IBM’s consultants were happy to help, although they had more than just software in mind. To make the most of their solutions, they recommended an overhaul of how the city’s weather, geological, and civil defense agencies operate, essentially forcing them to work together. “The ideal situation would be to appoint a sort of chief operation officer who would coordinate across multiple agencies,” Banavar said. “To my surprise, the mayor took that advice very seriously, and within a couple of days had appointed a COO.”

“This is a very special thing for IBM, because we’re seen as a trusted advisor by the mayor–not a vendor, not even a partner,” Banavar continued. “He absolutely takes us with him for most of the city-related decisions. It’s a very close relationship that has pretty much transformed the organization model for the city of Rio.”

The result is the new operations center announced today and opening Friday that will operate independently of any agency while receiving data from several of them, running it through a battery of algorithms to monitor, predict, and visualize storm damage while deciding how best to respond. “Which streets will require the most troops?” IBM materials suggest as one of the variables. “Which hills are most prone to mud slides? Are their shelters that have vacancies? Which hospitals have beds available? What is the best way to exit from a soccer match at the Maracana? How should officials direct traffic coming from the Copacabana Beach?”

The high-tech centerpiece is a new weather forecasting system built atop IBM Research’s “Deep Thunder” software and tailored to Rio’s climate and topography. Melding data from the river basin, topographic surveys, rainfall logs, and satellite info, IBM promises the system will boast an 80% success rate in predicting downpours and floods 48 hours before they occur.

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Assange sticks his head above this bland crowd of empty slogan-chanters and dares to stand for something, and this cannot stand, liberals and progressives shout him down because they’ve accepted Hollywood’s ideological framing of evil as the sincere non-ironic attachment to a belief. Every movie villain believes in a cause, the good ordinary people ultimately defeat him, but not in the name some other true belief, but simply to preserve the status quo, so that the neoliberal capitalist system should continue unmolested. The failure of the Democratic party to offer any true alternative is therefore not the fault of craven centrists, blue dogs, etc., rather it is the left wing who is playing at radical politics while secretly depending on the fact that the “sensible” moderates will win out in the end. They’ll write a lengthy blog post complaining that Obama hasn’t done enough to free us from the corporate oligarchy, then we step out to catch a matinee and cheer the defeat of a fantasy villain by the forces of the status quo.

No wonder that every liberal Wikileaks opponent or advocate for the importance of discretion and secrecy eventually outs themselves as a believer that the US as a force for good in the world. One huge benefit is that the Wikileaks issue is a line in the sand for the left, we know where you stand.

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* 20 American politics is almost broken

Today’s US government is almost completely gridlocked – and astonishingly vulnerable to vested interests. President Obama and Congress cannot get to grips with the scale of the budget deficit, nor the need to contain the threat of a new financial crisis. Corporations write the law. The public realm is hollowed out, and most public institutions, from education to the transport infrastructure, are decaying – there seems little hope of turning the tide.

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While Apptrakr has an absolutely huge database of cracked apps, by no means does it index all apps currently available. However, as millions of Installous users are also buyers of apps from the App Store, most titles will already be installed on their collective devices. But how can they be shared with the world?

…

“Essentially what will happen is when you’re using Installous you’ll get a little pop up that says ‘Hey, you have an application that Apptrakr doesn’t. We will add the application to a queue in the background (if you say yes) and it will start uploading tiny pieces of it, kind of like a torrent, up to the cloud’,” Dissident explains.

So, unlike BitTorrent, where one starts with a single file that multiplies the more people jump on the torrent, with Mobile Hunt the start point is perhaps hundreds or thousands of copies of the same piece of software, and little tiny pieces of each upload from each person’s device to the cloud in order to make one final copy, which will then become available from Apptrakr. From there it will be available for millions to download.

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It is time to think of resistance in a new way, something that is no longer carried out to reform a system but as an end in itself. African-Americans understood this during the long night of slavery. German opposition leaders understood it under the Nazis. Dissidents in the former Soviet Union knew this during the nightmare of communism. Resistance in these closed systems was local and often solitary. It was done with the understanding that evil must always be defied. The tiny acts of rebellion—day after day, month after month, year after year and decade after decade—exposed to everyone who witnessed them the heartlessness, cruelty and inhumanity of the oppressor. They were acts of truth and beauty.

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We’ve worked out that we don’t need shops when we can buy online and we’ve worked out that we don’t need advertising because we can now find anything we want. For the first time, we’re seeing mainstream campaigns that drive no incremental search or web traffic. That’s a first. You can spend millions on TV and not see anything in your search or traffic stats. Why? Because everyone who might be interested in your product is already looking for it and they’re not hanging around long enough to see the commercial in the ad break.

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Solidarity has gone hypertextual. The student movement that made its voice so powerfully audible in the fee protests was largely organised on Twitter using the hashtag #solidarity. “Being able to contact thousands of people with one short tag was really important,” says Jessica, 20, a student activist who claims to have been “radicalised” by Twitter. “#Solidarity has very obviously now become the link between all of those fighting against the same government in different ways,” she goes on.

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The US state today is a nexus of power for corporate interests. Since it must pretend to serve the people, it fears the truth may leak. Hence its parallel campaigns against WikiLeaks: to crush it through the precarity of the internet and to formally limit freedom of the press.

States seek to imprison the Anonymous protesters rather than official torturers and murderers. The day when our governments prosecute war criminals and tell us the truth, internet crowd control may be our most pressing remaining problem. I will rejoice if I see that day.

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