Before we dive in, I’d like to provide a word of caution to my more conservative readers. The following piece will be a lot more critical of the Bush administration than I usually am on this site. As the piece unfold, you will realize why I consider what is probably the defining event of my generation to be a list of missteps, miscues, and missed opportunities.

We will never forget

It’s hard to believe, now four years later that the nation swore that it would never forget what happened on that day. Beyond New York and Washington DC, however, it seems that people have moved on. I was even told to do so, during a conversation with people outside of the strike zones. It’s easy for people who only witnessed the matter on television to do so; It’s a little harder for people who witnessed it first hand; It’s even more difficult for those who lost friends in it; And I cannot even start to imagine how difficult it would be for those who lost family members in it. Some of us have not forgotten and it is our burden to bring it back, at least once a year, dredge up the dust and see how well we are doing in our recovery.

Since then, we’ve seen the largest reorganization of government, with an intent to prepare it for a major crisis, and its first test with the disaster in New Orleans; we’ve seen two wars, one with the intent to bring culprits to justice, the other with unclear objectives; we’ve seen the first steps of a reconstruction that may or may not be going slower than expected; and we’ve seen government work on financial appropriations that seemed to go anywhere but on the areas that need it.

… and so, we pick up the pieces and do the evaluation, and the assessment is, when faced with core facts, sadly inappropriate for an event in which over 2,000 people lost their lives. Let’s dig in on the details…

Disaster preparedness

As a result of the 9/11 disaster, the U.S. government reorganized itself to be more prepared for when future disasters struck. A new department, named the Department of Homeland Security was tasked with the responsibility of coordinating any effort relating to disasters, man-made or other, happening on U.S. soil.

The first major test came not from a man-made event but from hurricane Katrina and its aftermath and, if the event of the last couple of weeks are showcasing how successful or unsuccessful the department of homeland security was at protecting the homeland, I feel a little less secure now than I did on the morning of September 11th, 2001.

I will leave it to others to dig into whether the levies were under disrepair due to poor money allocation but it is without a doubt that the scenario of one of those levies breaking and flooding all of New Orleans was one that DHS should have prepared for. As opposed to the morning on September 11th, 2001, this last disaster was one where the general public was aware that it was coming. In fact, in the days leading up to the hurricane, breathless reports on most of the 24-hour TV news network talked about how the levies in New Orleans were a potential risk if the hurricane were to hit the city. Worries about a potential flood were so high, the government asked for a massive evacuation of New Orleans prior to the hurricane, and yet it did not provide buses or other modes of transportations to help those who did not have transportation get out of the area.

Katrina did not hit New Orleans head on (that distinction went to Gulfport, Mississippi, which is now what one could only call a former city, the destruction of the area being so complete that it is difficult to imagine a city once existed there) and yet, it was seriously damaged. Katrina was known of several days in advance, and yet government trucks with supplies did not roll into the city until a few days after the disaster. Images of people stranded in the Superdome made their way to the airwaves, and yet the head of FEMA and DHS did not seem to know there were people there until four days later.

If this is the kind of response the U.S. government now has to disasters, please give us back the pre-9/11 response scenario. At least, on that day, police and fire officers were there within minutes, FEMA was there within hours, and people were helped within a day or so.

Some will say that the response was different because this was an “act of God” but one could warrant that the only distinction that exists between an act of God and an act of man is that God gave us warning. Had a terrorist group decided to blow up one or more of those levies in New Orleans, I believe the response would not have been any better.

I now worry more than I did in the days prior to 9/11 and it is not because I fear terrorist more (having lived in France in the 80s, the age of terrorism is one I grew up in) but it is because I fear that our preparedness to a major disaster, whether it is a terrorist one or an act of God, is worse today than it was on the morning of 9/11. If a terror group where to attack the subway tunnels in New York city (let’s assume they’d blow up a bomb in one of the underwater tunnels, combining the horrors of 9/11 with those of Katrina), or if a major earthquake were to struck California (Los Angeles or San Francisco in particular), I fear that the U.S. government in un-ready in accomplishing the first duty of any government: protecting its people.

The Hunt for Bin Laden

If the government is not ready in dealing with a crisis after the fact, let’s look at what it is doing to deal with the people that are responsible, when a crisis is man-made. After 9/11, we were promised that those who were responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center would be brought to justice. The main culprit, we were told, was a man by the name of Osama Bin Laden, who heads a group called Al Caeda. Based in Afghanistan, the group is a coalition of several terrorist groups around the world and has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to be responsible for the horrific act in New York.

Four years later, Osama Bin Laden is still free, supposedly somewhere in either Afghanistan or Pakistan, based on what I’ve read of expert accounts in several newspapers. And four years later, Al Caeda’s capabilities do not seem to have diminished much. In fact, they seem to be on a new roll: recently, they claimed responsibilities for bombing in Madrid, Spain, and London, UK.

