Steve Clift is always worth paying attention to, so let’s start off with a general discussion of the fundamental problem that he feels online participation presents to everyday democracy/society as part of the Rebooting American Democracy series:

• Sidewalks for Democracy Online | Rebooting America | Steven Clift
  There are no public forums or meeting places in the heart of representative democracy online. Why have we decided to delete democracy from the most visited interface citizens have with “their” government?
  (tags: article participation edemocracy usa 2008 politics)

Now, a couple of databases/directories:

• E-PARTICIPATION.NET
  Directory of participation projects around Europe, crucially distinguishing active and dead sites, and with useful search functionality. I’ve mentioned it a while ago - and in my initial comments on Pep-Net (on which more soon!), and I am glad to see that Pep-net is encouraging more entries.

  Even though it currently it still seems restricted to Germany, Austria and the UK there are in fact projects from Spain and Switzerland (at least) there are plans afoot to extend the system to cope with the new diversity.

  (tags: europe participation reference)

And at a different level:

• Councillor Info v3 Councillor.info is a collaborative project backed by the Local Government Association. Councils from England and NI.  Councillor.info aims to connect Councillors with their communities using their own websites and easy-to-use online tools.
  (tags: uk politics edemocracy participation resource)

Frustratingly, the entries for individual councillors seem to have a fixed format and don’t seem to allow for external blogging activities (though there is a ‘My latest news’ feature on councillors’ pages), nor does there seem to be an RSS feed. It’s difficult to find active bloggers - all in all, a design that does not seemed destined to encourage use by councillors or (crucially) their constituents.

I found Councillor.info via this story on Slugger O’Toole, which seems to be strongly promoting the tool in Northern Irelend

“Slugger O’Toole is supporting the Northern Ireland Councillor Website project, and is encouraging local councillors to become more active users of the Internet to communicate the values of good local governance.”

Councillor.info is not on the e-participate database, though a site called http://www.councillor.gov.uk/ is - it knows about all the council wards in the UK (Scotland seems to be covered too), and the councillors England at least, providing a simple contact form for getting in touch with them.

Ah, the diversity of online democracy in the UK!

Finally and slightly off topic, I’ll mention Total Politics - not that there’s much of an e-participation angle, but it’s not often that polical magazines start up in the UK… let’s see how it goes. Enough reviews elsewhere.

Found via the SANS mailing list, Verizon’s report on the causes of and responses to data breaches is worth a read.

Some worrying/fascinating stats:

• Only 7% of data breaches are identified through a detection process
• It takes weeks to do anything about them (pp22-23)
• Two thirds of breaches involved data that the organisation did not know was present on the system (p25)

On the bright side, a basic patching strategy would protect against most attacks - even if the patches are applied weeks late.

And to wrap up, one of the SANS editors puts this report into context (my emphasis):

The learning that results from this kind of forensic analysis of actual security failures is invaluable if it is used as feedback to inform our security investments. It also is useful to guide the selection of security outcome metrics we should be tracking on a continuing basis to determine how well or poorly our security investments are working. Cybersecurity begs for more application of causality oriented feedback learning. The lack of this type of analysis and feedback is a great weakness in so-called risk management.

Download the report here (it’s only 27 very readable pages).

More comments etc:

http://www.out-law.com/page-9179
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/06/16/Insider_threat_exaggerated_says_study_1.html
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/security/Startling-findings-in-Verizon-Data-Breach-Report–/news/110936

Finally, you can get on the SANS mailing list via http://portal.sans.org/.

Update (24 June)

Bruce Schneier has now picked up on this - expect some interesting chat here.

