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Seriously bad | Jul 25, 2003 12:08
Scoop's big scoop on the stark shortcomings of the Diebold electronic voting machines being commissioned by the thousand in the US is really starting to get momentum. Alastair Thompson's gutsy move in making the contents of the Diebold ftp server available has allowed the code to be scrutinised by expert researchers, and their verdict seems damning.
The story has reached the New York Times and it appears that it may yet escalate to become a political issue. The Listener's story about it is also getting a lot of hits, I hear.
Why the big deal about these machines and their software? As the Scoop site puts it: "You can overwrite votes. You can vote more than once. The system is vulnerable to both inside and outside attacks. Intruders can overwrite audit logs. You can assign passwords to all your friends."
Whether the various holes and trapdoors in Diebold's software have actually been used to influence an election result is another question altogether. But it is clear now that they could be used to do just about anything. It is hard to see now how a US Presidential election could credibly take place on this technology. Seriously.
I referred my own expert - who has a professional perspective on these issues - to the new stuff on Scoop and his response was:
"Jaysus! If the reported findings regarding the Diebold systems are true then they represent an utterly shoddy replacement for the flaky mechanical voting machines they used in Florida. I've no idea why anyone would build a system like that described in the previous articles. It's not as if security in IT is an immature area of the technology or anything.
"It all goes to prove something I've personally thought for a number of years - here in NZ we should think long and hard before we replace the good old system of counting bits of paper with the voters' choice written on it by hand, with ink."
Read more about it here. Expert commentary welcome.
Doc Searls, the Libertarian-voting editor of Linux Journal, has written an extremely perceptive editorial on the future of the open source movement, Internet culture, big business and the difference between liberals and conservatives. It's here and it's really worth studying.
In the grand tradition of these things, Parliament's health committee is expected to recommend the medicinal use of cannabis - and then quickly pass the buck. I can't help but feel that the people fretting about it as a back-door route to decriminalisation should try looking at it the other way around: is too much fretting over recreational use getting in the way of making the correct decision on grounds of medicine?
Principally, people who would feel more comfortable if cannabis was available in a nice, white pill instead of a smelly old reefer are missing the point. As anyone who has eaten cannabis knows, it's no use at all as an acute remedy, and it's very difficult to govern both the strength of dose and the time it lasts. The customary means of ingestion simply works better and can be controlled more easily by the user. If it's to be cleaned up and medicalised, it will have to be as an oral spray. Could that spray, in the wrong hands, be used in search of a buzz? To some extent, possibly. But frankly, get over it …
Here's the Google News list of stories on the freshly-released US Congressional report on the September 11 terrorist attacks, which appears to show a failure of co-operation between security and intelligence agencies.
But why were 28 pages on the possible role of Saudi Arabia withheld? Not, apparently at the request of the Saudis, who say they want it all made public. And if nothing else, it could have doused the many anti-Zionist conspiracy theories that have held that the foreign power being sheltered is in fact Israel.
Giles Foden has a nice essay on the life of Idi Amin.
Tracey Nelson has updated her essential All Black game stats on Paul Waite's excellent Haka site. Her conclusions on tackles made, speed to the breakdowns and who took the ball up cast an intriguing light on last weekend's game against South Africa.
Interesting points: Jerry Collins has a simply phenomenal workrate, with McCaw not far behind. If you thought Reuben Thorne had a bigger game than usual, you were right. But if you thought Chris Jack played a blinder - and they certainly did on Re:Union - it's not really there in the stats.
And so, tomorrow night, to Australia. Dammit, we should beat them. We should make them pay a terrible price for starting two openside flankers, and smash them up the middle of the park until they beg for mercy. But will we? They've had the home-game hoodoo on us for a while. In truth, I'm expecting a decent, if not spectacular, win to bouy me out the door to 95bFM's annual dance party, Oonst. But one thing's fer sure: this is Carlos's last chance to prove that he's a first-choice goalkicker.
PS: That strange sound you hear is the footfall of The Times of London running backwards very rapidly. Why should this story be playing down the BBC's culpability in the Kelly affair after The Times attacked the Beeb in unison with other Murdoch papers at the beginning of the week? Because, according to another story in the Daily Mail, the BBC's tape of Kelly talking to Newsnight reporter Susan Watts includes mention of Alastair Campbell in a passage where Kelly says the government was "obsessed with finding intelligence to justify an immediate Iraqi threat". And this story in The Independent indicates that Blair's government didn't just lie about Kelly's intelligence connections and about leaking Kelly's name to the press, but, most recently, about who authorised the leak. Good grief.
Departures | Jul 24, 2003 10:10
So, a week of departures: some mourned, some emphatically not. The death under fire of Uday and Qusay Hussein comes, ironically, as the ogre of another age, Idi Amin, slips away in a Saudi hospital.
All three are Muslims - Muslims who inflicted untold woe on their fellow believers - and are presumably on their way to the Islamic version of Hell. Islam teaches that every man's Hell will have been shaped by his evil deeds, but it appears that there will be many forms of fire awaiting them, including Laza (sweeping flames of fire) and Sa'ir (blasting fire). There is also scalding water and scorching wind, and, should they become insensible to the unending torture, they will be provided with fresh skins so that they can feel constant pain again.
Phew. None of this, of course, is real. Islam's Hell is, like that of Christianity, no more than an unpleasant fantasy developed to govern the behaviour of the living. Saddam's sons are dead, Amin nearly so, and that's all. Their atoms will be absorbed back into the body of the Universe, which you can take as a form of redemption if you like.
But if the Husseins are now officially crossed off the US government's bounty website, it is hardly over in Iraq. Hours after the Husseins died, two American soldiers were killed in separate incidents and Iraqi insurgents were vowing bloody revenge. Ahmed Chalabi has already claimed that Qusay was directing the Iraqi resistance, but believing anything he says is now clearly a stupid thing to do.
Yet, as the Christian Science Monitor says, perhaps things are turning.
The challenge for Iraq's occupying forces is, of course, to avoid becoming the ogres themselves, and the evidence there is less promising. A sharply critical new report from Amnesty International details claims from Iraqis of unlawful and inhumane detention, torture and brutal searches, including the shooting of a 12 year-old boy by US troops. Occupying forces are currently unaccountable to any court in Iraq. Iraqi scientists, including at least one who voluntarily presented himself to the occupying forces for questioning, continue to be held with charge, apparently because they can't provide the right answers on weapons programmes. This has to end. And the US has to surrender its imperial fantasies and involve the United Nations in good faith.
