« December 2004 | Main | February 2005 »
Unable to drop a bad idea, the TSA continues spending yet more money in yet more attempts to do the totally stupid
The Transportation Security Administration continues to push for a centralized passenger-screening system, this time using a combination of airline passenger information, terrorist watch lists and junk-mail databases. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News]
Here is one of the reasons I've been relatively scarce of late -- we at EFF have been working on a brand new campaign to demonstrate the many ways that the copyright cartel is spoiling the environment for innovation:
FCC Chairman Michael Powell calls TiVo "God's machine," and its devotees have been known to declare, "You can take my TiVo when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!" But suppose none of us had ever been given the opportunity to use or own a TiVo -- or, for that matter, an iPod? Suppose instead that Hollywood and the record companies hunted down, hobbled, or killed these innovative gizmos in infancy or adolescence, to ensure that they wouldn't grow up to threaten the status quo?That's the strategy the entertainment industry is using to control the next generation of TiVos and iPods. Its arsenal includes government-backed technology mandates, lawsuits, international treaties, and behind-the-scenes negotiations in seemingly obscure technology standards groups. The result is a world in which, increasingly, only industry-approved devices and technologies are "allowed" to survive in the marketplace.
This is bad news for innovation and free competition, but it also threatens a wide range of activities the entertainment conglomerates have no use for -- everything from making educational "fair" use of TV or movie clips for a classroom presentation, to creating your own Daily Show-style video to make a political statement, to simply copying an MP3 file to a second device so you can take your music with you.
Rather than sit back and watch as promising new technologies are picked off one-by-one, EFF has created the Endangered Gizmos List to help you defend fair use and preserve the environment for innovation.
The Wessiepooh had surgery on Thursday for bone spurs in his shoulder. Unfortunately, his sleep apnea caused us some scary moments with his wonderful idea to stop breathing multiple times. Luckily, he is now ok, off the pain killers, and is being his usual ole self, although still a bit sore.
Meantime, my totally insane daughter is playing with a Furby. I wonder about her mental health. I had put that thing in the freezer so that it would shut up at one point, however she resurrected it. What did I do to deserve this?
In other news, life is good :-)
Washington, DC - The US Supreme Court set the date for the oral argument in MGM v. Grokster for March 29, 2005, in Washington, DC. EFF is defending StreamCast Networks, the company behind the Morpheus peer-to-peer (P2P) software, against 28 of the world's largest entertainment companies.
The companies first brought this lawsuit against the makers of the Morpheus, Grokster, and KaZaA software products in 2001, hoping to obtain a legal precedent that would hold all technology makers responsible for the infringements committed by the users of their products. The entertainment companies lost in District Court, then lost again on appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The lower court rulings were based on the Supreme Court's landmark decision in the 1984 Sony Betamax case, which determined that Sony was not liable for copyright violations by users of the Betamax VCR.
On March 29, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments from both sides. A final ruling is expected by the end of July 2005.
Contacts:
Cindy Cohn
Legal Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
cindy@eff.org
Fred von Lohmann
Senior Intellectual Property Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
fred@eff.org
From CircleID
Given the recent panix.com hijacking, I will give an outline of the current ICANN transfers process for gtlds. In the case of panix.com, evidence so far indicates that a third party that holds an account with a reseller of Melbourne IT, fraudulently initiated the transfer. The third party appears to have used stolen credit cards to establish this account and pay for the transfer. That reseller is analyzing its logs and cooperating with law enforcement. [CircleID]
So I had this First USA card for many many years. It was sold to Bank One. First thing I noticed was that my interest rate suddenly went up to over 26 percent. Since I don't normally carry a balance on my cards, the interest rate was irrelevant so long as the grace period was good, which this one was. About 9 years ago I had given a secondary card on this account to our nanny, which, of course, was also changed over to Bank One.
All was well for a long time, paying the card out of my brokerage account (ALSO through Bank One) until one day when I signed up with Bank One's online payment service, which I used to pay a bill early in December. I typed in the ABA routing number and the checking account number, which was accepted, and made a payment, which was also accepted. Approximately two weeks later, I got a letter saying there were insufficient funds. I called my broker and ranted and raved at him, but found out that there was plenty of money in the account, and no checks were marked returned. We all figured they'd just re-deposit, especially since it was off of one of their accounts.