The U.S. did accomplish the toppling of the Taliban, which was the Afghan government hosting terrorists. However, it seems that the new government is having problem trying to regain control of the country. Some areas in Afghanistan are ruled by warlords, some of whom have aligned themselves with the Taliban, and democratically elected leaders are murdered on a regular bases by forces friendly to or associated with the Taliban. In other words, Afghanistan is a country that is teetering on the edge of a civil war, with a few American troops left behind (a substantial portion of the US troops on the ground were relocated to Iraq after that conflict started) attempting to keep the whole country from imploding.

Meanwhile, Bin Laden is taking advantage of the confusion and the rough terrain (the south of the country is very mountainous, making it difficult to do a successful man-hunt) to hide and continue directing global terror efforts via frequently leaked audio or videotapes bringing encouragement to his supporters. His demonization may have been forgotten in the United States but it has not been forgotten by US-opponents who are now seeing him as a rallying point, thus strengthening his power globally, and increasing the ranks of Al Caeda. As a hunt, it has been a major failure and as a fight against terrorism, it has been a disaster.

War in Iraq

So instead of trying to locate Bin Laden, the U.S. leadership has been trying to shift the fighting ground, first by talking up a presumed link between Iraq and the terrorists that struck the world trade center (several government investigations later, the existence of such link has been refuted time and time again by commissions appointed by the same president who has led the administration’s effort at creating the link in the first place.) That supposed link and the subsequent inference by members of the Bush administration that we had to invade Iraq before we ended up seeing “a mushroom cloud over an American city” led to a conflict that lowered the reputation of the United States around the world (a day after the WTC was destroyed, French president Jacques Chirac declared “Today, we are all Americans” a couple of years later, France has become one of the biggest opponents to the Iraqi conflict.)

While the U.S. administration was building up its case to invade Iraq, millions of people in the US and abroad made the counter-case: that, while Saddam Hussein was a horrible individual, he was a despot under control, weighted down by years of U.N. sanctions and that what would follow his removal would be potential anarchy in a country that controls almost 20 percent of the world’s oil reserve. The case was also made that an invasion of Iraq would be costly in terms of invaders’ blood and that it would probably help strengthen, not weaken, terrorists as it gave them something to point to the evilness of the west.

Sadly, the invasion of Iraq went through, with the United States and United Kingdom leading the charge, and few others following. The first days looked very good as the forces met with very little resistance, making it into Baghdad within days, capturing Hussein within months and looking as if all the nay-sayers had been wrong…

… but time has told another story. While the initial success of the invasion of Iraq could have been cause for praise, the following years have been a long descent into hell with many of the worst predictions made by opponents of the invasion turning from conjecture to truth. At the current time, American troops have suffered over 2,000 casualties with more coming every day; tension between Sunnis, Kurds, and Shiites are increasing to the point where the country may soon be facing civil war… and Al Caeda has been using the invasion as not only a recruiting tool (claiming that the imperialism of the west is the reason for their fight, a big of circular logic on its own as it was not the reason they gave for 9/11) but also as a training ground in urban warfare for their future recruits.

Much as the cold-war Afghani proxy fight between Russians and Americans had been a training ground for the Bin Laden generation of terrorists, Iraq is turning out a new generation not only of insurgents but also of future carriers of atrocities.

The new argument coming from the administration is that it is better to take the fight to the terrorist than it is to have them to it to us. This argument, which is how Saudi Arabia has managed to be an exporter of terror by removing its more extreme elements to foreign places like Afghanistan, is starting to show wear and tear. In the case of Saudi Arabia, they have recently seen attacks against foreigners in their own country. In the case of the West, London and Madrid stand as painful reminder that the fight is not just located in Iraq but is metastizing into a cancer that infiltrates every society. It may not have happened in the United States since 9/11 (and thank god for that) but I fear that it is only a question of time before they strike again.

As a tool in the war on terror (a term recently replaced by “struggle against violent extremists” or SAVE, an acronym which makes me feel a bit uncomfortable), the Iraqi conflict has been a disaster and one can only hope that the situation will not get any worse than it is now.

Financial Appropriation

Considering the different failures at the federal level, one hopes that more is happening at the local level and that the federal government has been doing a good job at providing cities and states with what they need to defend themselves against terrorist attacks.

From a New York standpoint, things haven’t been particularly rosy. New York City may have been the primary target on September 11th, 2001; the New York area may have a population of 20 millions people (8 millions in the city ), representing roughly 10 percent of the US population but Congress decided to use a different formula to calculate financial appropriations of counter-terrorist funds. As a result, places like Montana or Wyoming find themselves with per capita appropriations that are several multiple larger than the per capita appropriations the New York area (or for that matter, any other major Metropolitan area) does.