Back home in the West, it appears the British Defence Minister Geoff Hoon, a strident Blair loyalist, is to be thrown to the wolves. Somebody authorised the leaking of David Kelly's name to the press, and Tony Blair, in the finest traditions of Shaggy, has declared it wasn't me. The Guardian looks at the element of the dossier affair likely to go septic first.
Meanwhile, the BBC has let it be known that it will provide the judicial inquiry not only with notes of interviews with Kelly by Andrew Gilligan and Susan watts, but with a tape of Kelly apparently expressing serious concern about how Downing Street made the case for war.
On a far more trivial plane, the possibility has been floated of a second-string All Blacks contesting the World Cup in New Zealand's name. There is but a week left until a squad needs to be named, and the NZRFU and its top players can't agree on a win bonus for the World Cup. But it won't happen. The All Blacks will sign, even if they are manifestly victims of the International Rugby Board's onerous and unfair contracts, which will see the IRB derive income from their names and images - PlayStation games, anyone? - long after the tournament is over and, probably, after some of them have quit the game.
Dark actors | Jul 22, 2003 08:04
Would you be surprised if I told you that the phrase "sexed up" does not appear in Andrew Gilligan's now infamous broadcast about Downing Street's handling of Iraqi weapons intelligence?
Tony Blair's press secretary, Alastair Campbell, who apparently escalated the affair to clear his name, is not named either. The story highlights the "45 minutes" claim as one which came from only a single source, and quotes its anonymous confidant - who we now know to be David Kelly - as saying that intelligence officers did not believe it was accurate.
At its most risqué, it quotes Kelly as saying that the September weapons dossier "was transformed in the week before it was published to make it sexier. The classic example was the claim that weapons of mass destruction were ready for use within 45 minutes. That information was not in the original draft."
We now know that last sentence to be true, thanks to the Parliamentary select committee hearings. Those same MPs found that Campbell was not responsible for the alteration, but Gilligan doesn't actually make that allegation in his story.
The strange thing is that Andrew Wilkie, the Australian intelligence officer who resigned in protest before the war, said much the same - and worse - about his own Prime Minister on the Holmes show last night.
We've read in detail about Bush administration officials - and his vice president Dick Cheney - pressuring the CIA to provide intelligence that supported the case for war, and ignoring caveats and qualifications that didn't suit their purposes.
We have even heard much the same about Downing Street from other journalists separately briefed by David Kelly, including another BBC reporter, Newsnight's Susan Watts, whose own report quoted the source we now know was Kelly as saying of the 45 minutes claim: "It was a statement that was made and it just got out of all proportion. They were desperate for information, they were pushing hard for information which could be released. That was one that popped up and it was seized on and it's unfortunate that it was."
You consider all that, and you think, a man had to die for this? And then you wonder what happened to make Kelly tell a journalist by email, after a grilling by a select committee, that there were "many dark actors playing games". What so badly spooks a man who has been up close and personal with the old Iraqi regime?
So is the BBC complicit in Kelly's suicide? Well, it didn't leak his name to the press - we now know that that was done by Ministry of Defence officials, probably under the direction of Defence Minister Geoff Hoon, who has previously lied to the public about it.
But where the BBC got it wrong was in getting way too cute: claiming that its source was "a senior intelligence official" (a claim, incidentally, that Gilligan never made in his broadcast, where Kelly was accurately described as "a British official who was involved in the preparation of the dossier"), and giving the broad impression that Kelly was not the source. The Guardian reports that BBC bosses declined a compromise late in the piece. They didn't want to be seen to take a backward step against Campbell. Had they done so, it's possible that Kelly might be alive today. But hindsight is a wonderful thing.
We don't know yet whether Gilligan sexed up his own report - unfairly paraphrasing Kelly or even inventing a few sentences - but as his and Watts' notes go to the judicial inquiry, we should eventually find out.
Meanwhile, the deputy editor of the Mail on Sunday describes an extraordinary confrontation with a "disturbed and dangerous" Campbell.
Thank goodness, then, for sport. The All Blacks simply thrashed the Springboks at Loftus - although to be fair, they were allowed to. For the second time this season, the ABs have been able to sustain both composure and rhythm across a whole game, scoring seven tries and finishing the game by shattering the Bok scrum. They're looking quite good.
And the Silver Ferns broke the Aussie hoodoo in Jamaica. Netball at this elite level - and face it, there are only two teams that play at such a level - is simply wonderful to watch. Fast, physical, tense, close. You have to wonder how it would look if it was played as widely in the world as football. But, then, it's probably a good thing that it isn't …
Spinning the rates rise | Jul 18, 2003 11:45
I haven't yet discovered how many hundred per cent my Auckland Regional Council rate will rise by this year, but I'm already amazed at the way the ARC has been able to foster the myth that the rise is the result of unprecedented largesse on transport. Because it just isn't.
The ARC has been running ads on 95bFM - and, I presume, other radio stations - telling us all what a mighty bang we're getting for our vastly increased bucks. And yet, the staggering rate rises across the region have very little to do with spending on transport or any other service.
As this story makes clear, the overwhelming factor is an abrupt and substantial shift of the rates burden from businesses to residents. The next influence is a shift in rating methods - from land value to capital value, which, according to a report prepared for the Papakura District Council, disadvantages the region's poorest households.
Neither of these moves was foreshadowed in any way before the last local body elections, and the two most left-wing regional councillors, Sandra Coney and Mike Lee were among the five regional councillors who voted against them. Yet somehow, according to the Herald's Jim Eagles, it's all part of some gross socialist assault on the productive sector. Go figure.
Auckland City residents are, of course, used to being told one thing then seeing another done. We were promised a zero rate rise - and, thanks to another unprecedented and unheralded bout of relief for business and the most wealthy households, some people will be paying 20 per cent more this year.
None of that was in the manifesto of John Banks, but, inevitably, he was quite unabashed last night on Face to Face with Kim Hill. He blithely claimed to have "no hidden agendas", and to have campaigned on the sale of pensioner housing, even though no media organisation has a record of such. He does not, he declared, tell lies, but "I don't have a very good memory". Indeed.
He had an opportunist crack at the ARC, declaring that public transport across the region should be run as a Local Authority Trading Enterprise like Watercare Services. But Watercare sells a resource by the cubic metre; what exactly would a transport LATE be selling, and how would it make a profit? Dunno.
He declared himself concerned about the legalisation of prostitution, because criminal gangs will hijack the industry to "launder money" - actually, they do already, and in theory at least, the Prostutition Reform Bill contains new provisions to prevent it - "just like they have with the drugs trade."
But the drugs trade is illegal. The whole friggin' point of money-laundering is that you do it through legal businesses. It was almost the most deranged argument you could possibly make in the subject.
