In itself this fact is worrisome. At the request of a government Facebook decides, at its own judgment, to curtail the individual freedom of 30 people (for though they are in prison and they are crime offenders, they are still people), without the intervention of a judge to guarantee the respect of fundamental rights. It seems that victims, government and Facebook (!) are the new authorities with regards to online freedom.

But it gets worse, for these new authorities are taking their self-assigned responsibilities very seriously, according to their declarations reported on today’s International Herald Tribune (print-version).

Gary Trodwell of Families United, a group founded by relatives of young murder victims, said:

When someone is convicted of a crime he loses his civil liberty through sentencing…We say he should lose his cyberliberty as well.”

Will Mr. Trodwell run for Parliament to get that law passed?

Even worse, John Straw commenting on the excessive time that took Facebook to take off the pages (48 hours!), he said:

What we’ve got to do is set up a better system with Facebook so that if they get a notice from us that this site is improper the all tehy have to do is not make a judgment about it but press the delete button”

What about given the same powers to China or Iran, Mr. Straw?

Even, even worse, Facebook wants to become the online sheriff, or at least that’s what Sophie Silver, a Facebook spokeswoman, is implying when she affirms that:

Facebook is absolutely committed to keeping its sites safe and clean…[the web could] be a wild an unruly place. Facebook tries to put some rules and protocols on top of the unruly Web.”

Wow, good thing we have Facebook, don’t you think? Otherwise we’ll be all online raped and smuggled by the scary people populating the “wild and unruly” online world!

Today, we know that the body claimed as Pilar’s is not hers (in English). Apparently, the United Nations Police, UNPOL, made a mistake in the recognition of her body. The Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs discovered the truth after checking the fingerprints. Her furious husband said that he was “disgusted” by this “very serious mistake.” He accused international organizations and donors of lack of proper channels of information and coordination among them.

Meanwhile, a relatively small organization called Ushahidi was mounting an impressive network of people to gather information on the field to help the coordination of aid assistance and rescue missions, which has been translated into a website (haiti.ushahidi.com) gathering all the reports they receive via SMS and web apps. On the Ushahidi Situation Room, Patrick Philippe Meier, one of the persons behind this effort of humanitarian crowdsourcing and writer of the blog iRevolution, tells us about a

live Skype chat between Anna here in the Sit Room and Eric Rasmussen (InSTEDD and former Chief Medical Officer of the US Navy). Eric skyping from tarmac of PoP airport asking for GPS coordinates of the most obscure addresses, sites, locations and Anna providing these in record time. She has wowed the entire team in PaP including military, UN, etc. Incredible to witness all this real time networking and collaboration.

Witness the gap between an international organization that is trapped in old bureaucratic, unnecessary and expensive procedures and the agility, low-cost efforts of a network of people sharing information. The gap is how they treat and respect information. One understands information as a secondary element of “action”, whatever the latter means. Ushahidi is born with information at its core. We need to understand that information is not what is written on a paper, stored in a computer or in a book, information is alive and it is the most essential element for action. Without information one is blinded. Information is not what an expert knows, it is what everybody knows and shares. The arrogance of bureaucratic organizations is their own nemesis, for they think they know, when they don’t. They thought they knew where Pilar was. The truth was unfortunately not theirs.

President-elect Obama has launched a new page on his www.change.gov site to foster debate about several issues. It has started with health care. As it is reported in The Huffington Post,

more noteworthy than the website itself is what the Obama team is signaling with its launch. It isn’t coincidental that Obama is addressing health care in this type of forum. During the campaign, he was repeatedly critical of the closed nature of negotiations during the Clinton-era push for health care reform. Already, he seems to be trying to make the public a shareholder in the process.

it might be the first sign of canalization of the energy of the communities created during the campaign. It is a new way of creating a constituency that supports a reform of the policies this new administration wants to change. Obama, in my opinion, has an open view of the way he wants to make policy decisions. He is not fundamentalist about ideology, though he has strong principles and values. He doesn’t believe he is always right; instead he sees the truth lying out there among the people being recreated continuously. The Internet allows this truth to be shared, reconstructed and communicated to those that have the capacity to take decisions. He and his administration will set the agenda and take the path that adapts better to what they think is right, but it will be an informed and participative decision. This information and participation won’t come anymore from an exclusive group of people (i.e. lobbyists and powerful constituencies), but from many different quarters of society, which will be empowered by the Internet. By allowing this, he is also empowering himself, for he will have the public and expressed support of those that are participating in this new way of doing politics.

I wonder why the spirit of Obama is so difficult to translate to the European political scene. It is not only that we are not united, still quarrelling for our nations. This is in fact the effect of the very problem Europe has, the control by the same elite that have governed us for centuries. We should say basta to them, break the chains their structures (including the political parties, left and right) have put on us. When will this happen?

Following the latest explosions in the United States, some Americans are pointing the finger at me, but I deny that because I have not done it. The United States has always accused me of these incidents which have been caused by its enemies. Reiterating once again, I say that I have not done it, and the perpetrators have carried this out because of their own interest

Every time there is an election in Spain, I go back to Barcelona to exercise my right to vote. I really attach a lot of importance to this. Now, I feel that my rights are being extended…

Change Congress stands on three legs:

1. Ushering the candidates into accepting a four-points pledge: to refuse contributions from lobbyists and political action committees, to support a ban on legislative “earmarks,” to promote legislation that increases government transparency, and to support public financing of political campaigns.
2. Allowing the people to track the record of candidates and incumbents on those pledges using the Internet and a wiki-style engine to pool the information from all voters (not ready yet).
3. Asking voters to take the pledge, by choosing those candidates that are taking and respecting their pledges against corruption.

To indicate the support to the campaign and to show they have taken one or more pledges, candidates will use a badge available on the website.

Now, I wonder if this campaign or a similar one could be imported to Europe. Politicians in the EU take advantage from the fact that politics is deeply fractioned in nations to keep their privileges and special relationships with money, without getting any criticism about their actions from a fractioned civil society and a capital-controlled media. Thus, a first step should be to get this civil society more integrated, more European in order to track the activities of their politicians. But would a French “citoyen” track what a British MEP or MP is doing? I don’t think so, though probably as much as a regular Californian would track a New York’s congressman/woman. The campaign should be pan-European, the action national, sort of “think European, act nationally”.

There are already some movements working for a more integrated political ecosystem in Europe, these movements may be ready to work together with anti-corruption groups on a campaign that wants clean and transparent European policy-makers.

I would be interested in working for that. Are you?