Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter as a way to share and consume information but I’m tired of the coverage lavished on it as a revolutionary entity.

The latest breathless article appeared in The Toronto Star recently in which the author, Antonia Zerbisias, talked about how Twitter was used during the G20 meetings, and how a digital divide is being created between people who get their news via Twitter, and those who receive it using traditional media sources.

It’s yet another example of Twitter getting far more credit than it really deserves. Yes, Twitter is an exciting new communication tool but the praise being bestowed on it as a “game breaker” is unjustified.

It’s not just political coverage that is getting people excited about Twitter. It’s healthcare, entertainment, sports, and business. As a long-time Twitter user, it’s strange to see Twitter hailed as such a breakthrough given the tremendous technology advances that have happened in recent years.

The fascination with Twitter may have to do with how it is rapidly emerging as more than just a niche service. With more than 100 million users, Twitter is big enough that it doesn’t draw a lot of blank stares from people unaware of it. That said, it’s still a new and shiny toy for those just starting to get on the Twitter bandwagon. This explains articles that gush over how much it has changed the world as we know it.

Twitter is a valuable tool for personal and professional reasons but, come on, it’s not the greatest thing since sliced bread. While I don’t have Twitter Fatigue, I am tired of seeing so much adoration for it.

Originally published on markevanstech.com.

Reading Daemon, one can’t help but compare it to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, perhaps because both deal with rogue artificial intelligences (AI) and can probably be considered science fiction. If I sound a bit tentative about that, it’s because, while Neuromancer neatly fits the mold, set in a time at least some distance from now and featuring all kinds of technology that we don’t have yet, most of the technology in Daemon exists today, and the time setting could be tomorrow or the day after. One is almost tempted to invent a new category for it — technosocial fiction, perhaps.

Prior to reading Daemon, I was among those who regarded Gibson as something of a visionary for the world he created in Neuromancer, but now it almost seems like a fanciful fairytale. This is not to say that Daemon is necessarily more prophetic. A part of me hopes it isn’t. Another hopes that it is.

You might be thinking that given the lack of progress in AI research, any story featuring it might properly be regarded as a fairytale. That’s where Suarez’s genius comes to the fore. True, actual, full fledged AI is still something of a grail, but pseudo-AI, or limited AI, or narrow AI — whatever you want to call what game designers use to get non-player characters in video games to behave in more devious, more human ways — that exists today.

What if a brilliant game designer, an absolute Einstein of the genre, wrote a distributed application that lived “out there” on people’s computers, on company servers, or anywhere a flaw or security hole could let in a worm? And what if this application (or daemon, a term used in UNIX circles for an application that runs in the background doing things unattended) possessed narrow AI of the highest sophistication, the brilliant game designer’s masterwork?

Initially the daemon bides its time, monitoring rss feeds, waiting for news of the death of its creator from brain cancer to start it on its path towards . . . but that would be giving away too much, and, indeed, is part of the fun of the book. Just what is this daemon doing, and what does it want anyway, to whatever extent non-intelligent, narrow AI can be said to “want” anything?

If this was purely a super-technology driven novel, it would fail to live up to its potential, or to the challenge that Suarez seems to have set himself, which appears to be to create and empower his daemon only with technology as it exists today. In fiction, a super bad AI could crack any encryption and do all sorts of unlikely things just because it’s so powerful and the plot requires it. But today’s encryption and security measures as employed by large financial institutions (heck, as employed by your web browser when you visit a secure site) would be beyond Suarez’s daemon. Much of the digital world would be closed or else very hard to crack, aside from some low hanging fruit. (One is astonished sometimes by security lapses committed by institutions which should know better.) There is no Gibsonian cyberspace in this fictive world which can be jacked into and manipulated in some not well defined but science-fictiony way.

Fortunately for the story, Suarez understands that the greatest threat to security is human beings. And in his fictive world (as in our real one) there are plenty of young, smart people — gamers, IT workers, electrical engineers, and so on — many feeling under-appreciated within government and corporations, feeling exploited and alienated in their basement server rooms from the rest of the organization, especially those on the highest floors. And there are plenty of this same type of person unemployed, laid off, out of work, and looking for money. For a smart AI in a networked world, procuring a virtually limitless payroll is no problem. I won’t spoil it with detail, but if you accept the premise of the daemon’s sophistication, its initial moves to acquire wealth are completely plausible.