Kim grimaced at the end of the show, as if she knew she hand't quite cracked it. But I wouldn't blame her. It wasn't like she wasn't well researched. But Banks is hard to pin down because he constantly makes such sweeping statements and won't even blink if he contradicts himself. It's just as effective as the Brian Edwards Teflon media training thing, and it didn't cost him anything to acquire.
Anyway, in other news in the city, a mystery arsonist sets a dozen fires up Queen Street just before a woman self-immolates in Aotea Square. But all is not what it seems. It actually comes across like something happening just beyond the narrative of Chad's novel, Shirker.
And, for your weekend, edification, finally a real Republican scorns the bug-eyed flight from orthodoxy that is the neoconservative political-religious cult in What Happened to Conservatives?, and a withering look at Dubya's track record.
Reader Jeff LePoidevin objected to my referring to Ann Coulter's silly cult tract Treason as a "comic" - on the basis that that was defamatory of comics. Fair call. As the owner of near all the Alan Moore-era issues of Swamp Thing, I ought to have known better.
Craig Ranapia of NZPundit wants people to write to Phil Goff to protest the death of journalist Zahra Kazemi, who died after being arrested at a protest and beaten by Iranian police.
It's an outrage, and it falls into a pattern of suppression of press freedom that currently sees Iran holding 15 journalists in detention, according to Reporters Without Borders (on the other hand, the fact that western TV correspondents can still walk down a city street in Tehran getting vox pops about the government and the protest movement suggests that there are worse places for public dissent).
But Craig's anger might be more convincing had he or his buddy ever expressed a jot of concern about, say, the Israeli government shooting, intimidating and detaining journalists, amid "an assortment of press freedom abuses" noted in the 2002 report of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Or the British journalist killed by IDF fire in May this year, while he was waving a white flag. (An Israeli army investigation later claimed the journalist has been shot by unknown Palestinians, in direct contradiction of eyewitness reports and an autopsy finding. At least the Iranian government has the decency to appear contrite and promise an investigation.)
Then again, Craig did write up the Israeli government's recent decision to withhold press passes and visas from BBC employees where possible as, um, a victory for free speech. Even his handful of readers found that a bit hard to work out.
Then, of course, there were those unfortunate accidents involving journalists in Baghdad. Couldn't be helped, presumably.
By the way, I think it's a bit rich for anyone who appears to regard phoning Newstalk ZB talkback as a career path to call anyone else a "funny little chap", let alone a "fool". Over here on Public Address we're all rather successful, but I'll let Chad tell you his news when he's ready…
Anyway, it's been a week of 6am starts (and one day, a 9pm finish) and I don't think I'll make it to the Family & Naval Tavern on K Road to see the D4 play tonight, but you should, really. I'm saving myself for Goldenhorse at the Masonic tomorrow night, then the Alhambra, to watch the test match live from South Africa. I fully expect strange eclectic pop and rugby to be the winners on the day…
First things first | Jul 16, 2003 08:30
Thank goodness for the resumption of international rugby this weekend: the absence of actual play was creating a vacuum for doubt, recrimination and the messianic Cult of Mehrtens.
So John Mitchell has named his first Tri-Nations side, giving the nation's amateur rugby analysts an actual team to bitch about and handing the goalkicking duties back to Carlos Spencer. This is something of a surprise - and certainly will be to wee Ben Blair, who presumably expected to at least be on the bench after being flown all the way to South Africa - but it's actually a good idea.
While there are some who believe Merhts will return from injury, indifference and club-rugby kickabouts to save All Black rugby, lead us to glory, throw The One Ring into Mt Doom from whence it was forged, etc, etc, the sane view is that the season-long form and obvious desire of Spencer is a safer bet. He can kick goals - and did, when both Carter and Mehrts choked in the Super 12 final - and t'would be better if he continue to do so, rather than obliging the coach to base his selections at fullback or 2nd-five on goalkicking ability.
There will continue to be searching examinations of the play and captaincy of Reuben Thorne, and of Mitchell's coaching ability. Frankly, I just wish someone would stop slipping them heavy sedatives before their post-match press conferences. If you have The Rugby Channel you can amaze and amuse yourself after-match by watching these strange events, where only Robbie Deans appears fully conscious.
Meanwhile, unlike Rod Vaughan on TV One's alleged current affairs flagship Sunday, the Herald is doing a decent job of trying to provide a rounded explanation of the seabed and foreshore issue. Tapu Misa has pointed out that "One standard of citizenship implies that Maori have the same recourse to the laws of this land as other New Zealanders. That a Government should be so ready to extinguish those rights, in contravention of the courts and international law, should give us all pause."
Law professor Jock Brookfield pointed out that "both the Herald [in its original editorial on the subject] and Sir Douglas [Graham] seem to see the court's decision as a judicial novelty. It is not. The trend and logic of court decisions and of much legal writing has long been against the Crown's contention that it holds all ungranted areas of foreshore and seabed free of any Maori claim to customary title."
The paper had a second go in an editorial headed As long as we can all go to the beach. There's no point in panicking over this, and no justice in suddenly passing legislation to get around decisions that are quite correct in law but not to our liking.
The re-emerged Ken Mair - bumptious and presumptuous as ever - might want to shut up too, of course: he and his Maori fundamentalist buddies don't have conventional title to a single grain of sand until such time as the Maori Land Court upholds a claim, and it's yet not certain that it will, even if it gets the chance to.
In the end, there will probably have to be some legal redefinition towards a concept of guardianship - our unique and unusual access to our coastline is that important. In a third editorial on the subject published this morning, the Herald concludes: "With common sense on both sides, and an eye on the consequences of failure, a fair solution can be found." Amen.
By the way, here's Public Access New Zealand's page on the Queen's Chain.
Also this morning, welcome notice that the government will be extending relationship rights to same-sex couples. Fine, don't call it marriage, just recognise the rights and needs of people in "civil unions". There suddenly seems to be a momentum in the modern world behind what ought to be a straightforward human rights issue. It may of course, take a little longer in those countries presently struggling with modernity, like the United States of America.
A couple of views on why planning for post-war Iraq is such a debacle: other US government official: a Knight-Ridder report finds recently departed US government officials blaming the blind, stupid faith of Defense Department officials that everything Rummy said would happen, "Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader as the country's leader." And an editorial in the Middle East Report advances the view that "there were never any serious plans to 'win the peace' in Iraq."
Salam Pax finds some reason for optimism over the new interim government council.
Documentary film-maker Grant Wakefield provides a brief, riveting history of the West's relations with Iraq. Worth reading.
My Listener column this week looks at the way the British government posted the second, "dodgy", dossier to the Downing Street website as, wait for it, a Microsoft Word document - complete with a hidden edit history containing the names of everyone who touched it. Brilliant.
