Bookcrossing

I found a book the other day. On the street that is.
It wasn't a book for me, so I left it for someone else, after taking a picture of it.

I had nearly forgotten about the phenomenon of bookcrossing, or liberating books, but as a librarian I am naturally very positive to the idea. You take a book you liked, and slap a sticker on, and place it somewhere in public. Someone takes it home, reads it, and leaves it for the next person. I've never done it myself, but after being reminded I will. Not sure which book yet though.

It's a good practise for many reasons. First of all you get to do something nice for someone you don't know, which is always good. Secondly it's about books and books you love, not about peddling goods for cash. I've done that for a living and I can tell you that selling books is rarely about loving books. Giving them away, or lending them out, is much better.

Read more here:
http://www.bookcrossing.com/
And, readers in Oslo, here are the books that have been liberated in our fair village:
http://www.bookcrossing.com/hunt/17/100/31053

Nyt Norge threatens legal action against blogger

The Norwegian blogger Christoffer Biong is being threatened with a lawsuit by the government financed initiative Nyt Norge (enjoy Norway). The case is a result of Biong's use of Nyt Norge's logo for his adbusting campaign against what he rightfully sees as a distorted campaign.
Using a corporate logo in this fashion is a well established means of political expression, and should be protected by free speech. If you can't use a corporate logo to protest their actions your means of expression are seriously hampered. This is especially true if the corporation is run by the government - and in turn our money.

We should make sure that these pictures recieve the attention they deserve, and that this turns into a public relations blunder for Nyt Norge. I would've never heard of these pictures if they didn't threaten legal action. Smart huh?

So here are the pictures they've got their panties in a bundle over:

Axis and Allies 1940

Finally! It's out, and I own it. The newest Axis and Allies that is, Europe 1940. Axis and Allies Pacific 1940, and Europe 1940 can be combined into a single huge game, that devastates any previous version.

You may not know, but I'm a big fan of strategic boardgames, and I've been following axis and allies since 1992 or thereabouts. (I guess it's hardly a shock considering my preternatural interest in WWII.) I've played every single version since the "classic" - except from D-day and Guadalcanal, and I've mostly loved them. I don't have any idea how many hours I've spent rolling dice and picking off plastic enemies. The only one I didn't care too much for was Battle of the Bulge, and figured that these limited campaigns aren't really my thing. Which is also the problem I had with the previous incarnation of Europe and Pacific. While I did use the rules for combining the game that were floating around the internet I wasn't really pleased with it. I want true global warfare, not theatres.

So, after I bought Pacific 1940 a great deal of my time has been spent checking for updates on Europe 1940. Waiting impatiently and speculating about it. No more! I've played it now. That is, I skipped Europe, and went straight for the global rules.

And I am very pleased. The game feels like "classic" AnA, but bigger and better. The boards and rules fit together like they were designed to be used together, unlike the last version. And I love the italians and french, and the new way the chinese work. Even more so I love the rules for neutrality, and the way the axis can more or less bide their time with the Soviet Union and the United States.

There are a few things missing, or that would have been better in a different way.
The soviet troops are too similar to the italians, in color. I don't see why they stuck to the brownish soviets, when they could've easily made them the red color of the japanese in AnA Pacific. Red soviets I would've loved.
(I see that a lot of peope were annoyed that the french and the soviets share design on several units. Personally I don't care. As long as I can tell them apart they could've used whatever design they wanted to for the french. It's not like they're going to be a huge factor at any point anyway.)
I also miss money. I hear that most players don't use the money, and prefer to write the numbers down instead. I however prefer to use the little paper pieces. Not a big deal though. You can cannibalize an earlier game, or print your own.
I also think the new battle board is horrendous. We made our own, that you can flip over, so that each player has a board with defender on one side and attacker on the other. The gameboard is so massive it's more practical to have a battle board each.

I've only played the game once, with three players, and I can't wait to play it again. It's by far the best version yet.

(Yes, I should've had more pictures, but I was too busy playing to really bother with a camera.)

For my sake, please!

