Hight of Patriotism: Indian Passport Dilemma!

Indian Passport Office (PO) with all their corrupt and age old paper work methods, which are designed in such a manner that, nobody who either doesn't have money to fuel a passport agent's propellers or a hands on experience with PO himself, can never be able to see his on face on his own passport without seeing the robust (don't even dream so!) bureaucratic culture of Indian administration. 

Ideas to Ponder: Need to Re-look at World Corruption Perceptions Index!

_{Since 1995, Transparency International has published an annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) ordering the countries of the world according to "the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among public officials and politicians". The organization defines corruption as "the abuse of entrusted power for private gain".}

_{Transparency International's 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index is the world's most credible measure of of domestic, public sector corruption. The CPI is an aggregate indicator that combines different sources of information about corruption, making it possible to compare countries.}

_{Method CPI calculation}

_{The CPI 2010 is calculated using data from 13 different surveys or assessments produced by the following 10 independent organisations:}

Impact of Wikileaks: Soon the Diplomats around the World would Start Hiding their Faces

Wikileaks has released just a few cables, and diplomats around the world have already started panicking. NYT reports that "Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday condemned the disclosure of thousands of confidential diplomatic cables, saying that it was an attack not only on American foreign policy interests but on the international community."

Of course its an attack on international community, because as I expect from the future cables, US alone is not going to be the culprit. 

Washington Post reports that "Diplomats and government officials around the world lamented the massive leak of U.S. diplomatic cables on Monday and many predicted it would undercut their ability to deal with the United States on sensitive issues." 

In Iran’s first official reaction to leaked State Department cables quoting Arab leaders as urging the United States to bomb Tehran’s nuclear facilities, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed the documents as American psychological warfare that would not affect his country’s relations with other nations, reports NYT on Monday. 

Wikileaks: Let the Fun Begin!

A latest news at NYT says that WikiLeaks released around 250,000 diplomatic cables to The New York Times Sunday, most from the last 3 years, detailing the conversations between Washington and embassies around the world on views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.

Pfc. Bradley Manning is accused
of leaking diplomatic cables
and other classified documents
to WikiLeaks.

The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. These documents are said to have an unprecedented effect on US relations with some of its allies in the east. 

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and some other American ambassadors around the world have been contacting foreign officials in recent days to alert them to the expected disclosures.

Wikileaks and the Power of Internet

WikiLeaks is an international organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press. Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents. The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Newspaper articles and The New Yorker magazine (7 June 2010) describe Julian Assange, an Australian journalist and Internet activist, as its director.  

Assange claimed to release a new set of documents related to US policy for fighting terrorism in Muslim countries. The Obama administration is warning online whistleblower WikiLeaks that its expected imminent release of classified state department documents will put "countless" lives at risk, threaten global counterterorism operations and jeopardize US relations with its allies.