The element of recruiting young, bright people who feel apart from the mainstream, who take refuge in computer games in virtual worlds the daemon is even more at home in than they, elevates the theme from simply technology gone amok to a kind of class warfare. It is at this level as well that one begins to question who really is the bad guy — the daemon which appears to be a major threat to the corporatist establishment, or that establishment itself? Both are cruel. Only one is fat, complacent, and much, much more vulnerable than its masters ever imagined.

This is a novel which doesn’t contain any characters who are “nice.” They seem to run the range from murderously psychopathic to, at best, people whose moral core is sound, but whose lives don’t always make having a moral core particularly comfortable. Nonetheless, there are protagonists one feels for. I wouldn’t say that character is Suarez’s greatest strength as a writer, but I’ve read far worse by much more famous scifi authors. And there are a lot of characters in this book, the story flicking back and forth between them. They are a colorful enough rogues gallery, though, that when the story shifts it isn’t difficult to go along with it.

I give Daemon four stars out of five for being a brilliantly conceived, if not perfectly executed first novel. (Parts near the end drop down to a more “hope they make an action/adventure film out this” level.) It is speculative fiction, but the speculation is so well founded in the world as it exists now — technologically, socially, economically, politically — that it does almost read as prophecy. The chief thing to tell oneself, if one doesn’t care for the prophecy, is that no one could be smart enough to create a narrow AI that sophisticated. Because if such a thing were possible, if such a distributed daemon could be written for a wired world full of brilliant disenfranchised young people fully prepared to follow a dead guy’s virtual ghost who not only understands their world but is a product of it . . . well, there might be some changes around here.

Daemon is a rollicking good, action packed story that respects your intelligence most of the time. A real treat, I highly recommend it.

Published by Dutton. Hardcover $26.95 (US), paperback $9.99, ebook 8.99

Who’s a good bionic kitty? Yes, you are, you peg legged black beauty you. Yes, you are so, you beautiful boy!

Excuse me, just suffering a bit of cat proximity effect.

courtesy of xkcd

On more than one occasion watching American news coverage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, I’ve heard it referred to as the greatest disaster of its kind in US history. One might think it is the worst in world history. One would be wrong.

Reuters has published a piece by Robert Campbell providing some very interesting background and context. The worst disaster of this kind was the explosion of the Mexican Ixtoc offshore well 31 years ago this month, back in 1979. According to the article, Ixtoc poured three times more crude into the Gulf than has gushed out so far in the Deepwater Horizon disaster. What happened with Deepwater was not only conceivable, it had precedent. Why, then, were its lessons not learned?

I’ll let you read the fine article for the details, but it boils down to hubris and wishful thinking. Something like that wouldn’t happen if an American (or in this case, a British based mulinational) company was running the show. And if you discounted Ixtoc as the result of inferior third world effort, then you could say that nothing like that had happened before, and therefore it was extremely unlikely anything like that would happen in the future, thus making adequate safety measures “prohibitively expensive” relative to likelihood.

The article is chilling not only for the insight provided into the slack standards and head-in-the-sand perspective of everyone involved, both government and industry, but also for the questions it raises concerning current operations of deep water rigs put into service under exactly the same terms of this same period of slack oversight and cutting of corners.

Campbell observes,

Macondo, the scene of BP’s spill, is 30 times deeper than Ixtoc — 4,993 feet, or about a mile down in the dark, freezing depths of the Gulf. Special robots able to resist the crushing pressure of the deep that would destroy a modern navy submarine are the only way to get close to the leak.

then later notes that some of these deep water wells are drilling at 7,500 feet. It’s hard not to feel that what’s going on is a form of madness. It’s difficult to say where the most responsibility should lie — with blithely unprepared companies conducting dangerous operations whose failure could be regarded as a major crime against the planet, or governments, who should be safeguarding the environment, paving the way for these sorts of operations.

Obama rails at BP hoping he can make all that oil stick on them, but both the Clinton and Bush administrations are clearly implicated, and his administration can’t claim to be squeaky clean either, if only for the policies it has inherited. Hopefully his Deepwater Horizon oil spill commission is more than just a PR move.

The lessons of Ixtoc were dismissed and forgotten. Let’s hope the lessons of Deepwater are learned and acted upon.

~ o ~

In happier news, I would be remiss as a tech writer not to give a shout out to Hayabusa, the little Japanese space probe that wouldn’t quit no matter what. It made an impressive entrance, returning to Earth yesterday with a display of fireworks totally in keeping with the happy occasion.

