Citizen Will

[Update:] Quisling Democrats capitulated in a vote 293 to 129. Rep. Price votes NO!!. Good for him.

More here: House Approves Unconstitutional Surveillance Legislation .

Yesterday I couldn’t get an inking of how my local “progressive” Democrat US Rep. David Price would vote on the latest attempt to defend the indefensible. Would he vote to absolve ATT from its culpability? Would he further extend the reach of the US government into our private affairs?

US Sen. Russ Feingold, one heck of a leader, had no such problem:

June 19, 2008

“The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation. The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the President’s illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home. Allowing courts to review the question of immunity is meaningless when the same legislation essentially requires the court to grant immunity. And under this bill, the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power. Instead of cutting bad deals on both FISA and funding for the war in Iraq, Democrats should be standing up to the flawed and dangerous policies of this administration.”

Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) is a member of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.

Capitulation.

Damn, David is a nice enough guy. He brings home the goodies more often than not but his inability to take a lead on any of the key issues - the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, illegal domestic surveillance, torture - perverting our nation’s foundations is disheartening.

He can be led to the water, tortuously, but getting him to drink is a hell of a proposition.

Called David Price, my local Congressman, this afternoon to see if he planned to vote NO on tomorrow’s House Bill HR 6304 which proffers blanket immunity to those telecoms, like ATT (Bellsouth, Cingular), that knowingly broke Federal and State wire-tapping laws on behalf of our current lawless madministration.

His current stance: no opinion.

In fact, his office said he won’t be expressing an opinion until after his vote!

Sounds like he’s preparing to defend the indefensible - issuing what the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) calls the ” Congressional seal of approval on illegal surveillance” but maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised.

What’s the big deal? The millions of folks that are represented by the EFF in a class-action suit against AT&T because their “private domestic communications and communications records were illegally handed over to the National Security Agency (NSA)” won’t get their day in court (more here).

Not all telcos, notably QWEST (here) went along with this incredibly intrusive and illegal operation. Will Price put ATT and Verizon ahead of our citizenry and strip them of their fundamental Constitutional protections?

Contact David and let him know that warrantless searches are not acceptable.

Washington, D.C. U.S. House of Representatives 2162 Rayburn Building Washington, DC 20515 Phone: 202.225.1784 Fax: 202.225.2014

Durham 411 W. Chapel Hill Street NC Mutual Building, 6th Floor Durham, NC 27701 Phone: 919.688.3004 Fax: 919.688.0940

Raleigh 5400 Trinity Road Suite 205 Raleigh, NC 27607 Phone: 919.859.5999 Fax: 919.859.5998

Chapel Hill 88 Vilcom Center Suite 140 Chapel Hill, NC 27514 Phone: 919.967.7924 Fax: 919.967.8324

Five years ago, I attended, as a citizen, my first Technology Board meeting. I had prepared a 5 item technology checklist I thought the Town should be addressing. Some items, the municipal networking/WIFI initiative, a technology assessment, broadening civic engagement online our Council has finally started to move on. Others, like moving to non-proprietary software, open document standards, self-service kiosks, we’re still lagging on.

About a year ago, I began to experiment with using video posted to youTube and googleVideo to cover local issues that were getting short shrift.

One of my first experiments involved covering the local Superior Court race. While I supported two solid candidates - Chuck Anderson and Allen Baddour - for the office, I felt it important to give the wider community the option to see all the folks - Carl, Adam, Allen and Chuck - explain their positions in their own words.

I knew I’d never get that level of coverage from WRAL or NBC17, so I took on the challenge to cover all the forums as best as I could (with the now famous wobbly Will-cam).

Since then, I’ve branched out from my own efforts and began converting existing footage from various sources for redistribution on the Internet.

League of Women Voters Forum	Sierra Club Forum

I think my passion for civic engagement and drawing the community into policy discussions explains why no one has asked me “Why do you do it?” Over the year, though, I’ve had a few folks ask me “How do you do that?”

Here’s a quick overview of how I currently convert the DVD’s produced by Chapel Hill and Carrboro into a format suitable for youTube or googleVideo. The same process should apply to most other video formats.

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At 1460 hits, this video is by and far the most popular one I’ve posted on youTube. No surprise to me as Tracey did an incredibly eloquent presentation on the flawed Solid Waste Advisory Board’s search for a new trash transfer site.

X-Posted from my 2007 Campaign web site.

Even though the Chamber made it clear that extended replies where not welcomed in the 2007 questionnaire ( Election 2007: The Chamber’s Yes, No, Unsure - Again!), I took the opportunity to answer each of their questions beyond the constraints of “yes, no, unsure”.

The questions are broad, open to interpretation and, on occasion, leading. How would you answer the Chamber’s questions?