But the real irony is that the city ends up giving the federal government more of that money than any other area. In other words, if there were no federal allocation of money for terrorism, New York City would find itself with more money to fight terrorism than it is under the present case.

And, considering the recent disaster in New Orleans, there is another sad fact to take into account: when the Department of Homeland Security was created, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was folded into it. As more allocations were made to fighting terrorists, some of the money was taken from dealing with other issues. Some of the money that was taken away was money to deal with ensuring that some of the infrastructure was kept in good shape. As hurricanes and earthquakes took a back sit to fighting terrorists, repairing levees in order for them to be able to survive during a natural disaster became less important. The images of the last couple of weeks are a painful reminder of the cost of such calculation.

Reconstruction Confusion

Four years later, there is, however, one bit of good news: at ground zero, a new building is rising… but not the one you’d expect. World Trade Center 7, which burned down a few hours after the hours collapsed, is rising anew above ground zero. It represents a beacon of hope for all New Yorkers who went through that horrible day.

Sadly, the rest of reconstruction at ground zero has been pretty horrible, with petty fights breaking out between the different individuals and agencies involved in said reconstruction. The result is that, four years after the towers went down, there is still a large hole not only in our hearts but also in the New York grounds. Inspired architecture was promised, then dismissed as concerns about security took hold. Instead, we may soon see what may either be the most beautiful bunker or one of the most awful towers to grace the New York City skyline. As a symbol of rebirth, it will be one brought force by fear and anxiety, not by the optimism and hopefulness that once were the hallmark of this country.

… and four years after our world changed, that is a damn shame.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 9–11 at 4. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Before the convention

For New Yorkers, the Republican effort started becoming visible weeks ago, as police tightened up the area. Living only a few blocks from Madison Square Garden, where conventioneers gathered, I started to realize with some level of concern that this convention had the potential of being a major annoyance. Rumors were flying high of the potential of some public transportation being shut down and, in the absence of actual information from the city (since none of the plans beyond street closures were revealed until the last minute), most New Yorkers made do with rumors.

Feeling that I needed to take a break and figuring that this might be a good time to skip town, I started planning on taking time off from work for convention week several months in advance. It then hit me that the mass hysteria stirred up by some of the more extreme newspaper (The NY Post, for example) was just media people playing around with facts that had little grounding in reality. Besides, having been through town on 9/11 and then again during last year’s blackout, I figured that New Yorkers had the guts and resolve to face any challenge. Combined with the lure of being close to a hot story, this left me with the decision to stick around.

The next question became how to best experience this. Of course, I knew that I had little chance to get into the convention itself but its perimeter seemed to offer a million interesting stories. With hundreds of thousands of protesters at the ready, it seemed to me that a potentially huge story could be developing outside the convention center, directly on the streets of Manhattan.

The First Amendment

One of the reason I love living in the United States is its constitution and attached bill of rights. Go read it, if you haven’t already. It’s quite a combo and of course, coming out of journalism, I fell deeply enamored with the first amendment and its protection of the press. However, re-reading it recently, I became more keenly aware of its other parts:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

These considerations, in an age of increasing uncertainty in the balance of civil liberties versus security, have led me to be a contributor to the American Civil Liberties Union, a group that works hard to ensure that the government lives by this promise.

As a contributor, I get to receive the newsletter for the local New York chapter and had recently learned from it that there would be a storefront established during the Republican convention as part of a wider campaign to protect the rights of protesters. This seemed like a great fit for me and I walked in there on the Saturday prior to the convention, asking if they needed volunteers. They did and I signed up to start on the following Monday, the first day of the convention.

Protesting

I am not a radical leftist. Nor am I on the right. The best way I could possibly describe myself on the political spectrum would probably be extreme centrist. I believe almost religiously in the genius of capitalism. That belief is only trumped by my belief in what I would call “Capital D Democracy”: A government of the people, by the people and for the people. Coming from Europe, I may have a different view from most Americans when it comes to social issues. I strongly believe that anyone should have access to free health care and free high grade education. Because those sit at the core of my political belief, and because I grew up politically through the Bush father administration, followed by the Clinton administration, I would probably qualify as a fairly conservative (small d) democrat in the United States.

Over the past couple of years, I must say that I’ve drifted a little further into that camp, as a direct result of what I’ve experienced and what I read. As everyone knows, September 11th was a horrible day, when many of us lost friends in the Twin Towers. Looking back at that time, I still feel that the Bush administration did a great job by going into Afghanistan to dislocate the Taliban, which had been a long-time supporter of Al-Qaeda. I know that it must have been hard to do so, as no president really wants to put soldiers in harm’s way. The Afghani mission was an important one and one that still needs more support than it gets.

