The Photo Industry's Kodak Moment

BEING DRAFTED

Kodak's management refused to heed the digital revolution, and the firm foundered. Now it seems that the rest of the camera industry will follow, as the phone firms gobble up the imaging market.

Is Apple the new Nike?

Apple is selling iPads at multiples of component cost. The retail price of an iPad 2 (!) in Paris is $500 at Fnac, a major retailer. Sales assistants will tell grannie that the little one really doesn't "need" the latest. 

When you sell hardware at multiples you are a fashion firm. Apple is now the new Nike of the tech world. It has the indispensable glitterati coterie, and the necessary sweatshop connection.

Fashion houses may have more longevity than tech firms, so this transformation seems a good deal for investors. 

Is Mrs Merkel dumb or just honest?

Mrs Merkel seems strangely reluctant to accept that the price for the removal of the malevolent and blackmailing STASI in Berlin is the acceptance of all-seeing computers near Washington.

Mr. Clapper in a hearing makes it clear that there is a market in the NSA information on non-americans, and that national intelligence authorities in Nato countries contribute their own citizen data which is then processed by the NSA.

Of course, Mrs Merkel having lived in a surveillance state, knows that a surveillance state thrives on the private trivia of random individuals, because knowledge can be used to create fear of the regime.  It may be that she is against an atmosphere of fear for "ideological " reasons, just as she seems to be in favor of democracy and free elections.

By emphasizing the fact that US organisations are legally empowered to procure, warehouse and especially share information with whomever it pleases them, the US has in fact done more political damage to Mrs Merkel than by any actual "spying": She has been shown to be powerless to protect her Stasi-shocked citizens from mass surveillance.

What is interesting is that Mrs Merkel may in the end be the sole extant specimen of a mythical species - an honest politician. The Snowden affair gives the US a chance to lose what it most needs in its fight against terror -allies- by calling her dumb to her face. 

Only spies and dictators see value in metadata

Classmates and friends of a terrorist could be terrorists, the NSA tells us, so they harvest gigaterapeta exabytes of metadata. Now, in a functioning democracy, this data may be of great interest to counterintelligence but it is essentially valueless for threatening Joe Citizen: trade union activism or cheating on one's wife are not crimes.

But then there are the faithful third world allies of the United States. These sympatico countries like Egypt that go through political convulsions every friday morning. Here the metadata can become an essential tool for unravelling the political dissent that would replace dictatorship by democracy.

I am willing to bet that every high-level trade negotiation between the US and a third-world country will now have as an essential component a "list of names". It is not that the US wishes to provide them, it will be that they cannot refuse - after all there must be a quid-pro-quo for cooperation on ... counter-terrorism. 

Snowden has done the citizens of third world countries a disfavor. He has made it known to every tinpot dictator that the complete list of his most effective opponents can be purchased. It remains to be seen whether Snowden himself will be traded back to the US in exchange for an up to date list of Russian dissidents. Now, that would be poetic justice indeed.

Edmund