Rumsfeld, pressed on his preposterous claim before the US Senate that he learned the Niger uranium information was bogus "only days ago", first says he ought to have said "recent weeks" and then admits that he had advice way back in March. That's quite a lot of "days", isn't it?
Interesting letter to The Guardian on Dossiergate: "So what if Iraq sought the supply of uranium from Africa? Iraq already has hundreds of tons of uranium at its disposal. Without enrichment facilities this material is useless for nuclear weapons."
Jack Straw caught spinning too.
And Fight the Patent is the centre of the local resistance to the fight against DE Technologies' attempt to extract tens of thousands of dollars from New Zealand companies who sell things over the Internet on the basis of its patent on, um, selling things over the Internet …
Culinary crimes | Jul 11, 2003 13:18
Well, that's that sorted: the sweetcorn on pizza thing, I mean. Apparently it's a cultural thing. Two Hard News readers, Renee Leckey and Ian Johnston, have been in touch to advise that sweetcorn on pizza is all but unavoidable in Japan and Korea.
Says Renee:
I lived in Korea for two years and never managed to get my pizza place to skip the corn, even when I asked in korean for 'no corn'. Anyway, in the end i grew resigned, threw down my guns and came to tolerate corn on pizza. am now in france and have not yet sampled any pizza so cannot advise you of presence of corn or not.
Says Ian:
Come live in Asia and you'll see sweetcorn on pizza everywhere. Hard to take, I know - I've refused to touch it for the last 12 years I've been an expat in Asia.
More worringly, this from Paul Caples:
Flashback to Hamilton mid-80s. After a solid day's skiing the lads stop overnight in Hamilton for some R&R. Victuals were required, so we order pizza ... and sure enough, sweetcorn! Haven't stayed in Hamilton since ...
Craig Ranapia on NZPundit claims to be disturbed that I thought the statement issued by National's broadcasting spokeswoman Katherine Rich - which held that "New Zealanders should be very nervous" that Brian Edwards is doing a chat show - was silly. Well, it was, and as Damien discovered on the radio, even Rich didn't actually believe what she said in her press release.
Ranapia also quotes from a fairly bizarre column by Jim Hopkins. I don't usually read Hopkins because I find his prose style unbearable, but in this case his content is a bit laughable too. The attempt to equate Brian Edwards with Alastair Campbell is fatuous. Alastair Campbell works at Downing Street and deals with the press and his Prime Minister on almost an hourly basis. Brian Edwards lives on Waiheke Island: he is not "the Prime Minister's principal media adviser" - that would be Mike Munro - he's the co-owner of a media training business.
I have some misgivings about that line of work, especially with politicians (it's made the job of interviewers harder) and I wouldn't do it myself, but it's hard to expect Edwards to dump his business to front a TV show that might only run for 12 weeks. Hopkins' flip comment that "it's only natural that the beneficiaries of privilege in TVNZ will know exactly what's expected of them - and provide it," by, presumably, hiring Edwards to front a personality chat show, borders on the defamatory.
For God's sake, even Lindsay Perigo was keen on the idea of Edwards returning to television for a long-form interview show when I interviewed him last year. Is he part of the vast left-wing conspiracy too? (I'd quite like to see Perigo back doing interviews too, for that matter - because he's a good interviewer, rather than because I subscribe to his politics. He's always good value on Mediawatch.)
This idea of ideologically profiling broadcasters at the door has become a bit of meme with the right this year. There appears to be a belief that broadcast appointments shouldn't be made on the basis of talent, experience or desire, but on the basis of declared political belief.
Thus, Pam Corkery will forever be referred to as a "former Alliance MP", even though she has spent nearly her whole career as a professional broadcaster. Reality check: she was a celebrity list MP for five minutes then bailed out and wrote a book dumping on her erstwhile leader and his party. The Last Word is clearly a ghastly mistake, but her brief fling in politics is not the problem with it.
And apart from anything else, this is all a bit rich coming from a website that has been singing the praises of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi this week. Berlusconi, you may recall, has established hands-on editorial control of 90 per cent of Italian television, via his private ownership of three commercial channels and his unabashed direction of the public broadcaster Rai, and is currently pushing a law through the Italian senate to further extend his influence. Berlusconi also isn't averse to forcing the resignation of newspaper editors he doesn't like. Apparently, he's NZPundit's kinda guy …
Reason.com is fretting over US forces' prospective entry to Liberia. I can see their point. But frankly: you created the damn country, you clean it up …
Dorothy Rabinowitz addresses a handful of the historical howlers in Ann Coulter's new comic, er, sorry, book, in the Wall Street Journal. The forum at the bottom is sort of interesting, if only as a measure of right-wing denial.
And the Miami Herald has the first story on the forthcoming report from the congressional investigation into the September 11 attacks:
A long-awaited final report on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will be released in the next two weeks, containing new information about U.S. government mistakes and Saudi financing of terrorists.
Former Rep. Tim Roemer, who served on the House Intelligence Committee and who has read the report, said it will be ''highly explosive'' when it becomes public.
That should be entertaining.
Oh, and I said this six months ago: "Yes, there, will be flag-waving and relief as the tanks roll in - but what happens when 100,000 US troops are still in Iraq six months - or five years - later? This is a country with a brutal and sophisticated secret police. Which is more likely: that they just melt away on cue, or that they start picking off American boys from the freshly-liberated rooftops? Does the word "Lebanon" mean anything?"
Scoop's scoop | Jul 10, 2003 12:16
If you had trouble reaching Scoop.co.nz yesterday, it was because Scoop got Slashdotted. The Wellington site's big story - bigger than Watergate, it was claimed - made the forums of the ultimate geek site, and people came to look.
So, is there anything in the story? As an IT writer of more than 10 years' experience, it looks that way to me. Had it been my scoop, I wouldn't have used the words "Bigger than Watergate", but if the technical profile of Diebold Systems' voting machine technology, as presented by Scoop and author Bev Harris, is correct, then it's potentially alarming: apart from anything else, democracy relies on a Microsoft Access database?
Two new stories - one highlighting conflicting statements about modem access to the machines - have been posted today.
There are probably three separate issues here: the generic unfitness of electronic voting systems that don't leave a hard audit trail; particular deficiencies in the Diebold system; and the somewhat incendiary speculation about the deliberate misuse of such a system to influence election results.
I don't really want to comment on that last one, although Harris's Black Box Voting website lines up news stories about odd results and political partisanship.
Elections are being held with Diebold voting machines in 37 US states. Surely the officials responsible would never buy into a system without being convinced of its integrity?
