Revelations About Massive UK Police Corruption Shows Why We Cannot -- And Must Not -- Trust The Spies

As Mike reported recently, the NSA has presented no credible evidence that its bulk metadata collection is stopping terrorist attacks, or keeping people safe. Instead, the argument in support of the secret activities of the NSA and its friends abroad has become essentially: "Trust us, we really have your best interests at heart." But that raises the question: Can we really do that? New revelations from The Independent newspaper about massive and thorough-going corruption of the UK police and judiciary a decade ago show that we can't: 

On Techdirt.

Latest Stupid DRM Idea: Ebooks With Corrupted Texts That Vary By Customer

It is extraordinary how companies have failed to grasp three basic facts about DRM: that DRM only needs to be broken once, and it is broken everywhere, thanks to the Internet; that DRM is always broken at least once; and that once DRM is broken, anything still with that DRM is effectively worth less than zero -- since copies freely available online never have DRM. Despite these inconvenient truths, copyright companies continue to hope that there is some magic technology that will "protect" them from the pirates. Here's the latest forlorn attempt to do that, as reported by paidContent: 

On Techdirt.

Bulgarian Banks Try To Silence Web Site That Called Them 'Bad Apples'

Whatever your views on the value of Wikileaks, one of its useful side-effects has been the appearance of other sites that have tried to do a similar job of calling the powerful to account using leaked information, but at a more local level. One of the most successful of these is BalkanLeaks, created by the Bulgarian investigative journalists Atanas Tchobanov and Assen Yordanov. In fact, it's been rather too successful for some, and is now on the receiving end of some legal threats, as a column in Forbes explains: 

On Techdirt.

Open Government: the Latest Member of the Open Family

One of the most exciting developments in the last few years has been the application of some of the core ideas of free software and open source to completely different domains. Examples include open content, open access, open data and open science. More recently, those principles are starting to appear in a rather surprising field: that of government, as various transparency initiatives around the world start to gain traction....

On Linux Journal.

How Openness Can Regulate the Real World

Yes, even the really messy bits:

Participatory regulation is arguably the best way to surface and defeat corruption in government and industry. I’ve highlighted a range of impressive efforts below. They range from Transparency International’s more top-down survey and index approach to the bottom-up Wikileaks site where anybody can post documents that uncover instances of corruption.

The post explores several examples: Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index; The Kimberley Process (KP) - a joint government-industry-civil society initiative to stem the flow of conflict diamonds; and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which is "similar in intent to TI’s bribe payer’s index — it also aims to strengthen governance by improving transparency and accountability in the extractives sector" (apparently the "extractive industries" refer to mining, oil, gas and similar companies).

What's really noteworthy here is that openness is being used to make a difference not in airy-fairy realms of genteel, abstract concerns, but in some of the most brutal, real-world contexts imaginable. Who knows, it might even work for something as corrupt as the British political system.

Update: Simon Phipps has pointed out the new Stimulus Watch, which works on similar principles.