All of the trials and tribulations it faced on its five year journey to a comet and back are outlined in this article of the Daily Yomiuru Online (still no word on the payload, hopefully it brought back a little comet matter to study). The team in charge of the project faced challenge after challenge with creative thinking and the true hacker spirit. Omedetō gozai masu!

A new copyright bill has been introduced into parliament today, Bill C-32. I nearly wrote “anti-copyright” bill because, while I like the original idea of copyright, most of what governments have done to it in recent decades has been to its detriment.

The idea behind copyright was that all creative works belong in the public domain. There is no so called “intellectual property,” that being a weasel term to try and get people to believe that copyright means ownership. It doesn’t.

The concept of copyright was created to grant creators of original works a limited duration monopoly on those works to serve as both reward and incentive to create further works. It was not created in order to allow Disney to make millions off of a cartoon rodent in perpetuity, nor to similarly allow other corporate conglomerators of media to live fat off of old stuff — that’s totally opposed to the original intent of actually encouraging the creation of new stuff.

From the sound of it, this new bill could be worse than it is. It doesn’t add yet another extension to the term of copyright, doesn’t add more levies to media or players of media (though the blank CD levy remains in place), it does explicitly recognize some fair use concerns, such as creating not-for-profit “mashups” from copyrighted works, as well as allowing format transfer, time shift, and backup (not that the current law necessarily disallows these).

The major downside to the bill is that it seeks to protect digital restriction management schemes (DRM, or “digital locks”) from being broken. DRM is a flawed idea which hands all control over the media to the copyright holder (or, let’s get real, to the media corporation, since generally creators of “DRM worthy” content do not retain the copyright and should be grateful for whatever crusts the corporation throws). In some cases this would render the positive aspects of the bill moot. What good is the right to be able to transfer your content from one media to another if the original media contains DRM which prohibits copying? If you crack the DRM in order to exercise your rights under the law you will be breaking the law. Or as Michael Geist puts it:

The foundational principle of the new bill is that anytime a digital lock is used, it trumps virtually all other rights. This means that both the existing fair dealing rights and Bill C-32’s new rights all cease to function effectively so long as the rights holder places a digital lock on their content or device.

DRM is flawed in so many ways it would take an entire series of articles to go over, so I’ll simply point to this rather extensive “briefing” by Cory Doctorow, and encourage you to google if you want more, because there’s lots out there.

The only other point I’ll emphasize because it is so incredibly relevant to the original concept of copyright is that some forms of DRM which require connection to server to grant access are essentially a kill switch on your content. When that server is no more, because the company folds or decides it’s no longer worth its while — bye bye content. Unless, that is, you crack the DRM, but under this law that would be illegal. Again, this is your content — public domain once the limited monopoly expires. If anything, we need legislation against locking people out of what should eventually be theirs (or with the current law, their kids’ or grandkids’).

The only reform that Canadian copyright law requires is a shortening of the duration of copyright back to original levels. People need to wake up to the bullshit of “intellectual property,” demand that copyright represent a limited monopoly as originally intended, realize that ultimately, beyond that limited monopoly, this stuff is all OUR property, and tell anyone who tries to put locks on it to piss off. You can find the contact information for your MP here. At least email, but be aware that hand written letters may make a stronger impression.

Copyright law as it exists currently is not worthy of our respect. The law this new bill proposes is even less so.

Q: How difficult would it be for the copyright holder of a film to get the IP addresses of people sharing that film over bittorrent?

A: Easy as pie. Here’s a portion of a screen capture from my bittorrent client, ktorrent, showing the ip addresses of people sharing a popular file on my computer right now.

I’ve blurred the ip addresses in the image in order to protect the innocent until proven guilty.

The relationship between the IP address on your computer and packets of information sent on the internet is similar to the address of your residence and letters sent by post — both letters and packets must know where they’re going if they’re ever to get there. If you want to access or share data on the internet, you can’t be without one, which is why it is difficult to be absolutely anonymous. Really, the best you can do is use someone else’s IP address — either by connecting through a proxy which, while it sees your IP address, displays its own to everyone else, or by connecting via someone else’s IP address, such as that of the wireless service provided by a local cafe or neighbour who has left their wireless unprotected by a password.

So why then haven’t studios gone after people using bittorrent? Surely the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which represents the big studios, would have an interest. Perhaps they don’t want the negative image that the RIAA and its member labels (Sony, Universal, EMI, Warner, etc.) have acquired by going after the people who are often their own customers. Or perhaps, since they’re experiencing record profits, they don’t really feel a need.