You'd be surprised at what a good marketing team can achieve: this reminds me quite a bit of the Mondex electronic cash system, a wholly offline stored value card technology in which six leading New Zealand banks bought a stake in 1996. I scored some world scoops of my own with stories highlighting exactly what was wrong with the Mondex technology. The banks, here and in Australia, eventually backed off their brilliant investment.
I made use of a number of sources in these stories, including a risk management expert who'd tried to blow the whistle at one of the banks, and Dr Ross Anderson, a Cambridge University academic who is one of the foremost independent experts on electronic security. Anderson has testified in a number of cases of ATM fraud, showing that security on ATM machines, including those sold by Diebold, can be compromised. He is also a public sceptic on electronic voting systems like the Diebold one.
One consultant with industry expertise in electronic voting systems has already written a scathing letter about Diebold on the basis of what Scoop has revealed. There's some interesting comment on Slashdot too.
Yesterday, I also contacted someone with relevant expertise, who said that on the basis of what had been published, and without the time required to look into the code made available, he could not say either way whether the system was or was not secure, although "the modeming of results might be a weak point."
On the issue of whether there was an audit trail, he said:
This is, I think, the crux. But I don't know - is there? I'd have to look at the database and code to determine that. Once again, it's standard practice in designing most database systems (not just this type) to include triggers in the database which disallow deletes and also audit trail critical tables time-stamping changes and registering who made the change. Choice of Access does, as you have already pointed out, call into question the security aspect. However this could be addressed if the system is managed in a secure way internally - ie: how do these systems actually roll out & get used?
Was there a reasonable explanation for the multiple ledgers Harris and Scoop discovered in the system?
It sounds a bit suss, but without talking to the designer you just can't point at this as evidence of any kind of problem. There may be a perfectly good reason for it. Depending on how it is used this might even increase security.
Could tallies in one of the ledgers be altered without leaving a formal record of the change?
Once again the Devil is in the detail. It depends on how the system is designed, and also how it is managed internally - procedures etc.
Any other observations?
Looking at the Diebold website my personal feeling was that if I was in charge of setting up elections of any kind I would need a *whole lot more* technical info regarding auditing and security before I'd consider them.
In short, by far the most important aspect of any system of this kind is the audit trail, and the security of that audit trail. Manufacturers of these systems have to realise that they are replacing a paper-based system which is operated within a well-tested framework of cross-checking by skilled and dedicated people. They have to match that, and securely provide an audit trail for each and every vote made.
To summarise, the Diebold website give me *nothing* in the way of information regarding this aspect, but the articles purporting to "expose" the system didn't convince me that anything was wrong either.
Wow - independent investigation frustrated by a regime that refuses to allow state employees to be questioned without a government minder present. What does that remind you of? Curiously, the investigation being frustrated - still - is the one into the September 11 attacks. The chairman of the federal commission has accused the Bush administration of "intimidation" of witnesses.
The Act Party really should get a clue itself before accusing the Greens of having a "tenuous grip of biosecurity issues". Gerry Eckhoff has lately been sounding off with clangers like this: "Genetically-modified organisms pose no health risks." Actually, Gez, it depends on what kind of organisms they are. An organism isn't automatically dangerous because it has been modified - but it's not automatically safe either. That's why we have regulations.
Winter | Jul 08, 2003 14:59
So it's school holidays, the kids spent all day yesterday bickering, it's raining, I've got deadlines up the wazoo, I've put my back out, and - oh goody - GM's back on the agenda.
In the weird way GM events have of gravtitating, last week's Erma report was followed not only by the BSA's decision on TV3's Corngate special (see below for comments on both) but by the mysterious but genuine discovery of inappropriate genetic material in a pizza topping mix shipped to Japan. Let's get this out of the way first: who the hell puts sweetcorn on pizza?
Various people are having words in my ear about all this. Does this latest discovery - which involves seed from Novatis/Syngenta, the same company that provided the Corngate seeds - lend weight to the claim that that fateful 1999 shipment did contain a little GM material? I think it does, but it's not a slamdunk. One event does not prove another, and we don't even know whether the two seeds lots have anything in common but brand. In the end, you're left with the question of whether politicians and officials wilfully lied about the GM status of the shipments, or changed tack after they received (doubtless welcome) expert advice from Dr Poulter that the test results they had were not reliable. I'm inclined to wait for the select committee inquiry to wash up.
I do wish the Greens could find someone other than Sue Kedgley to front on this. Every time she starts flapping her arms I start closing my ears. Mind you, Marian Hobbs needs to get some new cue-cards before she does any more interviews.
It ought to be pointed out that under the new European Union regime, both the original seed batch (assessed this week at not more than 0.05 per cent Bt11 corn, or five seeds in 10,000) and, so far as I can see, the subsequent corn product, would officially be regarded as GM-free and passed for planting.
The European threshold for soya seeds, for example, is 0.7 per cent, more than 10 times what was reckoned to be in the local batch. In New Zealand, a zero-tolerance regime applies - the discovery of a single seed will prompt the destruction of an entire shipment. It is simply wrong to say the New Zealand applies lax rules to seed imports. (The controversial "interim protocol" briefly and illegally applied while the Corngate panic was taking place behind closed doors, would have allowed a 0.1 per cent presence, making it still a far stricter protocol than Europe's.)
It is extremely likely that low-level presence of GM seeds in commercial seed lots is not new. What has changed is the viability of testing for extremely low concentrations, so we've started to find it. The only way around this issue is to either stop importing seeds - which would actually cause the collapse of certain crop industries - or try and get them somewhere else. The proposal advanced by GE Free NZ - making companies like Syngenta wholly liable for any damages if GM seed is found in a non-GM batch - would simply result in seed companies refusing to do business with New Zealand.
This has nothing to do with the lifting of the GM moratorium and it's not a food safety issue either: products made from Bt11 corn are approved for consumption in this country, and I sincerely do not think they're hazardous to health. The greatest fear is fear itself, in the form of consumer sentiment in some of our export destinations. It doesn't matter if Europeans think GE will make them grow horns - if they shy away from it in their supermarkets, it's a genuine issue.
I still think the regulatory regime developed in the wake of our Royal Commission is a model one - few other jurisdictions have anything as good. But good law must still be well executed, and the government ought to be at pains to win public confidence in its infrastructure before and after October, when the moratorium on applications for GM release ends.
I've also had a few emails (and a lengthy and concerned answerphone message from a friend) regarding my recent venting about the overnight introduction of the new system for immigration applications. Oh, alright then. Let's see how it works in practice. But I still feel like my would-be immigrant friends have been treated shabbily by the system, not just at present, but all the way along, and I'm still embarrassed by it.
