William Fichtner is a damaged NYPD detective solicited by International Criminal Court “inspector” Donald Sutherland to work with French, Irish, German, and Italian cops to…play with fancy 3D holograms, shoot guns all over Europe, and, according to the trailer, “CROSS BORDERS.”
The ICC: I do not think it means what you think it means.
(h/t @Wronging Rights)
A friend and I just spent four days in Uganda, and I got an email today letting me know that she had put her photos from the trip up on Facebook.
She geotagged the album as taking place in Uganda, and when I clicked on the “Uganda” link, mistaking it for the album title…
…I was redirected here:
Once again, for those of you who missed it:
I clicked on:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Uganda/106029926094101
and was redirected to:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Joseph-Kony/112208505457015?rf=106029926094101
Dear Facebook: WHAT THE FUCK.
(Also: 70,000 people “like” Kony on Facebook. WHAT DOES IT MEAN.)
UPDATE: As of Wednesday morning EST, this appears to be fixed. The country page for the United Kingdom, however, redirects to a page for the Britanica Summer Academy.
Coming out of blog hibernation to show you this:
The map above makes up just under half of a TIME.com article by Thomas P. M. Barnett that so inanely oversimplifies African geopolitics (Muslim terrorism! China is scary!) that I’m almost at a loss for words. Shame on you, Barnett, and shame on Time for posting this.
As I’ve talked to technology for transparency activists over the past year, one thing that’s repeatedly come up is the importance of traditional transparency tools — partnering with the mainstream media to get the word out tends to be more effective than going it alone with phones and websites, for example. One key aspect of this “old school” activism is the use of freedom of or right to information laws (FOIA/RTI) in different countries — officially requisitioning information from the government. This doesn’t always work, of course; bureaucratic processes often draw out the process interminably, and some governments simply don’t have the capacity to keep track of the kinds of data transparency activists would like.
Today, I stumbled across of the best uses of public record requests I’ve seen since I’ve started paying attention to this field. Thank you, Oregon House of Representatives, for this gem, created with the help of a public records request for hours of film of the February 2010 legislative session:
More information on how this beauty came to be, and the role that public records requests played, here: How one Oregon lawmaker convinced his colleagues to ‘Rick Roll’ the state legislature