But a smaller studio, Voltage, has filed a copyright complaint against the currently unknown holders of 5,000 IP addresses who used bittorrent to snag a copy of their movie The Hurt Locker. Lawsuits for 10 other small films have been filed by a company called the U.S. Copyright Group.

The message they want to send is probably that you shouldn’t take free copies of movies via bittorrent. But in practical terms the message may be more specific, namely avoid the movies of litigious studios like Voltage and those represented by the US Copyright Group, including Cinepro Pictures International (The Steam Experiment), Far Cry Productions (Far Cry), G2 Productions (Uncross the Stars), Animationwerks (Gray Man) and Braeburn Entertainment (Call of the Wild in 3D). It shouldn’t be too hard, since none of these movies is exactly rated highly.

I just hope this doesn’t represent a new business model — create a crappy movie, then recoup your losses by suing file sharers en masse. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will ISP’s cooperate in associating names with IP addresses? Will those targetted simply settle, rather than go to court? If they don’t settle, will the courts react negatively to being used as part of a business model intended to generate revenue through litigation? Or will they award the sort of over-the-top damages that they have in music sharing cases? Stay tuned.

Facebook has taught us some lessons about what people want on the web. Geocities provided a space, but there was nothing in it. It had to be filled with content from the account owner transferred via something called FTP — waaay too much work for a lot of people, and scary too. I mean “FTP” sounds like something out of a barely remembered science class. There might also have been an uncomfortable implication that you ought to have something worthwhile to say before going to all that trouble.

With Facebook, on the other hand, the content practically generates itself! Just hit a lot of “Like” and “Share” buttons and you don’t really need to write anything. Or if you do feel like broadcasting yourself, just type whatever you like into a form, and it’s as easy as that! And so safe as well for those who don’t want their info exposed to the whole world, but only to a select group of one or two or three or four hundred “friends.”

Facebook’s Achilles’ heel, though, may turn out to be privacy. Matt McKeon has created a wonderful chart which allows one to track, year-by-year, the erosion in Facebook’s default privacy settings. Over at Wired, Ryan Singel provides some insight into the current situation.

So is there an alternative for those concerned by Facebook’s emerging business model — namely, selling its user’s identities? Could any private entity be trusted not to do exactly the same?

The answer may be to take a fresh look at the web, with the lessons of Facebook in mind. Facebook does nothing unique, and it doesn’t do any particular thing particularly well. What it does primarily is aggregate a number of things which can already be done, and facilitate sharing of information between users (and increasingly anyone else they feel like sharing user info with).

What if these various functions could be distributed following much the same sort of model as the internet? Let’s take a simple example, like your email address. There isn’t a central server which holds all info about email addresses, but rather a system which allows your computer to fire off an email which goes to another computer which does a lookup and sends the info on towards its destination. Yes, it’s all quite technical, but, as a user, you don’t need to know any of the technicalities in order to send email, and no single entity or organization needs to manage all the email addresses in the world so that everyone can communicate with one another.

An open, distributed system wouldn’t be enough on its own for a lot of people, just as Geocities’ free empty space you could FTP to wasn’t appealing to a lot of people. But it would allow others to set up their own “Facebooks,” and every one of them would be interoperable with every other. If friend Alice posted something on her “wall” in her account with the Super Social Networking A-go-go site, friend Benny would see it in his account with Awesome Social Networking Divas site. And accounts would be transferable between sites, just like any real internet type account is today.

That latter point is very important. If Super’s privacy policy sucks, there’s absolutely nothing stopping Alice from moving her account to Awesome. Users would no longer be The Damned, condemned to an individual social networking site’s hell.

It’s difficult to say when or even if this will come to pass, but I’ve yet to hear a Facebook user who was entirely pleased with the service, especially on the issue of privacy. Give users a site with all the functionality of Facebook, better designed, as easy or easier to use, with total control over access to their information, and they might just go for it. Make it a distributed technology, and you’d do away with the need for a single entity to acquire a critical mass of users — any individual, group, ISP, etc. could set up their little corner, which would be interoperable with everyone else’s little corner, with all those little corners adding up to a global community of users.

In other words: watch out, Facebook.

I’ve been taking violin lessons for over a year now. Back at the 12 month anniversary, I thought it would be cool to create a vid of my playing to look back at on the second anniversary, to measure my progress.

My first attempt was with my Acer Aspire One netbook. I’ll spare you the gory details, but sufficeth to say, the Aspire One SUCKS at video (though the blur effect on the bow was kind of cool; man I must be able to play fast!).