In case the Director omits my business background, as he did in 2005, I worked for Northern Telecom for many years, winning a couple President’s Awards and a Chairman’s Award for Innovation (the first IT person to do so). I have been a CIO/CTO of a couple successful startups, including Reged.com which sold to FiServ for millions. As an entrepreneur I was part of the crew that guided those companies to multi-million dollar revenues. I currently work for Tibco, an enterprise application integration company, specializing in XML technology and distributed Java application architectures.

Here is the questionnaire and my extended answers. You’ll note I wasn’t unsure at all:

4. Is increasing the commercial tax base in Chapel Hill an important priority for you?

YES

Even before my run for office in 2005 I was agitating for a Economic Development Officer to help develop strategic and tactical approaches to increasing our commercial tax base. Council finally hired an officer, now we need leadership with business acumen to make the best use of his services.

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Coming on the heels of last month’s $65,000 NRC fine, Progress Energy continues to promote two more reactors at their Shearon-Harris site.

There are several unresolved issues involving Shearon-Harris that makes siting further reactors more than problematic. Until waste disposal, security, adequate fire protection, safe storage and a slew of other issues are dealt with, furthering a development proposal for Shearon-Harris makes no sense.

The NRC, the industry’s partners in the nuclear mess, is holding an initial public hearing Sept. 18th in Apex.

In preparation for the Progress Energy license application for Harris, the NRC has scheduled a public information meeting on Tuesday, September 18, at the New Horizons Fellowship at 820 E. Williams Street in Apex, NC. An open house will be held from 6 to 7 p.m., followed by a NRC presentation at 7:00 p.m., after which the public will have an opportunity to ask questions. (A copy of the meeting notice is attached.)

Earlier posts on Progress Energy’s Shearon-Harris

The complete notice follows (more…)

As long time readers know, I’ve been trying to get our Town to adopt free/open source software products for the last 6 years.

There’s been some success but not enough.

FOSS (free/open source software) is a low cost alternative to the Microsoft Monopoly (the Town could’ve saved between $500-700K by now if it had adopted some of the recommendations of the now defunct Technology Advisory Board). Beyond driving cost out of the process, many of these products use (heck, celebrate) open standards which will preserve our information assets over the long haul and prevent costly proprietary lock-in.

Tomorrow, the Carolina Open Source Initiative (COSI), an organization dedicated to promoting and supporting Open Source software, principles and practices at UNC-CH will sponsor Software Freedom Day 2007.

Check out their FAQ “to learn more about Open Source software, and why you should get involved!”

Thanks to UNC’s Free Culture folks for the tip.

Speakers and Participants

10am Max Spevack from Red Hat.

Max is the Fedora Project Leader

11am Amit Bhutani from DELL. Amit is a Sr. Linux Software Engineer

12, noon - Pam Sessoms, University Library

Pam will be giving a talk on how her team customized the Pidgin chat client for use by librarians at UNC-CH. Multiple librarians can seamlessly answer questions using the ‘davisrefdesk’ IM nickname, and evening questions can be routed to librarians at Duke and NCSU as part of the Night Owl chat feature. Such customization would not have been possible if Pidgin had not been released under an Open license.

12:45pm Mark Finkle of Mozilla.

Mark is a Platform Evangelist at Mozilla Corporation. His primary job is to make it easy for people to develop extensions for Firefox. He also provides support for developers building applications on XULRunner and embedding Gecko in native applications.

1:45 Joseph Mack of AustinTek

Joseph will be discussing the Linux Virtual Server for people who are unfamiliar with the project and for those who would like to get started but want some background.

I’ll be banging the drum, once again, this year for wider adoption of these technologies by the Town to improve service delivery, preserve our information assets, promote greater transparency in the governance process and DRIVE COST out of the system.

Another bad bit of news for RTP’s Northern Telecom.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged four more former Nortel Networks Corp. executives with accounting fraud, alleging they manipulated reserves to change Nortel’s earnings statements on the orders of more senior officers of the Canadian networking equipment maker.

The U.S. stocks regulator said Wednesday it had filed civil fraud charges against Douglas Hamilton, Craig Johnson, James Kinney and Kenneth Taylor, the former vice presidents of finance for Toronto-based Nortel’s optical, wireline, wireless and enterprise business units.

In March, the SEC filed civil fraud charges against ex-CEO Frank Dunn and other executives — including former Chief Financial Officer Douglas Beatty and former controller Michael Gollogly — alleging they directed a so-called earnings management fraud to manipulate the company’s financial reports.

My Triangle career started at Northern (now Nortel) in the late ’80’s. Back then I worked for TEAM10, the DMS-10 switching side of the business. Over the next 6 years I managed to move around to various units, working on everything from manufacturing process automation to revamping the switch engineering process to writing software that managed the core central office switching equipment.

I won several Presidents Awards and was the first IT staff to get a Chairman’s Award for Innovation.