That wasn't the case. Next bill I got had a finance charge of almost 100.00 and a late charge of 35.00. That's a LOT of money to pay for nothing. I called customer service and complained. They told me they couldn't figure out why the payment was returned, and the only people who could wouldn't be in until Monday, but I could call back then. Oh boy. Meantime, the nanny went to buy groceries and her card was declined.
I finally got through to our friends on the "payment team" and was told that none of this was their fault, that they don't accept "brokerage account" checks, despite the fact that they had accepted them for the over 10 years I had the account prior, and that no, their website shouldn't have to tell people this, regardless of the fact that this was one of THEIR accounts, and the website could easily have been programmed to tell when one of THEIR accounts wasn't going to be accepted. They also claimed it was not their fault that the letter said "insufficient funds" rather than "we don't take things off these types of accounts" which would have given me PLENTY of time to make another payment and avoid the finance charge. Moreover, because this "wasn't their fault" they would not rebate the finance charge they took.
I told them to cancel the account. Slime like this shouldn't have my money.
If ever there was a case that the Supremes SHOULD be deciding, it's this one. What more perfect a Supreme Court case could there be than deciding the extent of the President's Executive powers? Think perhaps the Supremes are possibly AFRAID of a political hot potato? Nawwww. Couldn't be.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Tuesday dodged a dispute over the government's plans to conduct military trials for Osama bin Laden's former driver and other foreign terror suspects, avoiding another clash over the president's powers.
Justices were asked to decide if the Bush administration is trying to shortcut the rights of non-Americans facing trials at the Guantanamo Bay Navy base in Cuba. They declined, without comment.
Read full story for latest details. [CNN.com - Law]
Consider this - an ISP, one of the oldest on the Internet, has a valuable domain name known world-wide. They "lock down" said domain name, in accordance with ICANN registrar rules, which supposedly requires several steps with verification procedures, in order to transfer the domain. Despite this, the domain was transferred; hijacked, in fact, to Melbourne IT. Of course, this took all panix users off the Internet, and all of their email went somewhere besides their in boxes.
The fallout from this action is going to be quite interesting. Some ISPs are talking about just pointing their DNS to reflect the correct information (a la pre-hijacking). Of course, this would effectively cut the registry, Verisign's stranglehold on the root zones. Granted, not all of the servers that get their information solely from Verisign would reflect the pre-hijacked state, but enough would to make a significant difference. This, of course, would be an end-run around ICANN AND Verisign. Definitely an interesting concept.
So think of this next time we have yet another debate on Internet governance, and who gets to "run" the Internet. The answers is now the same as it ever was - the ISPs.
From circleid.com
There's a thread on NANOG to the effect that Panix, the oldest commercial Internet provider in New York, had its domain name 'panix.com' hijacked from Dotster over to MelbourneIT and it has pretty well taken panix.com and its customers offline. Looks like this may be among the first high-profile unauthorized transfer under the new transfer policy. It begs the question, despite the existence of the dispute policy under the new system, what provisions should there be for a situation like... [CircleID]
The Bush administration has been carrying out secret reconnaissance missions to learn about nuclear, chemical and missile sites in Iran in preparation for possible airstrikes there, journalist Seymour Hersh said Sunday. [CNN.com]
EFF Demands Answers from DOJ about PATRIOT Act Surveillance
Washington, DC - Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI and other offices of the US Department of Justice, seeking the release of documents that would reveal whether the government has been using the USA PATRIOT Act to spy on Internet users' reading habits without a search warrant.
At issue is PATRIOT Section 216, which expanded the government's authority to conduct surveillance in criminal investigations using pen registers or trap and trace devices ("pen-traps"). Pen-traps collect information about the numbers dialed on a telephone but do not record the actual content of phone conversations. Because of this limitation, court orders authorizing pen-trap surveillance are easy to get -- instead of having to show probable cause, the government need only certify relevance to its investigation. Also, the government never has to inform people that they are or were the subjects of pen-trap surveillance.
PATRIOT expanded pen-traps to include devices that monitor Internet communications. But the line between non-content and content is a lot blurrier online than it is on phone networks. The DOJ has said openly that the new definitions allow pen-traps to collect email and IP addresses. However, the DOJ has not been so forthcoming about web surveillance. It won't reveal whether it believes URLs can be collected using pen-traps, despite the fact that URLs clearly reveal content by identifying the web pages being read. EFF made its FOIA request specifically to gain access to documents that might reveal whether the DOJ is using pen-traps to monitor web browsing.