For awhile I’ve been thinking it would be interesting to get a digital camcorder, but, as I don’t have loads of disposable income, they would have to come down significantly in price. But frustrated by the netbook and feeling the pressure of passing time, “significantly” suddenly took on a lower value. When I saw the Samsung U10 for sale at ncix.com for $200, I got one.

Mounted on a tripod with the handy tripod mount attachment, it did a good job of documenting for myself, and no one else in the world ever, ever, ever, the current state of my violin playing. Some vids are not for YouTube.

The subject of my first attempt was actually my cat. I wanted to see what sort of quality this little beasty could crank out, so I made sure it was set to max HD. Interestingly, it turns out that my computer can’t play full HD video. It tried valiantly, but there were lots of dropped frames, and, in places, it was just a slide show. If quality at a low price is your objective, this little unit may suffice, but unless you’ve got a recent computer with a graphics subsystem that can handle it, you may not be able to play it back.

Of course, you could always play it back through your TV, since it comes with cables for that. What it doesn’t come with, surprisingly, is even a small SD card. Since it records to SD, you would think that they’d at least include a little 4 GB one, good for a little more than a half hour of HD vid. But no, and until you get one you’re out of business. Also missing is any sort of cover or sleeve — again, a cheap little extra they could have included.

And don’t look for a printed manual. That would have been very nice, since the interface sucks so badly I actually had to refer to the one provided in pdf format on a CD that was included. I would guess that Samsung did not do extensive prototype testing with actual human beings, refining the design with their feedback. If they had, it wouldn’t have this interface.

Here’s a glaring example. What does this button do?

Wrong! That’s not a play button, that’s the “mode” button. It switches you between record standby mode and file management mode. If you want to play a vid or view a still, you switch to file management mode, use the dicky pressure pad buttons to select the file and then, if you’re like me, you press the play button and get switched back to record standby mode.

I got my first cassette recorder when I was a child and have had numerous recording devices and programs since. That symbol is burned into my brain as the play button. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that, and that it really does qualify as a universal symbol. To play the selected file, you’re actually supposed to hit the “ok” button on the dicky pressure pad.

“Dicky pressure pad” is not Samsung’s term. If I had a handy printed manual, I’d look up whatever they’re calling it, but I don’t and am too lazy to find the CD and look it up in the pdf. But “dicky pressure pad” describes it well.

Because the dicky pressure pad is flat with no raised buttons to inform your fingers of where they are, you have to pay careful attention to what you’re doing to use it. It seems to have been designed for the fingers of a geisha, and is not well suited for meaty man fingers.

Miskeying is a common experience. Reliability is also an issue. Sometimes I’ll get a double keying, other times no effect at all. This, plus the way the software works, makes selecting and deleting some files, but not others, a royal pain. Even if you finally get marked all the files you want to delete, and manage to get to the menu option to delete, you have the opportunity to screw the whole operation up by miskeying the confirm dialogue. For cleaning out files it is definitely better to use the provided USB cable to connect it to a computer and use the operating system’s file manager to do the job.

Because of the interface, I would only recommend this sweet little horror if you need something small and cheap which produces high quality vids right now. For only a hundred bucks more you can easily get something a little more conventional (although I marvel at how small even the conventional camcorder is becoming) with a more mature, less flawed interface. Or if you like the idea of a high def camcorder you can slip in your shirt pocket, I doubt it will be very long before the competition comes out with something better, perhaps even by the time you read this. So shop around.

I’ll close now with a clip originally shot in HD. It’s about a minute and three quarters. It was around five, but I used the built in split feature of the U10 to divide the video in two. Sadly, as unpleasant as the experience was, it was easier than trying to edit video on my otherwise redoubtable Linux operating system. The video split feature is another reason not to lose the CD with the manual, or if you’re blessed with an OS and software that edit video easily, do it there.

Without further ado, I present my cat, the inimitable BB Rose in her online video debut.

Confession: I’m a social media junkie – an enthusiastic blogger, active Twitter user, reluctant member of the ever-growing Facebook empire, and YouTube watcher. I like to share my thoughts and interesting content and online services.

The chances, however, of me using Blippy are zero, nil, nadda, nunca.

Why anyone would give a third-party their credit card information so their purchases can be tracked and broadcast is beyond me. Over the past week, I have been beating the drum about the changes that Facebook made to its API that now make more of your information public. Blippy is just another strange part of the “tell-all” ecosystem that has emerged in recent years.

Really, what are the benefits of telling the world about your purchases? Seriously, what’s in it for you, your friends, or strangers?