Open Letter to Reporters without Borders

The reputable press organization Reporters without Borders (reporters sans frontières) have issued an open letter to wikileaks citing them for what the see as reckless behaviour in releasing 77,000 confidential documents. You can read it here: http://en.rsf.org/united-states-open-letter-to-wikileaks-founder-12-08-2010,38130.html. Naturally, I disagree with them, and I sent them an e-mail about it, as should you rsf@rsf.org. I decided to also publish my views here, as I believe it is an important issue. So here goes:

I have just finished reading your "attack" on wikileaks, and I must say I am a bit disappointed.
While I realize that a great deal of the difference between your organization and wikileaks is a result of differing values, with regards to the legitimacy of the state itself and its methodology, I do find your approach a bit lacking in focus.
I am of course fundamentally respectful of your work to further press freedom and end censorship and alike, but when you claim that wikileaks' release of documents gives the various authorities around the world legitimate reasons to monitor the internet and keep internet activists under surveillance it smacks quite a bit of backwards logic. That would be like saying that the government can legitimately keep journalists under surveillance because some of them publish confidential materials. There is no legitimacy in such a policy and there never will be. It seems to me that you as an organization should rather focus on that instead of running errands for the Obama administration in taking down Wikileaks.
Also, this issue touches on fundamental issues in state theory, and the philosophical reasoning for a democratic system. The question remains whether a state should be allowed to keep secrets from their own people, while resting on the "legitimacy" the same people provides? Or rather, should a government answer to its people, and be ready to defend its policies without secrecy and threats of legal action? Democracy is founded on the right to overthrow the government should it lose legitimacy, by peaceful means or otherwise. With the excesses we see today, with more than a million dead in two wars, mostly civilians, we as citizens are in our rights to expose and criticize government policies. We have a fundamental right, and even obligation to protest against heavy handed and illegitimate state behaviour, by any means we have at our disposal.

Additionally your arguments seem a bit willy nilly considering that you untill recently praised wikileaks for leaking documents pertaining to Guantanamo and the incident known as "collateral muder". There is no fundamental difference between this most recent release of documents, and these earlier instances. The only difference is in the respose from Obama and his cronies.

Organizations such as your own will continue to reap the benefits of wikileaks' work in the future, as well as suffer the collective punishment of the authorities. The question you should ask yourself is simply, whose side are you on? I'm not implying that you should stand by wikileaks regardless, or that this issue only has two sides, but if you are in favor of press freedom, you cannot turn your back on wikileaks in this matter, and claim that they are the reason why the government is cracking down on freedoms. The government is cracking down on freedoms, because they are protecting their own power, despite lacking legitimacy and a system of principles to back them. All they have is force, and the people's fear of force - in whatever form it takes. Place the blame where the blame is due.

Privatized Propaganda

My political view are well known to anyone who's frequented this blog, or otherwise been subjected to my opinions. They're not really the subject of this blog however, I just wanted to tone an ever so little black flag before I get started on my subject: privatized propaganda warfare.

Over the last year or so wikileaks has become the most publicized actor in an ongoing information war between peace activists and various governments of the world. Wikileaks ofcourse has been responsible for leaking a great deal of classified material pertaining to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and this upsets the people responsible for sending troops to this wars.
Wikileaks however is not the only opposing actor in this war against government information monopolization and spin doctoring, and the war is not new.

I have previously posted the cultural terrorist manifesto, as well as a video by Emergency Broadcast Network - and both of these posts concern the same ongoing information war. What EBN, the Grey Wolves and Wikileaks have in common is that they represent a phenomema or ideology often dubbed infoanarchism. An ideology they also share with the swedish Pirate Party and several other groups and individuals - including yours truly. The main motto for this loose movement of people is "information wants to be free". If you're into revolutionary romanticism we can call this an "information guerilla". It's a quite accurate description.

In other words it as an ongoing insurrectionist campaign being waged between state forces and comercial media with huge budgets and established channels of communication and technology on one hand, and volunteers with highl improvised means of communication and distribution on the other. In many ways this is an example of assymetric warfare, or fourth generation warfare, but on the information front rather than on the classic battlefield.

Assymetric warfare is seen by many as the most important tendency in modern conflict and it is usually typified by regular military units with training and technology going against a guerilla with little or no training and little common ground with their enemy. Usually wars are fought over territory or ideology, or both, whereas an information war is waged in the field of public image and credibility and over a strictly ideological goal.

The interesting thing is however what history teaches us about what happens when a large military system takes on a guerilla. Quite often the "weaker" party succedes, and the government must accede to loss. Whether we are talking about conflict of force, in the cases of the american revolution, the vietnam war or Gandhi's campaing to oust the brits from India - or we are talking about popular protest movements such as the civil rights movement in the sixties. To retain some shred of legitimacy a government cannot trample the rights of its citizens lest it become a dictatorship. So this wikileaks bout is something of a pickle for the authorities. They must attack the activists while trying to come out as the party that takes care of the public interest. Wikileaks must be made out to look like they are thugs, criminals, sociopaths and evildoers, rather than concerned citizens. Once people start questioning why the government so often feels the need to take on their own citizens, whose will they supposedly draw their legitimacy from, the authorities are quite simply fucked...

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions, maybe while you check out this wonderful little rap about wikileaks.