"It's been over three years since the USA PATRIOT Act was passed, and the DOJ still hasn't answered the public's simple question: 'Can you see what we're reading on the Web without probable cause?'" said Kevin Bankston, EFF Staff Attorney and Bruce J. Ennis Equal Justice Works Fellow. "Much of PATRIOT is coming up for review this year, but we can never have a full and informed debate of the issues when the DOJ won't explain how it has been using these new surveillance powers."
The law firm of DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary assisted EFF in preparing the FOIA request and will help with any litigation if the DOJ fails to respond.
Contact:
Kevin Bankston
Attorney, Equal Justice Works / Bruce J. Ennis Fellow
Electronic Frontier Foundation
bankston@eff.org
From Morons.org.
While thousands of hours of recordings go untranslated, the
military has been discharging translators for being gay...
It's a case of screwed-up priorities.
Between 1998 and 2004, the military discharged 20 Arabic
speakers and 6 Farsi speakers for being gay, even as national
security depends on translating Arabic transmissions and the
demand for additional... [Morons Dot Org]
IPac has just unveiled Jailed for a Song, a new public-awareness campaign that makes it clear that people who support sensible copyright law aren't the radical extremists in this debate:
Jailed for a song? That's what a proposed law would allow. Skipping commercials is stealing? That's what some copyright holders think. And spending millions of taxpayer dollars to hunt down file-sharers? Congress nearly passed not one, but two bills that would have done just that in 2004. Does that sound like the right set of priorities to you?Copyright infringement is a problem, but the radical political agenda of copyright holders is far beyond what normal Americans want. We need constructive proposals for how to pay artists, protect technical innovation, and end the record & movie companies' crazy litigation campaign. That's why we need your help.
From CircleID. Once again, the nature of the Internet befuddles those who wish to impose "order" and "control." See how wonderfully the government did combatting spam to predict how well they'll do with this.
Former CIA Director, George J. Tenet recently called for measures to safeguard the United States against internet-enabled attacks. "I know that these actions will be controversial in this age when we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability, but ultimately the Wild West must give way to governance and control." Mr. Tenet seems about as confused about the internet as the ITU... [CircleID]
Okie dokie. And an insurance company I contacted about legal malpractice insurance insists that I provide my SSN before they'll give me a quote. They admit it's "solely for identification." "But they'll keep it confidential." Yeah, about as confidential as T-Mobile kept theirs?
A seven-month hacking spree in T-Mobile's network nets the intruder all kinds of sensitive information -- including e-mail from the Secret Service agent who was tracking him down. [Wired News]
EFF Defends Rights of Reporters Who Published Asteroid News Stories on Blogs
Santa Clara, CA - Only weeks before Macworld, the nation's biggest annual trade show devoted to Apple products, Apple sent legal threats to the publishers of the Mac-centric weblogs AppleInsider and PowerPage for posting information about a product code-named "Asteroid." Apple-watchers believe this product will be announced at Macworld. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing the publishers to protect their right to keep confidential the identities of the people who supplied them with the information.
On December 13, Apple filed suit against "Does 1-20" in a Santa Clara court. The company obtained a court order that allows it to issue subpoenas to AppleInsider and PowerPage for the names of the "Does" who allegedly leaked the information in question. EFF is defending the publishers against these subpoenas, arguing that the anonymity of bloggers' sources is protected by the same laws that protect sources providing information to journalists.
"Bloggers break the news, just like journalists do. They must be able to promise confidentiality in order to maintain the free flow of information," said EFF Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. "Without legal protection, informants will refuse to talk to reporters, diminishing the power of the open press that is the cornerstone of a free society."
"I am very disappointed by Apple's behavior and its new policy of issuing legal threats to its best customers," added Jason O'Grady, publisher of PowerPage. "Is corporate paranoia really more important than the First Amendment?"
Contacts:
Kurt Opsahl
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
kurt@eff.org
A big win for freedom. Making the Music Industry play by the same rules everyone else has to is a big plus.
Ruling in Charter Case Smashes DMCA Subpoena Powers
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision today that will stop entertainment corporations from gaining access to the names of people using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks unless the companies file lawsuits against them and furnish actual evidence of copyright infringement.
