This will end up being one of the biggest tests of democracy and ethics in governments around the world that we have seen in decades.

Governments clearly hide information and operate covertly. We all know this, nothing knew. Regardless of your opinion as to the method of information revelation, it is clearly evident this week that government are as two faced as our intuition was telling us. An integrity fail-athon.

Secondly, Julia Gillard is out defaming Julian Assange as a criminal when he clearly isn’t, he’s a conduit for information. The words “allege” need to be used at a minimum. See NSW Supreme Court Solicitor Peter Kemp’s Letter to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

Why is it that the US seems to be allowed to repeatedly breach UN conventions? How can governments hold any credibility going forward and it seems the UN has become an un-government in recent times.

Governments around the world are pooling together like bullies and especially The Swedish government. The ABC reported last night that the Swedes wouldn’t interview Julian Assange when he was in Sweden for a month about alleged non-consensual sex. He tried to speak to them but clearly in my mind they had another agenda. If the Swedes learned he was probably innocent then it’s hard to arrest him. So my theory is that the plan was never to talk to him and instead just arrest him. Governments are looking to nuke him for any slip up. It seems the Swedes picked a team a long time ago in open versus closed government.

Lastly it’s disgraceful watching the misinformation stream. The press, governments and even companies are now pumping it for any number of motives. See this beatup up of the risk of the coca cola formula being leaked.

Seriously do these governments and companies seriously think they can outcompete the atomic level democracy of the net and it’s power to reveal the truth?

• iPad non-porn by Bob Parson’s marketing machine at GoDaddy.
• Tech Zealots and how to spot them in the wild.
• Megashark infographic. It’s the absolute truth.
• Without civil liberties, government is just a criminal racket by Stilgherrian
• The secret to great work is great play – so that would mean it’s no-longer work, right?

Sydney Industrial – clearly it doesn’t have to be about skyscrapers. By Mugley

Manhattan – so strange without the twins but now balanced with buildings in scale. By paulobar

Shinagawa Hilton Tokyo – a super city that transports you 10 years into the future. By PSD

A few years ago I worked in Tokyo on some transactions with the investment bank I was working for. I desperately want to go back there to live for at least a month or more to soak it all up again with my family.

This video really captures the feeling of Tokyo. It is an amazing place, you must go there.

What is amazing is that Iran isn’t on the list. Iran had an earthquake in 1962 which was one of the founding reasons behind the establishment of the WFP. Iran is making mega bucks out of oil at the moment.

Photo thanks to OLPC on Flickr.com

I mentioned in my previous post I thought the David Hicks issue was a failure point for Amnesty so I thought I should clarify further in this post. David Hicks has it quite good really for someone in his situation, he’s only paid away 5 years of his life for someone willing to kill Australian, UK or US soldiers.

I would have much preferred to spend my donation dollars on freeing a pacifist Tibetan monk in a Chinese prison.

The press only cared about conditions in Guantanamo because of growing public focus on the HR violation issues created by HR organizations (including Amnesty). The press were interested in David because he was an Australian fighting Australians not because of how he was treated in prison. That’s the reality, the press don’t right a story unless there is one there to be written.

HR organisations have made Guantanamo into a huge issue now to the point where we are spending plenty of government dollars on top of the aid dollars. Not to forget using international relation favours to speed things up. Crickey we should have kept those favours for a better day when we really needed them.

On a triage scale where you have ‘x’ dollars and you are trying to save ‘y’ lives then Guantanamo is near the bottom of the pile. Assume there is 20 truly innocent people out of 400 in the prison. These people happened to be caught up in the mess or they hung out with some bad guys or happened to know some.

I’d argue that all the good intentions to (a) free David and (b) bad cop the Guantanamo Prison leaves countries like China saying “See the Americans have a prison like ours so we can keep our prison”. Who did this? The HR organisations creating public following via the press and blogs did it. You can’t argue its the press, do you ever see stories about Chinese prisons with such frequency and rigor?

Again, I’ll be clear that I applaud the good intent of Amnesty on these issues but I feel there was a failure to recognize the impact of doing this. I agree that any torture or execution needs to stop but again I go back to triage. Whats the relative comparison to torture and execution in Chinese prisons?

Triage is all about saving lives with the most likelihood of success. You need to remove emotion and attachment for effective triage (i.e. David is Australian – so what!!! He’s human like everyone in the Chinese prisons that deserves to be saved) The Chinese prison system probably has 10′s of 1,000′s of innocent people. Effectively, Guantanamo saw HR Organisation focus set resources onto 20 people instead of those 1,000′s – poor triage management.

Now there is a new problem that has been created out of this stance by HR organisations. We now have to get rid of Guantanamo to get the “influence power” back with China to do the same. However, this poses a problem – Americans will have military prisons for a long time to come. Guantanamo was just a “military prison” now it’s an excuse for others to have one like it, we all agree. So I don’t think it was a good decision to fight the battle for David, raise public awareness, highlight the bad points of Guantanamo etc at the expense of many more in Chinese prisoners that need freeing. I just hope there may be some internal insight into what Amnesty has actually been creating and backing in this situation.

I’m not a Catholic but this shift was the final straw for me. After their concentrated effort for David Hicks I feel like Amnesty’s ability to operate in triage mode is all but lost so I’m diverting funds into other causes now instead. Triage would have you look at David Hicks and ruthlessly say well that isn’t a cause worth supporting.

Further you could be mathematical about it and say that there is a high probability that he’s guilty and thus leave Amnesty resources for causes that have much higher probability of being good causes to save 100% innocent people. It’s not that I don’t believe strongly enough in the right to a quick fair trial for everyone (including David Hicks) it’s just that I strongly believe in triage. A huge amount of resource cost seems to have gone into this one matter by my anecdotal evidence. Harder evidence is available.

Amnesty has 193 pages of info on David and his case in the Australian website as an example. Triage would have you use that resource differently, on a larger number of people in need. I think Amnesty has done some great work over the years and I hope they change their minds on this matter so I can start my direct debit again.

One of their best campaigns was Message in The Bottle by Digital Eskimo.

You could argue Amnesty needs the media profile that the David Hicks case brings to their organisation to help them get donations which then allows them to be a pillar and do good things but I think that is a bit of a sellout on the donators (like me) who give to Amnesty because in the past they were there for the low profile people in desperate need.