[LINK] Oil-for-Food Inquiry Report On-line

Tom Worthington Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au
Tue Nov 28 13:30:19 AEDT 2006


In February I attended a hearing of the "Inquiry into certain 
Australian companies in relation to the UN Oil-for-Food Programme" 
and made some comments on its use of IT 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/courtech.shtml>. The final 
report of the inquiry has been released on-line at 
<http://www.ag.gov.au/agd/WWW/unoilforfoodinquiry.nsf/Page/Report>. 
This report consists of five PDF files (with a HTML version promised "soon"):

* Volume 1 - Summary, recommendations and background  PDF - 346 pages 
- (3231 KB)
* Volume 2 - Negotiations and sales, July 1999 - December 2000 PDF - 
463 pages - (1791 KB)
* Volume 3 - Sales, allegations and inquiries, January 2001 - 
December 2005 PDF - 432 pages - (2590 KB)
* Volume 4 - Findings - PDF - 396 pages - (1417 KB)
* Volume 5 - Appendices - PDF - 428 pages  (21960 KB)

These are very efficiently encoded PDF files (about 10 to 50 kbytes 
per A4 page) and downloaded very quickly.  A table of contents has 
been included for fast access to sections.

Unfortunately the inquiry chose to turn on the PDF security option 
which stops content copying or extraction. The effect of this is to 
make it difficult to copy sections of the report for reporting and 
analysis. They have allowed content extraction for access by the 
disabled. Attempting to stop coping sections of the report provides 
no real security and will just make harder accurate reporting and 
analysis. I have suggested to the Inquiry that this security should 
be removed, especially if an unsecured HTML version is to be provided "soon".

This is one of the first major inquiries of the Internet age. Many of 
the revelations occurred due to email messages discovered by the 
inquiry staff and the word "email" occurs 68 times in Volume 1. The 
evidence is available on-line in electronic format and should provide 
a very useful resource for scholars, as well as journalists 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/courtech.shtml#evidence>.

Curiously the word "Internet" only occurs once in the summary of the 
report and the inquiry seems dismissive of its importance saying "All 
they has was a database of prior contacts and the capacity to use the 
internet to make any other inquiries". Even at the time referred to 
(1999), the Internet was a powerful open source intelligence tool 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/irc/irc21.html>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml  




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