Is it vanity? Is it a way to provide real-world suggestions about the best products and services to purchase? Is it just another creature of consumerism, which seems to have survived the recession relatively unscathed? Or is Blippy just another beast to feed our growing addiction to sharing?

I’m sure there are people who get some value from Blippy by getting a better idea of what people are buying so they can make better purchasing decisions, but let’s be real here: Blippy’s in the business of collecting massive amounts of data so it can aggregate and leverage it to make money. In other words, your activity fuels the fire.

To me, the common theme between Facebook and Blippy is how the balance between the benefits offered to users, and what these companies get from all their users’ activity, is starting to tilt in the direction of the businesses. While users get a few social media crumbs, Facebook and Blippy are gorging at the data buffet.

By the way, here’s Blippy mea culpa in the wake of reports that some of its users’ credit card information was accidentally disclosed via Google.

Originally posted on markevanstech.com

There seems to be some confusion as to whether or not AK47s and RPGs (rocket propelled grenade) were present in the video released by WikiLeaks of the slaughter of civilians, including two Reuters news staff, by the crew of an Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007. Consequently, I present here a brief primer on spotting AK47s and RPGs in hopes it will be useful to anyone trying to resolve this question by watching the video.

The name AK47 stands for Kalashnikov (its Soviet inventor) Automatic, model year 1947. That’s right, a design from just after World War two which has continued to be manufactured down through the decades to today, not because it represents some sort of perfection in rifle design, but because the thing is so damned durable, cheap, and easy to use.

Here’s a link to a Google image search on the term AK47.

As you might imagine, over the years there have been many variants and styles, but one thing which appears remarkably consistent is the curved magazine which contains the bullets.

The RPG, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to have quite the same amount of variety.

And here’s a link to a Google image search on the term Rocket Propelled Grenade .

This is a shoulder fired weapon with a very distinctive shape when the grenade part is attached to the launcher. One might describe it as almost phallic, with the grenade creating the impression of an elongated bulge at the front. I confess, while I had heard of it within the context of war reporting, I hadn’t given much thought to what it looked like, and recently, for some strange reason, was thinking that it must look something like a camera with a telephoto lens.

Now that we know what AK47s and RPGs look like, let’s look at some key frames from the video.

Is this fellow holding an AK47 or RPG?

It looks like he’s holding a gun of some kind, but with no distinctive magazine, and it doesn’t seem to fit the profile of an RPG.

How about this fellow?

Again, looks like a gun, but no magazine, and also, easy to to say, not an RPG.

So no one is carrying an RPG. But wait, how about this frame a little later of the first guy’s weapon again, but in a different orientation?

Let’s zoom in a bit on that.

Does that profile not look a bit priapic? This sequence of frames is very easy to miss, occurring for only a couple of seconds. You would think that the gunner would mention it, since a lucky shot from an RPG (they are inaccurate except at short distances) could do serious damage. Keep in mind, though, that even if it is a guy carrying an RPG, that doesn’t mean it’s open season on him if he isn’t clearly a belligerent.

What of this figure suspiciously hiding behind the corner: does he have an AK47 or an RPG?

Strange that they would miss an RPG carried by one of the men earlier, yet here mistake a camera for one. You and I, knowing now what we do, would certainly never have made such errors. But sadly, if we were filled with blood lust and adrenalin and in a similar psychological state, we just might.

That’s why the guys in the Apache will walk away from this even if it were reinvestigated and charges filed. I’m not convinced that any court using the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” could say that these fellows weren’t actually seeing what they wanted to see and calling it as they saw it; that is to say, there was no conscious intention to deceive in order to get permission to engage. As hard as it may be to stomach on first watching, the initial attack could be regarded as a regrettable failure of perception brought on by extreme and understandable conditions.

Firing on those giving aid to the wounded, however, was a clear war crime, and probably the real reason for the cover up. Yet even there, the only one who is in any danger of legal consequence is the controller. The crew of the helicopter sought and got permission to engage. That could be interpreted as an order, thus opening the door to the “just following orders” defence. I know, that hasn’t been admissible in an international court since the Nuremberg trials at the conclusion of World War II, but if you think any of those fellows will ever go before an international court, then I respectfully suggest you put down the pipe.

This concludes AK47 and RPG Spotting 101. I hope you will find this information useful with regard to determining just what is and isn’t (and might or might not be) in the WikiLeaks video, and I pray you will never need that kind of information to make the type of determinations required by the crew of that Apache.