Northern Telecom (it’ll always be Northern to me) had a good energy back when I started - a vibrancy that made it fun to work there. Towards the end of my tenure, Northern was a different place. Wave after wave of layoffs. Many folks climbing the management ladder based on gamesmanship over merit.

The fun was over. The waste of talent, the incredible dissipation of the “can do” spirit was sad to see.

I kept in contact with those folks that decided to ride out the storm, looking for Northern to regain its footing, waiting for the old Northern to emerge as a technical leader once again. Unfortunately, the rot that was apparent in the mid-90’s wasn’t rooted out. It appears to have spread, as today, another 4 company officers face SEC charges.

I learned quite a bit at Northern. Great lessons in managing folks and projects. Terrible lessons on how to drive the joy out of a joyful working place.

Good luck Northern, maybe better days are ahead.

Was looking for some information on October 4th’s National Conversation on Climate Action when I stumbled upon what appears to be the Mayor’s own, new website: www.chapelhillmayorsoffice.com.

A quick Google of “www.chapelhillmayorsoffice.com” only turned up the site itself and this reference from today’s Herald-Sun:

CHAPEL HILL — The town will be part of the National Conversation on Climate Action, and will host an event at the Chapel Hill Public Library on Oct. 4 to discuss the science of climate change and what can be done locally to deal with global warming.

Chapel Hill joins local government leaders from across the country in hosting an event, which will be part education and part interactive community-wide discussion.

For more information on the National Conversation on Climate Action, including a current list of participating cities, go to www.climateconversation.org. For more information about the Chapel Hill event, go to www.chapelhillmayorsoffice.com/climatechange.html.

“I’m glad we have this opportunity to talk about climate change, and I hope this event helps citizens learn about local efforts to address global warming. The Town Council wants people in our community to think and work together on this issue, which is important both nationally and locally,” said Mayor Kevin Foy.

The network registration record indicates the domain was secured 2007-08-10 10:38:58 and registered as a DOT.COM. The first content appeared Aug. 29th, 2007.

I’m dropping an email to the Town Manager to see if this site is owned and maintained by our Town and, if not, does he know who does?

‘Blogs and websites are de rigeur of current campaigns, if this part of a Mayor Foy’s campaign or associated with the local Chamber of Commerce it might explain the .COM.

Hopefully this is the beginning of a more interactive conversation between our Mayor, whomever that is, and the public - an event to celebrate.

More information when I get it….

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I’ve been pushing for our local government to invest in community-owned networking as necessary infrastructure for the 21st century. Communities that provide neutral and widely accessible communications infrastructures will reap the benefits of greater economic activity, level the playing field vis-a-vis the digital divide and help create a new Town commons open to all our citizens irrespective of their political or other views.

To date, the Town has ear-marked $500,000 to tag-along with NC DOT’s traffic signalization upgrade project.

One argument in favor of a municipal network is that the community has direct oversight and input into its operating policies.

So, unlike a mega-corp telco like AT&T, our local community can adopt policies which don’t siphon off our emails without due legal process and protect our 4th Amendment freedoms. Or, again unlike AT&T, can sustain network neutrality, repudiate online censorship and preserve our ability to exercise freedom of speech.

AT&T did their part this weekend to make the abstract threat of mega-corporation censorship little more concrete:

After concluding our Sunday night show at Lollapalooza, fans informed us that portions of that performance were missing and may have been censored by AT&T during the “Blue Room” Live Lollapalooza Webcast. When asked about the missing performance, AT&T informed Lollapalooza that portions of the show were in fact missing from the webcast, and that their content monitor had made a mistake in cutting them. During the performance of “Daughter” the following lyrics were sung to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” but were cut from the webcast:

- “George Bush, leave this world alone.” (the second time it was sung);
- “George Bush find yourself another home.”

This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media. AT&T’s actions strike at the heart of the public’s concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media. Aspects of censorship, consolidation, and preferential treatment of the internet are now being debated under the umbrella of “NetNeutrality.”

Check out The Future of Music or Save the Internet for more information on this issue.

Pearl Jam News, Aug. 8th, 2007

Pearl Jam? Hey, whatever you think of their music or RIAA issues, they have a point. If their performance can be censored in real-time by the only conduit carrying their message, well, it can happen in pretty much any other venue.

AT&T was caught this time. What of the next when, say, they are tempted to prune a few unflattering comments made about their monopolistic practices during the telecast of a Congressional oversight hearing?

I’ve taken a break from pushing the community owned networking agenda for a short while. Folks like fellow ‘blogger and net-activist BrianR have picked up my slack and moved forward.

I have a post coming up singing the praises of these local activists who have striven to protect our community’s ability to deploy a counter to the AT&T communications monopoly.

Until then, please hop over to Brian Russell’s Yesh ‘blog to catch up on what has been happening on the local scene.

