tisiwoota

The father of one of my former residents runs a newspaper in Nepal. I had forgotten this bit of personal trivia until one night a few months ago when, on the way to the grocery store, I happened to catch an interview of him (the father) being interviewed on NPR about the severe restrictions the King had imposed on the press following the February coup.

That prompted me to look up the paper’s website, to read about the situation from the ‘inside’ perspective. The first few issues after the restrictions were marked with a defiant tongue-in-cheek vitality. Without printing anything so outright critical as to risk being shut down by government censors, the paper still managed to signal to its readership that it was committed to retaining its independent voice. Much of this was accomplished through satire– editorials focused on nonsense topics and ridiculous metaphors to emphasize the absurdity of both the political situation and the restrictions being placed on the press. The next edition presented readers with a conspiratorial invitation to literally read between the lines. The gimmick wasn’t hiding any particularly incendiary information, but as subsequent letters attest it did help to give people a sense of unity, and perhaps a brief respite from ambient tensions.

A side-effect of these editorials is that they’ve given me a greater sense of personal connection to the struggles– maybe only in a small way, but my humor-appreciation-driven inclination to check in on the continuing satiric takes on the situation has served as a good reminder to keep up with actual news on the subject as well.
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This essay by William Safire in the Time’s Book Review is a good overview of threats to privacy posed by what he terms “the new security-industrial complex.”

As he notes:
“The first civil-liberty fire wall to fall was the one within government that separated the domestic security powers of the F.B.I. from the more intrusive foreign surveillance powers of the C.I.A. The 9/11 commission successfully mobilized public opinion to put dot-connection first and privacy protection last. But the second fire wall crumbled with far less public notice or approval: that was the separation between law enforcement recordkeeping and commercial market research. Almost overnight, the law’s suspect list married the corporations’ prospect list.”

This is one of the reasons I’m wary about things like national DNA databases: while Xaosseed is probably right in noting that such databases are “no worse than most of the other information ‘held in confidence’ by all your service providers”, the existing precedents provide scant reassurance that implementation would remain rigorous and that information would be kept out of the hands of those who might wish to use it for targeting specific persons or groups.

Remember this post about how WIPO was planning to exclude qualified NGOs with expertise on developing issues from its meetings to incorporate a development agenda into its work? Well, there’s good news!

Thanks entirely to the signatures added to the protest petition by you, my vastly incalculably legion readership [well, and perhaps thanks a *tiny* bit to some slight efforts put in by the NGO community], WIPO has agreed to hold additional reform meetings which 17 additional currently unaccredited NGOs will be allowed to attend [[And incidentally, one of the newly-admitted 17, Third World Network, is the NGO my internship mentor was employed at prior to her position at WHO]] .

This will make for a much fairer representation of developing versus developed country perspectives [a ratio previously clocking in at 1:7… which is, of course, a patently absurd imbalance to have at a meeting devoted to development issues].

And as EFF points out in their releases, this first development agenda meeting actually turned out to be “a genuinely substantive policy discussion”:

“For 30 years, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has worked primarily to expand the scope of intellectual property protection around the globe. Whether it’s bringing patents to countries where previously there were none, or expanding the entitlements of copyright holders in developed countries, WIPO has always started from the premise that more IP is always better for everyone.

That’s changing. Countries around the world — even across the “north-south” divide of developed and developing nations — are becoming wary of over-protecting intellectual works. Everything from free speech and open source software to the availablity of essential medicines is impacted by runaway legal regimes, and the world is taking notice.”

So thanks, dear legionly vast and incalculable readership. It was really sweet of you to single-clickedly save the world like that, out of such pure altruism.*

*PS: What’s that? You want to know whether your country of origin ultimately defeated St. Lucia in the per population rankings of petition signatures? Um… well, you see… they never put up an updated bar graph… or, I maybe forgot to check for one, and… I know, I know. I’m sorry. How will you ever collect on the bets you all had riding on this? How will you ever be able to trust me again? But please, forgive me. I’m new at this blogging thing, and I promise I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll never trick you into altruism again.

Well, probably never…