I fear this is about me: the attention-deficit geeks on Slashdot are discussing a claim that getting information causes a "dopamine squirt" in humans, a rush similar to that given by nicotine and other drugs. You can even be addicted to information.
Lots of people thought I'd like Government Information Awareness, an MIT-based project aimed at maintaining "a symmetry of accountability" in the face of the recent rollback of privacy in the US by collecting and compiling "information on individuals, organisations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America." Yes, I do like that.
Only weeks after that lovely Vanity Fair spread, the British public's trust in Tony Blair continues to plummet, along with support for involvement in Iraq. Latest poll is in The Times.
In other poll action, Canadians are happy, which is possibly partly because, as a Naomi Klein column points out, suddenly, they're interesting.
And has this poll given us all a look at the likely Democratic challenger for the US presidency? Howard Dean ("a pro-gay, pro-gun peacenik" according to Radar) achieved a storming and surprising result. Two reasons for this: one, he's Internet-savvy and runs not only a website but a weblog. Two: he's not an insipid, compromised crypto-Republican like most of the other Democrat prospects. Interesting …
Corngate revisited | Jul 07, 2003 12:59
On Friday afternoon, in the hours after the Broadcasting Standards Authority released its decision on complaints over TV3's so-called "Corngate" special, the news angle you heard depended greatly on what radio station you were listening to.
While National Radio was reporting that the BSA had upheld several of the complaints against TV3 (from the Prime Minister's office, the Life Sciences Network and individual citizens) and Newstalk ZB was telling its listeners TV3 had been "rapped over the knuckles" and that the BSA had "on most counts" agreed with the complainants, Canwest radio stations were giving every impression that TV3 had been vindicated.
Canwest is also, of course, the owner of TV3. The usual opponents of foreign cross-media ownership do not appear to have been jumping up and down about what might be seen as a toeing of the company line.
Before I go further, I want to note that the timing of this story, and the way in which it was mounted was the undoing of a number of journalists - myself included. It took me several tries to unwind Hard News from the rather rash statements I made in the first 48 hours of the story, and I hosted what I now regard as a fairly poor Mediawatch programme that week. I would hope to do better next time, and I would also hope I'm not the only one feeling that way.
I'm not looking here at the government's role in this, largely because its reckoning will come in the form of the select committee inquiry into the original allegations.
So what did the BSA actually say? Well, the full decision is here on Scoop and I think it's a literate and nuanced document. By all means, read the whole thing. But BSA decisions, because of their structure, can take some wading through. So here's what I think.
Both TV3 and Seeds of Distrust author Nicky Hager himself have welcomed the fact that the BSA did not find fault with the facts of the story. This is more than a little disingenuous. What the BSA did - as it almost always does in such cases - was decline to determine the scientific facts.
[377] The Authority notes TV3's comment as to whether the seed was or was not contaminated, when it wrote in response to the complaints that the item was inaccurate in describing the corn as contaminated:
It is not the function of this Committee to determine whether the corn had been genetically modified. This Committee lacks the expertise to determine such an issue. It appears that scientists, who are experts in this area, cannot themselves agree on whether the tests confirm that the corn was genetically modified.
In other words, TV3 wasn't prepared to unequivocally state that GM corn was present in responding to the complaints, so it's a bit rich to expect the BSA to do:
[378] The Authority is similarly unable to determine those aspects of the accuracy complaint. It notes from recent discussions in Parliament that the matter is apparently yet to be resolved. It accepts that the early tests which were conducted suggested that GM material was present but this finding was not confirmed by later tests. It also accepts the scientific view that there was an acceptable confidence level which allowed the Minister for the Environment (Hon Marian Hobbs) to state when interviewed on 3 News on 11 July:
From the testing and retesting I've been able to confidently say there was none planted, there was none there.
What the authority did do was to uphold TV3's right to conduct a demanding and aggressive interview without tipping off the Prime Minister in advance as to its specific content. Complaints about the interview per se were not upheld:
[319] In sum, the Authority considers that both the interviewer and the Prime Minister, who is an experienced interviewee, were challenging in their questions and comments, and that the Prime Minister was not treated unfairly given the nature of the interview. The Authority accepts that not all members of the public support an aggressive interviewing style, but aggression per se does not constitute a breach of the requirement for fairness.
But, on the other hand, the authority takes the view that there was a public interest justification for the story and the interview, but believes that the Prime Minister had a right to know when she was interviewed what was specifically being alleged against her, and by whom:
[325] The Authority upholds the complaint that the fairness requirement in Standard 6 was breached on the grounds that the presentation of the interview was unfair because the Prime Minister was not advised of the source of the specific allegations. It was also unfair that the Prime Minister was not told that the person who advanced the allegations had presented his conclusions in the same programme as the interview with the Prime Minister, but before her.
But I think it's the following part of the decision that gets to the nub of the matter. The authority again endorses the right of the broadcaster to conduct a tough interview in the public interest. But it believes that tough questions ought also to have been asked of the source of the allegations. Interestingly, the decision specifically harks back to the Holmes' show's infamous "brain drain" story - a case in which the broadcaster had an exclusive deal with an interview subject (in that case, the hapless Richard Poole) to whom it failed to apply sufficient public scrutiny.
[396] The Authority notes that it is not considering again the aggressive style said to be adopted by the interviewer when questioning the Prime Minister. That is a matter of fairness and the Authority has discussed and declined to uphold that matter in its review of Standard 6. Rather, it is now determining the aspect that the interviewer adopted different approaches when interviewing Mr Hager and the Prime Minister and, in doing so, breached the requirement in Standard 5 for objectivity and impartiality. The Authority notes the absence of the field tape of the interview with Mr Hager and records that it probably would have been useful in determining this aspect of the complaints.
[399] The Authority considers that reasoning should also apply to Mr Hager. As Mr Wierda pointed out as an aspect of his Standard 4 complaint, Mr Hager is a skilled publicist and has considerable expertise in television. In addition, while not standing for political office, Mr Hager published his book during an election campaign. In the Authority's opinion, he should have been exposed to similarly robust questioning in the interests of impartiality. Instead, in the 3 News Special and subsequent programmes submitted by the broadcaster as being in the period of current interest, Mr Hager was treated in either a deferential or neutral manner in the segments of the interview which were broadcast.
[400] The Authority accepts the validity of TV3's view as to its responsibility to make public those issues which are of public interest. Nonetheless, it also has an obligation in that type of situation to ask difficult questions on behalf of the public, which, the Authority finds, it failed to do in its questioning of Mr Hager.