However, as many New Yorkers, I felt blindsided when the administration decided to start making the case for going into Iraq. I had read a fair amount about Iraq and the middle east region in general. As far as I could tell from all the newspapers and magazine reports I was reading, Sadam Hussein was a megalomaniac who would do anything to hold on to power. After being rebuffed from Kuwait by an international coalition led by Bush pere, he had focused inland, using chemical weapons against the Kurds in order to avoid having them overthrow him. For the following decade, the United Stations enforced sanctions that contained him while looking for more information about what types of weapons he had. He kept stonewalling them on two major issues: chemical and nuclear weapons. I personally believe that this was a tactical moved aimed at dealing with internal Iraqi issues: By stonewalling the UN, he ensured that questions would be raised as to how many of those weapons he could have. If word that he held chemical weapons came back into Iraq, along with the remembrance of what he did to Kurds, people would be afraid to attempt an uprising. Similarly, if word was spread that he had a nuclear program, Iran might stay more quiet.

In fall 2002, then CIA-director Tenet testified before Congress about the Iraqi thread. His belief at the time (or at least what he told senators) was that involving ourselves in Iraq would only increase the terrorist threat. Having lived through 9/11, the words increase and threat were not the ones I wanted to hear. At the time, reports from the United States and Europe also pointed out that there was no credible reports of evidence linking Iraq and Al-Qaeda. This was all public information available in late 2002 (I do read a lot on the Internet, not only by using RSS feeds but also visiting the web sites of several news sources in the United States, United Kingdom, and France). This led me to believe that the Iraqi threat was being overstated. However, trying to keep an open mind, I listen to arguments from the administration and, for every point they would make, there would be tens of rebuttal points coming from European publications.

I started to feel that people living in the US were being bamboozled so I started listening more closely to the people advocating peace. I did not agree with all of them (I believe war is sometimes necessary) but I did agree with them that this threatened conflict (at the time, the war had not started) was one that was unnecessary. I joined demonstrations, I met smart people there. Over time, I became more acquainted with the issues surrounding them. While I disagreed with the most extremist elements, I believed in their rights to free speech.

Last year on February 15, a huge march was impeded by the police, which would not let people get to the proper location of the rally and where policemen would provide misleading information to people who were trying to legally join the march. The tactics prompted an ACLU lawsuit which resulted in orders by the court for the police to alter their practices. Knowing this, I still approached the largest protest set for August 29th with a little apprehension.

It turned out that I didn’t need to. The police worked hard to keep the peace while respecting the rights of protester. Countless times, I saw police officers doing their job as they should, ensuring that things would work out and that protesters could stay safe. With half a million people taking to the streets of Manhattan and a police contingent that numbered in the thousands, it turned out to be a really great event and made me feel better about the week that was to come up. All the tension that had existed prior to the protests starting seemed to dissipate and free speech was respected, just as the founding fathers would have it.

With protesters as far as the eyes could see (45 blocks of solidly packed people were taken over by the protest), my wife and I joined the 1000 coffins group, which honored the memory of fallen American soldiers in Iraq, all the while making a powerful statement on the impact of this war on our troops.

At the end of the protest route, I had the chance to witness a crowd of hundreds of people folding American flags in a way that was both respectful and legal.

The New York Observer

On Monday, after some basic training on what to do and what to watch for, I made my first foray in the field. The police presence was strong at every event but, for the most parts, things would run OK during daylight. Once night fell, however, it seemed that the police turned into Mr. Hyde, arresting peaceful protesters rather quickly and working in an intimidating fashion otherwise. Many of the clashes I personally witnessed were at night, probably as much the result of exhaustion (I don’t know how long the police shifts were but it seems that nerves were more frayed towards the end of the day, leading me to conclude that some of the officers may have been tired).

Much of what a legal observer does is very similar to what a journalist does. Largely, the job of a journalist in the field is to sit around the location of an event and talk to people, hoping to get some juicy bit. Often, it’s just sitting around waiting for something to happen. In the case of legal monitors, the situation is similar; you sit (or stand) around, checking whether fencing is locked or not, and eventually post yourself in a location where it is likely that something would happen. You then idle around that location until something happens, and then start taking notes, observing whether policemen are doing their job properly and calling in to the main office if infractions are very serious and could lead to further trouble. Your job is, however, not as a participant but an observer.

Occasionally, you cross the line into a more active role, at the request of one of the two actors (protesters or cops) asking you to step in. For example, I was asked by a cop if I could work as a liaison to help relay an inquiry to the leader of a protest group. After putting the top officer in charge on the scene with the lead organizer in touch with each other, I watched the interaction to ensure that the police was not trying to abuse its power. The discussion between the two people was tense but cordial and an agreement was quickly struck, leading to an eventual change of location for the protester so they would not block regular pedestrian traffic and a pull-back from the police force so they would not seem as intimidating to protesters. This was an example of the two groups working together properly.