The case was sparked by a series of subpoenas sent by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to Missouri-based Internet service provider (ISP) Charter Communications, Inc. The record companies claimed that these subpoenas, which demanded that Charter identify customers accused of offering infringing music on P2P networks, were authorized by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with 21 other groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), and the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), filed a "friend of the court" brief in the Charter case, urging the Eighth Circuit to determine that the same strong protections applied to anonymous speech in other contexts also apply when copyright infringement is claimed but has not yet been proven. In a victory for privacy and anonymity, the Eighth Circuit determined that DMCA subpoenas could not be used to get this information.
EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer noted that the RIAA has already changed its tactics for the better in current suits against filesharers. In these new cases, record companies generally file suit against "John Does." Said Seltzer, "In the 'Doe' lawsuits RIAA members are currently filing, a judge oversees the discovery process and can help protect ISP customers before their names are revealed." EFF has filed amicus briefs in several of the Doe cases, and some judges have limited the record labels' discovery of identities through mass lawsuits.
In December 2003, the DC Circuit ruled that the RIAA could not use the DMCA's non-judicial subpoenas to obtain subscriber identities from ISP Verizon Internet Services, Inc. "Charter should be congratulated for following in the footsteps of Verizon in standing up for the privacy of its users," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. The US Supreme Court rejected the RIAA's appeal of the Verizon case. Today's Eighth Circuit decision is an explicit endorsement of the DC Circuit's ruling.
Contacts:
Cindy Cohn
Legal Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
cindy@eff.org
Wendy Seltzer
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
wendy@eff.org
From Larry Lessig
If I had the time, and the money, I'd do the deep analysis that it would take to explain to myself why it is I constantly hope to be surprised by Mr. Gates. Yet I never am. Here's BoingBoing reporting the red-baiting of Mr. Gates.
It's one thing to read this sort of thing from a studio exec, or head of a record label -- surrounded as they are by the sort that surround them. But the people I've met at Microsoft are miles beyond this sort of silliness. Does Mr. Gates not even talk to them?
[Lessig Blog]An interesting analysis from the DRM Blog whose link is at the end of the story
In case you haven't heard by now, a gentlemen named Thomas Slattery has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in San Jose (9th Circuit I believe) against Apple and iTunes. He makes the argument that we at DRM Blog have been spouting for a while, that Apple is using its marketing strength to lock customers into their hardware and software.
Many people think that Slattery has no chance of winning, that the lower courts shy away from ruling on such matters. But we think that his lawyers know exactly what they're doing.
"Apple has unlawfully bundled, tied, and/or leveraged its monopoly in the market for the sale of legal online digital music recordings to thwart competition in the separate market for portable hard drive digital music players, and vice-versa," the suit charged.
no one's said it outright yet, but Slattery's lawyers are making the same arguments that were used against Microsoft and Internet Explorer several years ago when the courts ruled against the software giant.
So I'll call it how I see it. I think they have a shot, if for no other reason than that they can show precedence with a similarity of business predatory business practices and pricing between Apple and Microsoft. Actually, their business models aren't all that disparate, perhaps reversed but certainly similar. Microsoft makes software that will work on the lowest common denominator of computers to lock in the largest number of people to its software products. Apple makes unique hardware that locks users into using its software products. The same business model approached from different views.
Now it's time for a little history lesson. Microsoft's main legal downfall during their anti-trust battle was that they used their market position to predatorily price a product to undercut similar products that were being sold by the competition. In that case it was Internet Explorer which they gave away for free and bundled (key words there) it with their operating system. By doing so, they made it virtually impossible for Netscape and other companies to sell their browsers when another one was being given away for free.
Apple has essentially done the same thing. Apple gave away their iTunes multimedia player software completely free first to MacIntosh users then bundled (there's that word again) the player software with the iTunes store software for PC users.
Then Apple priced songs at far below market value, 99-cents, a level that many have argued Apple can not be making a profit on, and at best, can only break even. The courts understand that consumers will naturally choose a lower-priced product, and that predatorily low prices have routinely been used by market leaders to drive out competition.
Finally, Apple wrapped it all up in their FairPlay DRM agreement, to which all users are required to consent, that forbids all music purchased from iTunes from having the DRM removed. Although you can burn a back-up of your songs to CD (the Redbook CD format, the standard that all CD players recognize), but allows no transfer of said purchased songs to other mp3 players (i.e. Apple's competition). And since it breaks the DRM agreement to do so, a customer is forbidden to rerip that back-up CD to mp3 form. Thus, to truly take your digital music on the go, you have to buy their iPod. Check out iTunes Music Store's ToS. It says you're allowed to export your music for personal use, but literally can't because the songs won't play on any other device.
