They came with Big Macs and Cokes, quintessential symbols of America all over the world. It was fitting that the Canadian secret service interrogators brought 16 year-old Omar Khadr American fast food. Their presence in America's infamous Cuban prison, Guantanamo Bay, helped extend and reaffirm the United State's deployment of an arrogant, quick serve imperialism that condones the torture of teenagers and the dispensing of due process and democracy.

Yesterday, videos were released showing the interrogation of then sixteen year-old Omar Khadr, taken into custody when he was fifteen by American forces in Afghanistan. The videos, which were released by court order after a multi-year fight between Khadr's Canadian lawyers and the Canadian government, show Khadr crying, tearing at his clothing, and begging for help.
But the men Canada sent weren't there to help him. They were there to see if his year in prison had softened him up. Alleged to have been denied sleep in the days and nights preceding the interrogation, alleged to have been tortured (at one point, he alleges through his lawyers, guards shackled his hands and legs together and used him as a human mop to wipe up his own urine), Khadr was relieved to encounter officials from his home country and did his best to answer their questions. Until he realized that the Canadians were simply an extension of US policy, a kind of twisted extraordinary rendition that saw him loaned to his home country in the hopes that they could do more with...

Why is that when corporations sue each other, we're the ones who end up suffering? Case in
point is Viacom's ridiculous lawsuit against YouTube. Viacom wants Google (who owns
YouTube) to bleed to the tune of a billion dollars because clips from programs like ViaCom's
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and SpongeBob SquarePants are sometimes uploaded to the
service. A recent court ruling in the legal squabble between entertainment giants has seen the
judge presiding over the case order Google to give Viacom its record of, essentially, who viewed
what videos when on YouTube. News reports tell us that the database to be handed over
"includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how
often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entry is each viewer's unique login ID and the Internet
Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer's computer."

This lawsuit should not exist in the first place. At the very least, individuals should be allowed to
re-purpose corporate copyrighted material transmitted over a monopolistic cable system which,
though overseen and controlled by the government and theoretically the citizens of the United
States, utterly and totally excludes us from any active participation (unless you call voting for
your favorite on So You Think You Can Dance programming). In other words, throw us a bone.
But no, this is what repressive anti-user-rights copyright law leads to: corporations suing
corporations over who has the right to make money off of us. Corporation 1 (Google)...

A few months back I joined something called Help A Reporter. It's the brainchild of publicist/marketing entrepreneur Peter Shankman. Basically what happens is that twice a day I get a list sent to my email that consists of reporters looking for sources for stories. Here's one of the shorter lists to give you an idea of how this works:

1) Podcasters with Tangible Results

2) Wedding Party Trends

3) Outrageous Bridal Bouquets

4) Ignore your Doc's advice?

Each query comes with contact information for the reporter. The idea behind the list is that, obviously, it helps reporters find the people they need for their stories. At the same time, it helps publicists and marketing types pitch reporters regarding their clients. So say your client is a herbal healer with a new book about ignoring doctors, well, you'd be pretty stupid if you didn't call up the reporter behind query #4 and offer to hook that reporter up with an interview.

Anyway, I'm of two minds about this list. On the one hand, sure, why not? Journalists require a steady flow of personal stories about actual people. A decent article about anything from the subprime mortgage crisis to working parents who watch their children at daycare via webcam always starts with, "Melissa George, a 43 year old mother from Schenectady...etc." Well guess what? Those individual stories can be hard to come by. You hear rumors, innuendoes, trends and gossip but where do you actually find the people doing something...

A recent survey by US information security company Cyber-Ark reveals that “One in three
information technology professionals abuses administrative passwords to access confidential data
such as colleagues' salary details, personal e-mails or board-meeting minutes.” Additionally, a
full half of the IT types surveyed admitted to “accessing information that was not relevant to
their role.”
This revelation isn’t much of a surprise to me. Behind the facade of secrecy erected by
corporations and governments and bureaucracies all over the world, there’s the obsession to
know. And the more try to make something secret, the more people want to gain access to those
secrets and spread them around.
I don’t think most people are out to rip anyone off. It’s more a reflex action. Knowledge
is power. Knowledge is knowing what everyone is thinking and doing and going to think and do.
Social anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues that language evolved from the way apes use
grooming to establish social groups and exclude those who didn’t belong. In other words, if you
put in the time and got to know all the other apes by slowly and methodically picking through
their fur, you were in. If you just waltzed into the group and figured they’d take care of you, well,
think again buddy.
So we’re basically apes who still see the value in knowing everything for our own
protection and survival, even as we live in a regimented, secrecy obsessed techno-society where
the left hand can’t access the right hand’s laptop with a...

It's summer when the big bears roam the national parks looking for yummy pudgy tourists, so let's turn our attention to Project Grizzly. This movie was released to much acclaim and fascination in 1996 and it's being screened again in Toronto in a few weeks, when the Cinemateque Ontario does a June 20 - 28 retrospective of the work of PG director Peter Lynch. If you haven't seen this movie and you're anywhere near Toronto, do yourself a favour and take it in. Otherwise, rent or buy a copy of this remarkable flick. PG tells the story of North Bay, Ontario's Troy Hurtubise. Troy is obsessed with battling a Grizzly Bear. While Lynch films, Troy constructs ever more cumbersome and unbelievable grizzly bear-proof suits for his inevitable conflict with the giant beast of a bear. Troy puts his suits through the paces -- he rolls down cliffs, has his buddies shoot at him in the suit, and finally pronounces himself ready for action. I'm not going to tell you what happens. You've got to see it for yourself. But this movie is a deserved cult classic, mainly because of the way it takes Troy's obsession and makes it more than a joke. By the end of the doc, you're thinking about the human animal's severed relationship to the wild. You're thinking about how disconnected from the land we are, and yet how primal we really are when you get right down to it.

These themes come to the fore...