While police and protesters danced around each others, with legal monitors and observers like myself checking the scene out, other people seemed intent on disturbing this tight choreography. At ground zero, a woman looked at my ACLU T-shirt and exclaimed “the ACLU, those free speech Nazis” (emphasis is mine).

However, at times, there were failures. I witnessed such a failure at ground zero on Tuesday when police worked with a group called the War Resisters League decided to start a march from ground zero to Madison Square Garden. The police worked out what seemed like an agreement to let protesters go through their march without a permit and then, a few minutes later, changed its mind and arrested a number of people. The Jekyll and Hyde nature of such incident can be considered fairly worrisome and a true threat to democracy.

Republicans in the Square, Dancers in Elephant country

Fortunately, the real spirit of democracy could also be felt this week and it came for a bi-partisan effort to work together. On Tuesday night, a group of about half a dozen Republicans skipped their attendance at the convention and headed down to Union Square, where many of the protesters were gathering. A dizzying array of discussions ensued as people from the complete political spectrum engage in debate for most of the evening. Groups gathered to listen in, sometimes throwing extra discussion points into the flow. Conversations covered such a wide range of issues such as the recent success/failure of the war in Iraq, the economy, educational reform, job programs, environmental issues, general foreign policy, etc… Kudos to those republicans for having the guts to enter their enemies’ territory and be willing to engage into longer discussion on policy matters. If such thing were happening more frequently, we would be better off as a country.

Sadly, however, the current tenor of the political dialogue seem to be far from such matters. When discussion surrounding candidates are limited to “George Bush is a baby-killer” or “John Kerry is a flip-flopper”, the system needs fixing and it is incumbent on everyone to get involved in creating that fix. There are approximately two months between now and the US presidential election so I would urge all my readers in the United States to do the following: find someone you disagree with politically, and agree to go out to lunch at least once a week to discuss political matters. Similarly, put pressure on politicians to discuss issues of substance. Whether John Kerry should have received two or three purple hearts in Vietnam, or whether George Bush did not tend to his national guards duties during the same era will have little relevance on the future of the country. What does, however, is how they see the future of the country. There are substantial differences in how the different candidates view the world. Dig in, get informed, and go out and get other people to do the same. It’s part of the homework required to make a democracy work.

And remember that it can all be fun. While there is some homework, there are occasional recesses and sometimes some out and out silliness. John Perry Barlow put together some Dance Flash Mobs which were quite a blast to follow. Imagine a basic street crowd. People are walking around, traffic is busy. All of sudden, someone turns on a boom box. Three quarters of the crowd start swerving, slowly; building, building, and then, all of the sudden, it’s a street party, with 15 to 20 people out in the street, dancing their hearts out. One has to admit that it is a very effective form of protest. A sudden derivation from the norm by a large group of “normal looking” people can create quite a disconnect. If you’re a New Yorker, you find such variations generally amusing, part of the great thing about living in the city. Based on my observation at one of the event, that may not be the case if you’re from out of town. They’re is something a little crazy that feel a little threatening. Your reality gets shaken for a moment, you pause, not sure of how to react and by the time you realize what happened, the crowd has moved on.

Protest Tech

Of course, I couldn’t resist going a whole post without sticking in some thoughts on technology. For the most part, technology at these events was more interesting because of its pervasiveness, rather than any single technologies being of interest. I’ve learned that the police did use some cameras with head mounted displays for monitoring but I do see any. What I did see, however, was heavy use of technologies like text-messaging and push-to-talk telephones to coordinate protest efforts. It’s interesting to me that those are now part of the protester’s arsenal as they provide with quick ways to deploy small to medium sized groups across a grid. When flash mobs happened last year as a summer diversion, I did not imagine the potential they could have in the political world. Witnessing events this week, I’ve come to realize that flash mobs can have a tremendous power in reshaping political dialogue by quickly creating and disbanding protest groups. This will probably be a challenge for law enforcement officials wanting to control such thing as they might have difficulties to locate such events in the future. One could consider those to be essentially guerrilla tactics empowered by technology and they can represent of fairly powerful component of new protests.

The other bit of surprise, to me, was to importance blogs have taken for some people. At one of the events, I was chatting with one of the observers, waiting for a group of conspiracy theorist (yes, their theories are protected by the first amendment too) to wrap up their protest so I could move on to something more interesting. Some guy seemed to be getting a lot of media so I asked the observer if he knew what the deal was with that guy. “He’s a major star. You should check out his website at…” I don’t remember the guys name but did check out his site. Basically, it was a badly designed conspiracy theory site run by a guy who seems to have his own online streaming show. When upper middle class people (the observer is actually a lawyer for a big firm) look at people as big stars because they have a website and a radio stream, you know the Internet has become pretty pervasive.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Conventional Wisdom: The RNC Hits New York. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Traditionally, telephone service was offered on a land line and was divided into local service, long distance, and extra features like caller ID, call forwarding, etc… The model was predicated on the concept of one device (the phone) receiving a package of services.