Another argument that begs to be made is that Apple took the open mp4 standard and changed it so that it would not work with standard mp4 players. By wrapping their digital rights management scheme around it, Apple broke an open standard. Compare this with Sony's approach. Sony took ATRAC and added DRM that locked it down. The difference is that Sony owns ATRAC and ATRAC was never an open licensed standard. This can also be compared to Nintendo and its console market. Nintendo was clearly the market leader in the console market but no other manufacturer could build cartridges for the Nintendo. This was challenged in court several times and Nintendo always won. The reason that both Sony and Nintendo will always win these cases is that those two companies were using proprietary technology that was never licensed to anyone else. The reason that this might hurt apple is that MP4 is an open standard that Apple licensed from another company and consumers have the assumption that their MP4s will work with any MP4 player.
Under the guise of intellectual property protection, Apple has created a very predatory business model intended to lock consumers into their technology. They sell the songs to sell the device, but the real problem is that they've potentially violated anti-trust laws to do it. One way that Apple could probably diffuse this issue would be to simply licens FairPlay to other hardware and software makers.
I should also add that the Ninth Circuit is one of the most liberal courts and tends to be overturned more than another other circuit. What this means is that regardless of the outcome, we may very well see this case, or another one like it, go all the way to the Supreme Court, or at least be remanded back down to the lower courts by the Supreme.
[DRM Blog]
The CAN SPAM Act of 2003 went into effect a year ago on Jan 1, 2004. As of that date, spam suddenly stopped, e-mail was once again easy and pleasant to use, and Internet users had one less problem to worry about. Oh, that didn't happen? What went wrong? [CircleID]
Ok... when Billy Boy attacks reformists by calling them by the same name that invoked fear and terror in the 50s and 60s, you HAVE to know you're onto something. Perhaps endangering the food train? Yes, definitely. Now that the Justice Dept. has been bought off (unlike the Europeans) this has got to be the most fearsome threat to ole Bill's empire yet. GO REFORMISTS!!!
When Bill Gates calls those in favor of copyright reform communists, the Microsoft chief's comments provoke a tongue-in-cheek embrace of the insult and some awesome logos for a growing movement. By Katie Dean. [Wired News]
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Tsunami aftermath - Picture of hell and no kerosene
Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 20:48:27 +0530
From: suresh@hserus.net (Suresh Ramasubramanian)
To: declan@well.com
CC: dave@farber.net
Relief efforts are going on, following a fairly familiar pattern.
High profile types (politicians, film stars) waltz in, get photographed and go
right back. Journalists hang around near the politicians and film stars. It
is left to a few volunteers to plow a lonely furrow, often without too much
access to all the money that's flowing in
---------
It’s five kilometres of hell, and it’s right here at Nagapattinam.
Kaviarsi studies – make that studied – in the sixth standard. Her schoolbooks lie a short distance away, and besides them lies a doll. The girl herself lies on a makeshift pyre on what used to be her home, her face totally blackened, her neck twisted upwards, the skin peeling off her legs like torn stockings. There is a large empty container of Pepsi lying just besides her, and four other bodies. And besides the pyre, towards the sunset, are five long kilometers of slushy wasteland strewn with dead bodies.
It wasn’t like this five days ago. We – me and two companions – are at a part of Nagapattinum called Akkarakadai, where a prosperous fishing community lived. This five-kilometre-long stretch of land was filled with houses, and had at its heart a bustling Sunday marketplace. The people here were well off – some of them had expensive fishing launches costing many lakhs of rupees. Then the tsunami came.
These settlements begin half a kilometre from the sea, across the road, but the tsunami swept everything away. Every single house was flooded away, all the way till the end of the stretch, and when I went there, I just saw one long expanse of slush. In the distance, there were pyres burning.
Dr Narasimhan, a man I’d wanted to meet, who heads a team of relief workers that has come down from Salem, told me when I called him that we had to walk into that expanse, beyond the pyres. “Walk towards the sunset till you find me,” he said, and we did.
It took us half-an-hour to traverse the half-kilometre or so until we reached him. The ground was like quicksand in parts, and our shoes would sink in with each step and resist our attempts to lift our feet again. We came across dead bodies on the way: a young girl in a basket, her limbs akimbo, and her face, with some dried blood on it, contorted in an expression that even Damien Hirst would have found too macabre. Three feet away from her lay a woman, with a frozen look of horror on her face, etched into an eerie permanence.
