presentations

Democracy and Technology: Canadian Citizenship in the Information Age.

DemTech 2009 will showcase cutting edge projects that use information technology encourage citizen access and foster democratic participation.

DemTech is a pre-conference of the 2009 Annual Conference and Trade Show of the Canadian Library Association, organized by Apathy is Boring, VisibleGovernment.ca and other members of the CivicAccess.ca community.

Date: May 29th 2009

Time: 9:00am – 10:00pm

Location: Concordia University

Registration Cost: free for speakers, $75 for participants (Need-based subsidies will be available. Please email info@demtech.ca for more info)

We are looking for presentations about projects, ideas, and actions that address one of the three DemTech Symposium themes.

Call for Presentations Deadline: March 15th 2009

DemTech 2009's Goals are to foster:

  • Citizen Engagement and Inclusion;
  • Government Accountability;
  • Accessibility to Government Data and Processes.

DemTech 2009's objectives are to:

  • Bring together diverse stakeholders: citizens, technologists, government officials and others.
  • Encourage a National Dialogue about democracy and technology;
  • Encourage grassroots initiatives and new innovative projects.

From the global theme “From Passive to Engaged Citizens,” DemTech 2009's themes are articulated as follows:

  • Consultation & Public Dialogue;
  • Public Policy and Legal Challenges to accessing government data;
  • Technologies to Enable Access.

Submission Guidelines

Proposals must be in English or French, Bilingual Presentations are encouraged;

Presentations will take two forms: Panel (15 min presentation, with 3 other speakers) or Lighting Round (5 min presentations);

Presentations must address at least one of the conference themes;

Participants selected to present will not be paid a per diem, honoraria, or expenses. However their registration fee will be waived.

Proposals Requirements: please send us the following information:

  • Contact Information (name, address, phone, email);
  • Organization or affiliation;
  • Presentation Title;
  • DemTech 2009 Theme Addressed;
  • Preferred Presentation Length (Panel or Lighting Round);
  • Presentation Summary (50 words max. – to be used for promotional purposes);
  • Abstract text (250 words max. – for selection committee only);
  • Presenter Bio (50 words max. – to be used for promotional purposes);  
  • Equipment needed for presentation (PowerPoint, internet, video etc.).
  • Proposals should be sent no later than March 15th 2009 to info@demtech.ca.
  • Presenters who have been selected will be notified by early April.

Any questions should be addressed to info@demtech.ca or call Apathy is Boring (514)844-2472.

To register as a participant, please access the website of the 2009 Annual Conference and Trade Show of the Canadian Library Association) to download the registration form [PDF] for the “P1” Pre-Conference, Democracy and Technology Symposium.

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