It appears that Progress Energy has prevailed against local concerns the fire safety and overall security of their Shearon-Harris facility is less than adequate:

Progress Energy has cleared a hurdle in its bid to extend the operating license of the Shearon Harris nuclear plant by 20 years.

The Raleigh utility persuaded administrative law judges to reject safety concerns raised by nuclear critics who are challenging the license extension.

The groups want to litigate safety issues that the atomic board said fall outside the scope of a relicensing proceeding. Such proceedings are limited by law to reviewing a nuclear plant’s safety components and environmental impacts as the plant ages, the atomic board said.

N&O

I commented on NC Warn’s efforts in this recent post.

I’ve been following the mess at Shearon-Harris before the facility opened. Locally, our governments have to be concerned that this facility maintains the highest safety standards. For nearby communities - Pittsboro, Apex, Cary - the consequences of an accidental release present a devastating prospect. Closer to home, the economic and environmental reverberations would be significant.

The troubled NRCs role in this - their continued lack of oversight and willingness to bend what is in the best business interest of companies like Progress Energy - does not bode will for our community.

Luckily, local Representative David Price is aware of the fire safety issue and has promised to have the GAO look into the process to make sure the public good is well-served.

As many of you know, I have a particular interest in employing technology to boost our citizens’ voices cost-effectively and in ways not otherwise possible. I met a kindred spirit in the The Peoples Channel’s director Chad Johnston many years ago when we both started attending the Town’s now defunct Technology Advisory Board to encourage facilitating democracy from the grassroots level.

As our Town’s “ONLY public access channel”, the Peoples Channel is dedicated to an informed, involved electorate.

For a democratic society to function properly, citizens must participate in their government, be educated to think critically and be able to freely communicate their ideas.The Peoples Channel’s mission is to advance democratic ideals by ensuring that people have access to electronic media and by promoting effective communication through community uses of media. Through this mission, we aim to provide the means and promote the opportunity for area citizens to exercise free speech through media production, education and distribution of cable television programming.

Cost-effective doesn’t quite capture how hard Chad and his fellow citizen media producers have done to squeeze value from the small allocation of funds their organization receives. And I’d be hard challenged to identify another local activist that has worked as diligently as Chad to forestall corporate efforts (IndyWeek’s 2005 “Big cable wants public access denied”) at the State and Federal levels to strangle avenues of citizen discourse.

One example is the Orwellian-name “Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act” which the Technology Advisory board discussed in 2005 (side note: Whom, now that the Mayor and Council disbanded that group, within our local government is spear-heading that discussion?).

That is why I was pleased to see today’s announcement over on OrangePolitics of a joint celebration of localism and fund-raiser for the Peoples Channel.

Co-sponsored by both the Preservation Society and OrangePolitics, the July 21st event will bring folks together to “learn about the importance of keeping it local”.

When: July 21st, 6-8pm,
Where: Horace-Williams House [MAP] (parking available on-site or take an easy stroll from Downtown),
What: Fundraiser for the Peoples Channel and gathering to discuss “keeping it local”. $15 donation suggested.

Four years ago I suggested we use the scheduled upgrade of our traffic system to fiber to upgrade Chapel Hill’s own communication infrastructure. May 21st, Council is prepared to approve funds. $500,000 to be exact, to move ahead with that tandem upgrade.

For a very modest cost, less, I believe, than what Council has set aside, our local government will free itself from Time-Warner’s monthly bills, increase capacity to the point of deploying new services - video conferencing, for instance - and provide a key economic incentive for information-based business.

Monday’s resolution spells out some of the initial benefits of the upgrade:

At the Town’s request, the State has approved funding in the 2007-2013 Transportation Improvement Program for rehabilitation and expansion of the Chapel Hill traffic signal system. The proposed upgrade project includes the following key elements:

• Fiber optic communication cable
• Closed-circuit television (CCTV) equipment at selected locations in the Town
• New system detectors
• Pedestrian countdown displays at locations with existing pedestrian signals
• Replacement/upgrade of existing cabinets and controllers
• New/revised signal phasing at selected locations
• Emergency vehicle preemption at selected locations
• Bicycle activated loops at selected locations
• Transit priority on selected corridors (if desired by the Town)

The agreement also includes planning, design, and installation of additional fiber optic cable and associated hardware for Town information technology purposes. 

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) equipment at selected locations in the Town? That could be pretty creepy.

During my tenure on the Town’s Technology Board, I and others suggested the Town draft specific privacy policies covering the deployment of surveillance technology. Whether it is tracking a citizen’s Internet usage at the local library or video-taping their stroll down Franklin St., the Town must provide clear, unambiguous directives for the use and dissemination of this information.

I’ve sent our manager an email requesting more information on the CCTV usage. Even if it’s only for monitoring traffic patterns, I believe we need to establish clear, measurable guidelines for the capture and stock-piling of this information.