“In an unprecedented situation, you need an unprecedented response”
“For the next five kilometres,” Dr Narsimhan motion towards the setting sun, “you will find bodies everywhere. Only the distance you have walked so far – around half a kilometre – has been cleared of corpses. This is the furthest point till which bodies have been cleared. There is so much work to be done.”
“It’s five days since the tsunami happened,” I say. “Why is this place so deserted, why hasn’t all this been sorted?”
Dr Narasimhan sighs. “Sorted,” he asks. “All that the government has been doing is lining the streets outside with bleaching powder. They are not interested in coming here, they left this to the NGOs. And look at this.” He extends his hands towards me. “We’re doing all the work of moving bodies with surgical gloves made of latex, which are no protection against cuts and bruises.”
I had heard about this before I arrived here, in Pondicherry, where Aid workers had complained that the locals in Nagapattinam had refused to help out in clearing the bodies, and when the aid workers got down to it with their latex gloves, the bodies had started decomposing, and were difficult to manouver, with a limb prone to just falling away from the rest of the corpse.
“We need heavy earth-moving equipment,” he had said. “That way the bodies can be shifted en masse and given a mass burial. That is the only way to deal with this situation.” Mani Shankar Aiyar, India’s petroleum minister, had announced on TV four days ago that such equipment was at the top of his wishlist of aid. Then why did it not materialise? Could the government not mobilise its resources even that much?
But that need is redundant now, says Dr Narsimhan. “What we need now,” he says, “is kerosene. We need to burn bodies as we come along them on this stretch, before they decompose further. And we have no kerosene.
“We’ve been calling aid agencies and so on asking for fuel to burn the bodies with,” he continues, “but we got none. We managed to file some cans of kerosene lying around some of the devastated houses, but there’s no more of even that?”
“But can’t the government give you kerosene?” I ask astonished.
“The government does nothing,” he says. “I thought differently till I came here, but now I’ve seen it for myself. Everything is left to the junior IAS officers, who are in meetings all day. Ministers come, and all they want to know is how many people are dead. They don’t care about relief work at all. In an unprecedented situation you need an unprecedented response. But that has not happened.”
The temple without a toilet
Dr Narsimhan gets back to his work, and I look up, where a helicoptor moves languidly across the sky. “That’s the fifth one today,” says a lady who is part of the doctor’s team.
“They come and ‘survey’ the area,which is so pointless, because you cannot actually see the dead bodies from here amid this debris. It is just a show, to reassure themselves that they’re on top of things. The army officers who come here, they refuse to even touch the bodies. They just hang around aimlessly.”
I ask the lady what she does, and she says that she is a journalist, but would like to remain unnamed for my story. “I have come here to help out and not report,” she says. “That is more important for me.” I look down, ashamed.
She has been here for three days, and I ask her why, mucky though it may be, the place doesn’t have any people looking for their loved ones. “Because the entire community is wiped out,” she says. “There aren’t too many relatives left of the people who have died here, and those that are have become resigned to their loss.”
“Have you been to any of the refugee camps?” I ask her.
“Yes,” she says. “I went to a refugee camp yesterday where there were 1500 homeless people. And not one toilet. Do you know why?
“Because the camp was based in a temple,” she continues, “and you cannot build a toilet in a temple. And I’d gone there to speak to them on health issues! And they cannot even wash their hands.
“And this is not an isolated example. There are scores of refugee camps like this. I hardly call this relief work.”
And how are the NGOs handling the situation, I ask.”Oh, they are doing all the work,the government is doing nothing,” she says. “But even they are competitive, trying hard to stake a claim to territory.” I had noticed a similar tendency when I was on my way here, with many trucks adorned with banners proclaiming the name of the relief agency involved. The organisation I had chosen to travel with, Aid India, was an exception, though, working hard and sincerely to solve every problem that arose.
So why haven’t the press written about this, I ask her. “The press,” she snorts. “The journalists from the Hindu are all flying around with dignitaries. That is the kind of reporting they do.”
The sun has set, and there is a column of smoke rising from the pyres flowing in the direction where the sun was. It is New Year’s eve. I say goodbye to Narasimhan and my unnamed journalist friend, and I do not wish them a happy new year. I wish them kerosene.
[ends]