It really couldn't be more clear than that. In sizing up the interviews, the BSA had asked for the "field tapes" containing the full interviews with both Clark and Hager:
[393] … TV3 provided the former which showed that the interview was approximately seven minutes longer than the interview which was broadcast. There were about four minutes of scene setting, before any part of the interview was screened, in which the interviewer raised the issues and asked some questions about the labelling of GM content on food. Then there is about a three minute sequence in the middle of the interview which was not broadcast. The focus during this segment is on ERMA's reports to the Minister about specific events in late 2000 and early 2001. The format and style of the segments not broadcast were consistent with the substantial segments of the studio interview which were broadcast.
[394] TV3 was unable to provide the full tape of the interview with Mr Hager, advising:
The field tapes of the interview with Mr Hager were not preserved and have been reused in accordance with normal procedure.
[395] The Authority is astounded at TV3's actions. In view of the way TV3 promoted the item, and the 300 emails and 200 calls to the switchboard TV3 claimed to have had, the broadcaster must have suspected that it could have a substantial impact on the election campaign. Given that reaction and the publicity the interview did in fact generate, it would have been reasonable for TV3 to expect a formal complaint. The Authority is unable to view the field tape with Mr Hager and can, therefore, make no conclusions on the basis of the Hager field tape.
This is a very poor look for an organisation seeking to accuse somebody else of a cover-up, and the authority, in my view, had every right to be "astounded".
Perhaps there was nothing embarrassing or compromising on the raw tape of the Hager interview. The point is, we don't get to know, because TV3 destroyed the evidence. Yes, field tapes are recorded over as a matter of course. But TV3 also has a detailed logging system under which potentially controversial content on field tapes is kept. They can hardly claim they didn't know that this interview wasn't going to be controversial.
The lingering impression is that TV3 agreed too readily to a confidential, exclusive deal that hampered its ability to do the story justice by scrutinising all sides. The irony is that the resulting furore probably had the net effect of damaging the credibility of the book itself, which, whatever view you take of its more incendiary conclusions, is about things that really happened.
I hope that any punishment applied to TV3 is kept light - for the BSA to exercise its ultimate sanction of removing the station from air for all or part of a day would be counterproductive. After all, democracy does depend on the media's ability to write and screen stories like this. So, by all means, keep doing the hard stories. Just do them better in future.
Bad seeds? | Jul 03, 2003 11:14
Is anyone else wondering if perhaps we overlooked the real story in the midst of last year's Corngate wrangling? While the central contention in Seeds of Distrust - malign corporate influence at the highest levels of government - looks unprovable, the bedlam in officialdom ought to have been evident to anyone who looked.
The problems indicated in the independent review of the Environmental Risk Management Authority released yesterday are almost certainly not new. Many of its findings - poor internal communication, a bitter turf war with MAF, ego clashes, confusion over roles - were present in the fine print of Corngate. Most of this business was about the officials.
Given the probability that its principal sources lay within Erma, it was unlikely that this would be the spin of the book. But the Greens are right: this all has to be sorted out quickly and firmly if there is to be confidence in Erma's ability to assess risk and administer the new rules on GM release from October.
So, will we ever have an immigration regime with a modicum of consistency? I'm angry about this week's sudden diversion - pulling the rug out from under 20,000 applicants pending approval - because I know a family who have been utterly stitched up by it. They are lovely people, they have skills and they would have made fine New Zealanders. Now they have no choice but to walk away from their commitment and go home. It's disgraceful. And I can't help but feel that the new system will prove unsustainable and will itself have to be overhauled sooner rather than later.
Er, what exactly are our soldiers going to Iraq for? Reconstruction or peacekeeping? And why does this Guardian story quote Donald Rumsfeld as saying the foreign force of which they will be part will allow US soldiers to be rotated home for "a rest"? Convince me this isn't Vietnam, please.
On the other hand, co-operative foreign deployments are quite clearly the major demand on the New Zealand military in the current environment. We have pledged more than 700 defence staff to at least 19 overseas posts this year, apparently vindicating the government's strategic emphasis on the Army and on resources for peacekeeping. I suspect a decision to pour hundreds of millions into second-hand F16s would have been looking pretty silly by now. Unless, of course, you figure that fighter aircraft are what we need in the Solomons …
This astounding interview with 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern (no hand-wringing liberal, then), arguing that the current US administration has deeply eroded the CIA's ability to give truthful advice, has been mentioned a lot this week. It's really worth reading. (Thanks to Zach Bagnall for the link - he spotted it in the forums at nzgames.com, of all places.)
Salam Pax isn't updating his own blog this week, but he's written good stuff for the Guardian on his current visit to Basra.
And, finally, my old friend Claire Turner is laid to rest in Wellington today, having finally succumbed to an inexorable cancer. It's ironic that someone who poured herself into brightening the lives of HIV sufferers should have had to face her own death so soon. She had the brightest wigs, the boldest attitude and the biggest heart. Goodbye Claire. We will always love you.
In pictures | Jul 01, 2003 10:15
Sure, it's the break you have when you're not having a break, but I'm glad nonetheless that the government's solution to the film investment problem has, officially, steered clear of the tax system.
Film and TV producers spending more than $50 million within New Zealand will make themselves eligible for a grant equivalent to 12.5 per cent of their expenditure. It amounts to the same thing as getting their GST back, but it's, er, different.
The rationale is that investment deemed culturally valuable should be attracted through a positive initiative, rather than through any special favours in the tax system. History demonstrates that overly generous tax breaks tend to aid the production of too many bad movies.
The immediate value lies in the prospect of the expat Kiwi Andrew Adamson, the co-director of Shrek, filming The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe in New Zealand, with Weta Workshop and Weta Digital working on it. Jim Anderton had apparently had a better briefing than the rest of us: last night he was talking in terms of a five-film project, at about $200 million a film. The subsequent films will inevitably depend on the commercial success of the first, but Anderton appeared to be throwing off every signal that the first film will be made here. Cool.
And, at last, Bill Ralston has been announced as TVNZ's new head of news and current affairs. I got interviewed about it yesterday by One News, 3 National News and Morning Report.
It's a bold choice, to put it mildly, but I like what Ralston has been saying. His predecessor, Heaton Dyer, was focused on presentation and the showpiece programme (his legacy is Sunday, and the One News redesign). Ralston is emphasising earthier, more journalistic values. Ian Fraser hinted pretty strongly at major changes to come.
Good luck to Ralston if he can pull it off. In a sense he's joining a process that has already begun, in small initiatives like the pruning of the florid One News style. But the question Ralston will have to answer, of course, is: can he manage? He wasn't exactly the master administrator at Metro magazine, and I figure he'll need good operational support. But for the moment, well, go Bill ...