The mobile phone business started having an impact by untying the phone lines from the wall, making the concept of localization a relatively moot point. Once localization was broken, the differentiation between local and long distance disappeared which left a division only between connectivity and extra features. Since most of the signals going over the air became digital, the cost of delivering extra services dropped to almost nothing, destroying the competitive value of such offerings.

While mobile phone service made headway against traditional land lines, a new set of telephone offerings appeared on the Internet: Voice over IP. With VoIP, telephone just becomes a software issue, unbundling telephone from the concept of a telephone network and dropping the connectivity issue altogether. While mobile phones were tied to a particular phone network, VoIP phones are not tied to any network: they can run anywhere as long as they are running on an Internet infrastructure.

It is due to this realization that AT&T abandoned the consumer market. Since services like Vonage are redefining the concept of telephony by moving the phone away from the lines and away from the device. Vonage service runs on a number of platform including telephones, computers and will soon run on PDAs equipped with a wireless card. This means that companies which were once relying on the bundling of a line, a device, and a set of features can no longer do so. It also means that the concept of overseas long distance will eventually disappear since one could easily run a telephone service on their computer with a local number in a foreign country.

For example, I can envision a time when I will have a phone number in France that will relay my calls to my computer, phone or PDA wherever I am, making it impossible to guess whether I am in the United States, Europe or Asia at any given times. However, I may sound sleepy in the middle of the caller’s daytime because I could be in a time zone where it is the middle of the night.

With this model now in place, the challenge of telephony is no longer a local one but a global one. Telephone companies will have to fight against companies all over the globe in order to retain their customers and since the delivery of those services does not rely on the introduction of expensive networks in order to provision service, it will soon be possible for small companies to provision phone services. One can expect countries like China and India to be the recipients of such outsourcing and your telephone company could well be located in one of those countries in the future.

How does one solve this issue? By providing cheaper products, emphasizing customer service, generally doing right by the customer or getting out of the competitive space. The power base has shifted to the consumers and the only way to fight it is to serve them better than a competitor could.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Modular by Design — Telephony. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Strong Growth

France had been a leader in terms of establishing an information society but was starting to get trapped by its legacy Minitel tool. The Minitel was introduced in France in the late 70s as essentially a precursor to the web. The service allowed users to read online versions of magazines and newspapers, shop in online catalogs, chat, play games, and have access to every government office. In the early 80s, Minitel penetration became so high that the government-owned phone company decided to drop printing of phone books and move that service to the Minitel.

Fast forward to the late 90s. France is still on the Minitel and the Internet has gotten wide acceptance in the United States. At that point, Internet penetration in France is sluggish as few people see any value in it. As a result, the French government issued an ambitious plan to move France onto the Internet. As is the case for every major government project, little happened for several years.

However, the combination of government support for a new Internet initiative and the rise of global services finally started a revolution in French online services. According to several people I talked to in Paris and in the south of France, the effects of the Internet were not really felt until about a year ago, when a sudden usage explosion started. From 1999 to 2001, the number of Internet users in France tripled and it is expected to double this year to about 30 million. As more and more services are now moving away from the Minitel and onto the Internet (as I was told by an American living in France, the Minitel is now fairly useless as most everything has moved onto the Internet.)

Combined with growth in other European countries, this represents a market of almost 150 million users in Europe.

Broadband

While most Internet users in Europe still use narrowband, a few people are starting to make the move to broadband. However, prohibitive costs for DSL mean that most broadband users in France are accessing the net via cable. A DSL line can cost over 100 euros whereas a cable modem connection can be had for as little as 15 euros, with averages of 30–45 euros per months for a 500Kbps connection. The big advantage of such connections in Europe is that local phone is metered whereas broadband is not. As a result, heavy Internet users are finding that it is less expensive to get a broadband cable connection than it is to use a modem and phone line.

The Euro

For the first time in history, 12 countries have simultaneously gotten rid of their currencies and moved to create a single monetary block: the Euro is here and it has wide implications on global E-commerce.

No more Austrian schillings, Belgian, Luxembourg or French francs, Finnish markka, German Marks, Greek drachma, Irish punts, Italian lira, Dutch guilders, Portuguese escudos, or Spanish pesetas. No more complexity in trying to convert those from one to the other when doing electronic transactions. Now, the Euro is the currency for this whole zone (dubbed the Eurozone) and it represents a very large market, larger, in fact, than the American market in terms of customers.