Wikileaks, the falcon and the snowman.

This week Wikileaks has released approximately 90,000 classified documents garnered from sources within the massive US defence. Pentagon and the White House are consequently angered to the point of bursting like lemmings, and have naturally initiated a search for the "traitor" in their midst. However, it seems that several thousand employees had access to these particular documents, and the search for the culprit may not be as easy as it is to find the un-american in "24". It is going to take time, and it's going to involve quite a few people.

This of course leads my mind to american intelligence in general. Of course the expression itself became an oxymoron with the invasion of Iraq because of their quite laughable work, but organizations like CIA, NSA, SS (secret service in case you didn't know) and the FBI have a long history of fuck ups. During the cold war their ranks were so littered with sleepers and walk ins that it's not much of an oversight to say that they lost the intelligence war against the Soviet Union. This history of incompetence goes back even further, to the days of OSS (office of strategic services), who were so easily spotted while under cover that the joke was that OSS was an acronym for Oh, So Social. Despite their efforts to make you think otherwise, the american intelligence agencies really are laughable compared to their counterparts in other countries.

This history of incompetence makes me think of one of Sean Penn's early films, the Falcon and the Snowman. Usually on film the CIA and similar organizations are portrayed as labyrinthine conspiratorial agencies full of hardcore toughies with the latest in technology, death squads and intelligence gathering gadgets. Whether they are up against innocent civilians in the ridiculous Enemy of the State or even the slightly more realistic Three Days for Condor Condor, or they are defending freedom against horrible soviets in ... Errr... I don't think I've ever seen a film where the CIA are the good guys except for comedies or James Bond. Even good ol' boys in the US prefer to see their very own CIA as the enemy. And it's no wonder. You don't want these people on your side. Just look at their work in Chile back in 1973. In the real world espionage isn't quite so sci fi-ish or fancy, and their agents are hardly as kewl as in the movies. (True, the do have technological monsters like Echelon in their service, but the CIA still can't catch Bin Laden. Not that it would matter much if they did. People are pissed off at the US for a reason. Bin Laden isn't Cobra Commander you know...)

The Falcon and the Snowman is a film about a pair of walk in spies (played by Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton) and their follies as they hand over documents to the KGB in exchange for monetary attention. While most films involving espionage of some sort feel the urge to include gun fights and explosions, and the occasional cleavage, this film is quite realistic. Intelligence work is mostly analysis and catalogueing documents. Very few of the people involved with intelligence work go to embassies and sleep with beautiful russian women to whom they reveal their secrets. (Though the latest espionage debacle between the US and Russia may have you think otherwise...) It's a good film, despite David Suchett's appearance as the russian spy master. You really get a feeling for how difficult it is to discover a leak, catch the perpetrator or get the needed evidence to prosecute. The two spies live the good life for quite a while there, despite being flamboyant and complete amateurs.


The Falcon and the Snowman is based on the real life story of Christopher Boyce, a former student turned spy. As I said the various intelligence agencies were riddled with operatives handing over information to the Soviets. Some of them were never caught, but some were. In the end Boyce is found out and has to go to jail for what he's done, and I am quite certain Pentagon will go to great lengths to have their man in the Wikileaks case as well. How many people's feet they will step on during the investigation is a matter of some concern. We also know that they won't exactly shy away from disregarding the persons rights once he has been arrested, as they have done with Bradley Manning, supposedly responsible for blowing the whistle on the Collateral Murder episode. But chances are it's going to take quite some time, and it's going to be very embarrassing to the investigators. As if the leak itself wasn't enough.

There is one fatal difference between Boyce and the sources in this case though: that of motivation. Boyce was supposedly motivated by greed the wikileaks sources are motivated by their justified outrage over US behaviour in Afghanistan and Iraq. I say fatal bacause it's a hard blow to the legitimacy of american war efforts. It's not OK for the US defence to keep their oversights secret, and it's not OK to portray the whistleblowers as traitors. The US was once founded by people who wouldn't stand for unjust treatment of civilians by imperialists, and those values seem to have been forgotten since.

The US authorities claim that Wikileaks is a threat to national security, but we all know what they're really threatening: national secrecy. If the government is really founded on the people its legitmacy wouldn't suffer from openness around the methods they use in war, or the consequences thereof. It is founded on military might, threats and violence however, Obamas response is all the more logical. The campaign in Afghanistan and Iraq was never justified, nor were the methods employed and the continued secrecy surrounding these issues add insult to injury. Obama should worry more about the casualties his soldiers are piling up, and less about saving face over leaks of documents pertaining to his predecessor.

If you want to donate money to wikileaks follow this link:
http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Support