• YouTube - UKParliament’s Channel
  Educational and background material. Most recent additions explain the role and make-up of the House of Lords
  (tags: uk parliament politics media resource history)
• eParticipation: The Work Programme 2008 has been adopted and the call for proposals is open - Europe’s Information Society Newsroom
  eParticipation is a Preparatory Action which aims at harnessing the benefits of the use of Information and Communications Technologies for better legislative and decision-making processes and enhanced public participation in such processes, at all levels
  (tags: europe participation funding 2008 fp7 edemocracy)

• Debategraph
  Making the best arguments on all sides of any debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all: Argument visualisation, wikis etc. Anlgo-Australian I think, but there are are one or two USA-related topics too. The debate agenda is definitely driven by the anglosphere (Obama, Iraq, Iran, abortion) rather than the EU
  (tags: visualization politics collaboration participation)

Found via a link in this post in OpenToPersuasion (a blog new to me, belonging to one of the founders of Debategraph) on the European Commission’s snappily titled FP7 ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling Consultation Workshop.

Ok, breaking my vow of silence here’s something I bookmarked yesterday:

• E-petitions on the rise - politics.co.uk
  Slightly sceptical overview by Alex Stevenson of the historical/political context of the possible revival of petitioning the UK/English parliament (as opposed to the government) by adding an e- to the front of it
  (tags: 2008 article uk politics edemocracy participation parliament)

via e-government news.

This week I shall mostly be preparing for and recovering from a project meeting in Brussels. Normal erratic service will return next week.

Feel free to comment against anything in the meantime - I’ll still have time for moderation.

Via Bruce Schneier:

• Built-in Windows commands to determine if a system has been hacked
  Two oldies: net and netstat and two ones new to me:
  openfiles - similar to Unix’s lsof
  wmic - which can list running processes, startup files etc

      wmic /?

  lists out the available options
  (tags: 2008 network windows security reference toolstutorial)

Could be used in an audit context to establish what’s running - less use for forensics, obviously

An update on Web 2.0 economics:

1. Web 2.0 fails to produce cash | FT.com / Companies / Media & internet

   ‘Nuff said. Tags: 2008 economics internet business news

2. Failing Web 2.0 stars pray for copyright abolition | The Register

   The Register’s take on the story: Web 2.0 was “interface” level people trying to solve “infrastructure” level problems and VCs have spunked $1.5bn of cash at the Javascript kiddies in vain. Tags: internet technology news 2008

In the end, Web 2.0 is a set of cool programming techniques (so long as you don’t mind huge downloads to display a single page) - it hasn’t created new revenue streams. The investors seems to be paying attention to what everyone’s been saying, at last.

At the moment, money is being made (I hope) by consultants like Puffbox/Simon Dickson who have understood how to bring the technology together to create value for their clients, but part of this this model is dependent on free media hosting in “the cloud” by YouTube, Flickr etc - what happens if/when that stops…?

Gotta love Dilbert:

…mind you, most people would just find a way of sneaking in the back door.

A random incoming link on my WordPress dashboard from Nourishing Obscurity reminded me about something I’d written over a year ago here in response to a piece of techno-optimism by Simon Dickson in his old blog and some Web2.0 caution from Demos’s Peter Bradwell (followed with links to a couple of relevant stories).

I said:

People are beginning to wise up to the implications of allowing those cuddly Web2.0 services to host all that nice information your give them

and noted that perhaps we should be worried about government as well as private sector exploitation of the data.

In an article today on BBC News, Bill Thompson reminds us that this problem isn’t going away:

Under the US Patriot Act the FBI and other agencies can demand to see content stored on any computer, even if it being hosted on behalf of another sovereign state.

Never mind all the other risks you need to manage when you leave someone else somewhere else to look after your critical business systems. (He points out that the UK’s RIPA is no better in the powers it gives to the government)

In August last year, I flippantly asked in Freedom of expression vs national sovereignty whether we need a new ‘Law of the Sea’ to clarify who controls whose data. Bill closes his piece with this:

Perhaps it is time for the UN to consider a cyberspace rights treaty that will outline what it’s acceptable to do when other people’s data comes into your jurisdiction.

An idea whose time is coming?