One the biggest challenges in dealing with the European market was the lack of standardization when it comes to laws, shipping, currency, and language. With the Euro, a large portion of that problem can be taken care of as members of the Eurozone start moving towards developing a similar set of economic policies.

Essentially, the Euro takes away the barrier of multiple currency transactions that held back some users from shopping online and some vendors from launching e-commerce sites.

A couple of years ago, I alerted our readers to the fact that Europe was quietly rising as a new giant in the global E-commerce arena. With the rise of the Euro, this message is becoming more important. Now that a market of almost 150 million people has been created, the US is no longer the only place where E-commerce can work and as such, it is important for people in the US to start looking at technological developments in Europe. In the long run, a number of European companies will probably become some of the larger players in the online space.

Wireless connectivity

While everyone in the U.S. is starting to pay attention to WiFi, the wireless computing revolution has not yet taken hold in Europe. On the one hand, cell phones keep getting smaller and offering more features (Multimedia messaging is started to take hold among European digerati), there seems to be some lag in the adoption of wireless computing offering. A few underground efforts are getting organized, in a fashion similar to that seen in the USA a couple of years ago.

Conclusion

The Internet space in France seems to now follow a curve similar to the one experienced in the United States in the late 1990s. However, the lack of venture capital and the fact that, much like the United States, France is suffering from an economic slowdown, have tampered the explosion. While acceptance for everything Internet is growing, the adoption of networked technology is following a course that is different from that of the US and UK. While there will be strong growth in the Internet field in France over the next year, expect that revolution to be relatively quiet, compared to what was experienced in other countries.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Internet in France 2002: An overview. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

This is not exactly the way Deja.com presented themselves but ultimately, this may be what transpires from their recent attempt to put the Usenet archives on sale.

Usenet History

For those of you who have never heard of Usenet, here’s a quick definition from the Usenet FAQ:

Usenet is a world-wide distributed discussion system. It consists of a set of “newsgroups” with names that are classified hierarchically by subject. “Articles” or “messages” are “posted” to these newsgroups by people on computers with the appropriate software — these articles are then broadcast to other interconnected computer systems via a wide variety of networks.Some newsgroups are “moderated”; in these newsgroups, the articles are first sent to a moderator for approval before appearing in the newsgroup. Usenet is available on a wide variety of computer systems and networks, but the bulk of modern Usenet traffic is transported over either the Internet or UUCP.

To put it simply, prior to the web, Usenet was what defined the Internet as a community. It covers subjects ranging from politics to computing, arts to news, and everything in between. Usenet, to the old timers was the town square. It was the place where jobs were posted, discussions about technical standards were going on and the latest movies or TV shows were dissected. It was on Usenet that Tim Berners Lee first announced his development of the World Wide Web, and it was also there that Marc Andreesen announced the release of Mosaic (the PC and Mac browser that popularized the web) and the subsequent launch of Netscape.

To put it quite simply, Usenet archives document the early days of the Internet (well, 1981-present anyways) in a way that no other place on the Internet does. As a result, I would venture to say that they are historically significant documents that should be held in the public domain, much like other historical records are. The Usenet Archives are not something that should be a private property.

In the mid-90s, Deja.com, then known as DejaNews, took on the mission and started archiving Usenet materials. The community was happy to find someone willing to do so and let Deja.com do it, assuming that it would remain faithful to the original code of sharing that then existed on the Internet. The model was Usenet plus ads, which would, according to a popular view on the net, help conserve these historical documents while covering costs and making a modest profit.

But Deja.com decided to shed its original mission, refashioning itself as a consumer advice portal instead of going the non-profit route as the Internet Archive did, and here the trouble started. Now moving away from conservation, Deja.com first started pushing the Usenet archives to the back. Then, during a system upgrade, Deja.com decided to take those archives offline. And now we learn that they are going to sell them off to the highest bidder.

In fairness to Deja.com, they did a great job in preserving material that may have otherwise disappeared. However there are several legal questions to deal with when considering such a sale. Today, we take a look at those issues.

Copyright Issues

According to 10 Big Myths about Copyright, most of the content on Usenet is covered by copyright law. But it is unlikely Deja.com holds copyright on that content. They are selling the intellectual property of the millions of people who have posted to Usenet. In doing so, they are breaking several laws, both in the United States and abroad.

For starters, they are in violation of Title 17 of the US Code, which covers copyright and copyright transfers in the United States and Title I of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which extends copyright protection to digital works. Under the provisions of both those acts, no one can profit from a Usenet post unless they have received an express grant to do so from the author of that post. As far as I know, I have never formally granted Deja a right to carry my Usenet postings and the people I surveyed had not done so either. I don’t want to over-generalize but it would be my guess that most of the people who have posted articles to Usenet have never granted Deja the right to reproduce them and, as such, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who are owed by Deja.com.