One thing that isn't doing him any favours is silly press releases like this one from the National Party's Katherine Rich. Rich's welcoming of Ralston as a softer touch for the political right (which follows similar comments from Murray McCully) will simply have made him cringe.
The centre-right's recent obsession with the alleged political biases of broadcast hosts is part of its slightly delusional new culture of grievance. According to Rich, New Zealanders, should be "very nervous" that Brian Edwards is to host a personality interview show on Saturday nights. Oh get a grip, you silly woman. If National thinks its problem is that Pam Corkery is doing gabby interviews on a late news programme that no one watches, it's in even worse shape than anyone thought.
Britain and the US appear to be going very separate ways over Iran. While Jack Straw has been in Tehran looking to engage, winning cautious support from the official Iranian news agency - and unequivocally ruling out an invasion under any circumstances - the Americans have been looking to put on the frighteners by grooming their own exiled dissident. We can only hope he is not the new Chalabi.
Salam Pax is getting gloomy about the future in Iraq, but is as readable as ever. He has links to some excellent photography and a female Iraqi blogger. Go look.
And no, I didn't watch any of Test The Nation last night. How exactly can a programme claim to measure the national IQ when its sample is a bunch of people with nothing better to do than waste three solid hours watching ultimately meaningless infotainment? That's skewing things down a bit, don't you think?
Listener up | Jun 30, 2003 11:00
The Listener has a new website this morning. I'm pleased and proud to be able to say that it has been constructed by CactusLab, the small but perfectly formed firm that built Public Address.
It's a nice, clean site with plenty of copy online - including my column
- and a 95bFM banner ad. Online editor is Mark Revington. Go and have a look.
TVNZ will finally announce Bill Ralston's new job as head of news and current affairs in a briefing to news staff at 2.15pm today. I'll comment on that tomorrow.
The rugby: well, we won. And for about 20 minutes, with Joe Rockocoko running in a hat-trick, the All Blacks looked like world-beaters. On the other hand, the second-string French forward pack dished out a drubbing in the scrums and lineouts, and the prospect of yet another distressing French comeback loomed for quite a while in the second half. In some ways, I'm less happy with this win than I was with the narrow win in the test against England.
Andre Watson controlled the game pretty well, with the exception of a handful of moments when he appeared to be refereeing a game being played in a parallel universe. He ruled a forward pass to disallow what would have been a decisive fourth try to the All Blacks. The reply showed the pass travelled a good metre or two behind the advantage line. It wasn't even near forward.
Then, minutes later, Watson whistled up a penalty in front of the All Black posts, alleging that Steve Devine had punched one of the French players. No such thing was evident in the replay. The French slotted the penalty, adding insult to the injury of the disallowed try at the other end of the field.
Rugby is a very difficult game to referee - its most important laws are basically open to interpretation. Offences are committed almost constantly. But it's still hard to understand how professional referees can whistle up infringements they plainly cannot have seen, because they didn't actually take place.
Anyway, the war between Downing Street and the BBC is getting more intense by the day. Tony Blair's spin maestro, Alastair Campbell, who was accused in a BBC report of "sexing up" the first Iraq weapons dossier. The second "dodgy dossier" has already been acknowledged by Downing Street to have been plagiarised rubbish - but not before Blair described it in Parliament as "factually accurate" and containing "fresh intelligence", and Colin Powell commended its "exquisite detail" to the United Nations Security Council.
Campbell is committing the fundamental offence for a spin doctor of actually becoming the story, and there is already a move from within Labour ranks to get rid of him and damn his special relationship with the Prime Minister. On Friday night, he turned up unannounced at Channel 4, just as the evening news was beginning, and demanded to be interviewed immediately (after refusing an interview request earlier in the day. Jon Snow did a remarkably good job of conducting the impromptu interview.
Campbell, it must be said, is acting very strangely. In testifying before a select committee this week, he repeatedly pricked his hand with a pin to prevent himself losing his temper, leaving his papers covered in blood spots.
Meanwhile, the BBC is resisting what is clearly an attempt at intimidation, and Andrew Gilligan, the reporter at the centre of the crisis, is threatening to sue the Labour Leader of the House unless he receives an apology for allegations that he lied to a select committee.
The British Foreign Affairs select committee is poised to accept Campbell's contention that he was not responsible, as the BBC claimed for "sexing up" the first Iraq dossier - but only after Campbell and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had said quite different things about when and how the "45 minutes" claim was inserted into the document, and Campbell was passed a panicky note from Downing Street while he was actually giving his evidence. It was not a very convincing look.
Nonetheless, most of Britain's newspapers - even the pro-war, anti-BBC Daily Mail - are siding with the BBC journalists on this one. The Sunday Times' lead editorial said this:
It is unlikely, as the BBC's anonymous source alleged, that Mr Campbell inserted the now infamous claim that Saddam could activate his deadly weapons within 45 minutes. It is highly likely he exercised a degree of editorial control. Mr Blair certainly did when presenting the dossier to parliament. The prime minister left no room for doubt that Saddam's weapons programme was "active, detailed and growing." Anybody who disagreed was flying in the face of the evidence and the integrity of our security services.
In the Observer, Peter Beaumont said:
While Andrew Gilligan did get it wrong in the detail of his initial allegation that the Government had 'sexed up' its first dossier on Iraq's alleged retention of weapons of mass destruction in September to claim Iraq could launch those weapons in '45 minutes', the problem for Campbell is that a journalist who has followed this story knows that Gilligan still got it right.
He did so because he reported what was widely being briefed to journalists - including myself - by MI6 officers and the Foreign Office that Number 10 (Campbell in particular) had gone out of its way to overstate the threat posed by Iraq to make the case for war.
Meanwhile, The Independent has spoken to a high-ranking US official who, on behalf of the CIA, investigated claims that Iraq was seeking uranium to restart its nuclear programme - and believes his conclusion that the evidence was fraudulent (as we now know it to be) was deliberately ignored by both the US and British governments, who continued to use it in statements aimed at illustrating the danger posed by Iraq.
Look, I am actually surprised that no real evidence of banned weapons development has been discovered in Iraq. I never thought the more extravagant claims (especially the "45 minutes" nonsense) were true, but I expected there would be something. After all, a number of Middle Eastern countries, including Israel, have some form of chemical weapons programme in place.
But what I object to very strongly is being lied to. It is beyond any doubt that both governments manipulated the evidence they gave to the public, made too much of information from self-interested actors (especially the demonstrably crooked Ahmed Chalabi) and, in a number of cases, said things they had been strongly and repeatedly advised were untrue. They lied and they knew it. Anyone who does not find cause for concern in that is well on the road to serfdom.
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