Going to an international level, they are in violation of Article 9 of the Berne Convention on Copyrights, Annex 1c of the 1994 WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Article 5 of the Universal Copyright Convention. Those essentially all cover the same thing, which is the issue of copyright transfer (getting the right to reproduce content from the content creator) and the right to redistribute those copies.

Under both US and International status, Deja.com would be in violation of so many copyright rules that it would cost them more to defend a lawsuit arising from the violation than whatever proceeds they made from the sale. In order to fully comply with copyright law, Deja.com would have to obtain approval from every single person to have posted to Usenet during the period covered by the archives… or from their heirs if the person has died. See, the problem is that Copyright extends to 50 years beyond the life of a person. As we know, Usenet is less than 50 years old, which means that EVERY post on it is covered under copyright law. The exercise, though, seems to be one in futility as people may have changed email addresses or disappeared altogether from the net. As a result, it is impossible for Deja.com or the purchaser to be in compliance with copyright law. Seems to me that this is a class action lawsuit in waiting.

Privacy Law

In the United States, consumer data is not as well protected as it is in Europe. Germany and France, for example, have policies that forbid gathering any kind of data from consumers without their prior approval. This includes data that would be entered in a form as well as data that would be gathered through the use of a cookie.

The 1995 European Directive on Data Protection was enacted to control the use of personal information gathered on European citizens. It has already been put into law by eight of the fifteen European Union countries. The law does not allow American companies to gather any data on European consumers because there is a lack of protection for personal data in the United States. This means that any data gathered about Europeans has to stay in Europe. If you transfer that information from a customer based in Europe to a server based in the United States, you are in violation of that directive. Technically, each of the signatory countries could take you to court over that gathered data.

Since Usenet is a worldwide system, Deja.com is already in trouble for transferring information from Europe to the US. As far as the net was concerned, it was fine when Deja was collecting archives as a public service but now that money is involved, this could become a legal quagmire for the potential new owner.

Under the Directive, European consumers are also granted a number of important rights and may appeal to their local government if they consider their rights are not being respected. Among the rights covered are:

• The right to know what the data will be used for, including who will use it and how it will be used
• The right to access personal information upon request.
• The right to rectify information. This means that the customer must be able to change the information if it is incorrect.

The directive also says that in the case of sensitive data, such as an individual’s ethnic or racial origin, political or religious beliefs, trade union membership or data concerning health or sexual life, the Directive establishes that such data can only be processed with the explicit consent of the individual, subject to a number of exemptions for specific cases such as consent of the data subject or where there is an important public interest where alternative safeguards have to be established.

Now, what does this have to do with Usenet News? Well, based on the content that is posted to Usenet, a lot of personal data can be culled. This information can then be used for purposes other than originally planned. Under the European privacy dictums, the data on Usenet could be protected by privacy rules and represents another legal minefield.

Defamation and Linking Issues

Beyond the possible privacy implications at hand here, users could also complain about defamation of character in a Usenet newsgroup. A question that I have for the legal scholars on this list is whether Deja.com could be cited as a co-plaintiff in a lawsuit arising out of a defamatory post. Based on my cursory knowledge of the law, I think they could argue that they are covered under Lunney v. Prodigy Servs. Co., which said that Prodigy was just a common carrier and could not be held accountable for carrying defamatory content as long as it wasn’t editing the content. However, Brown v. City College of San Francisco, which arose out of the linking to defamatory comments could be and issue for Deja’s archives and their linking to defamatory comment.

Also of concern is DecSS. Buried deep inside Deja’s archives are links to sites that allow for DecSS to be downloaded. In the first interpretation of the DMCA, a judge ruled that linking to illegal code is a violation of copyright law. As a result, could Deja be held accountable for linking to DecSS download sites? Could they possibly be sued for not cutting those pages out of the archive? Once again, we are talking about tricky legal issues covering the right to link to certain software and the common carrier provisions. And that’s not even talking about links to illegal software emanating from the Deja.com site. By providing news groups that offer illegal passwords and links to copies of cracked software, doesn’t Deja break the law? Considering that Deja.com does not carry ALL newsgroups (for example, notice the missing talk.rumors newsgroup which is listed in Lizst but not Deja.com), does its selection of the newsgroups it support imply an endorsement of those newsgroups? And if that is the case, isn’t Deja.com then responsible for the content of those newsgroup?

All and all, it looks like Deja.com may be getting itself in hot water from a legal standpoint. Should it transfer the archive to a public organization, it might be able to sidestep a number of those issues by having the archives be held for the public good. However, a public institution will probably not be the highest bidder and the new owner may end up with more than it’s bargained for when making the purchase.

On the other hand, Deja.com could try to spin the archive into a non-profit organization and ask for immunity from prosecution in exchange for maintenance of an important historical entity.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Double Trouble for Deja.com. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.