• BBC coverage
• Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review 2010
• Background Brief: Nuclear Standoff with Iran

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman and this is the World. The Pentagon says it’s expanding land and sea based missile defense systems in and around the Persian Gulf.  The moves are intended to counter what the U.S. considers a growing missile threat from Iran. The buildup comes as President Obama is pushing for a new round of sanctions against the Iranians over their nuclear program.   The World’s Matthew Bell reports that the military expansion seems to be part of an evolving policy toward Iran, one that emphasizes the stick more than the carrot.

MATTHEW BELL: The Pentagon is reported to be speeding up plans to put Patriot defensive missile installations in four Persian Gulf states.  They are Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.  The U.S. plan is nothing new.  It would be a continuation of something the Bush Administration started, but the timing is significant given the Iranians’ confrontation with the West over their nuclear program.  Muhammad Sahimi is an Iran expert at the University of Southern California.  He says boosting U.S. anti-missile capabilities in the region goes hand-in-hand with the Obama Administration’s efforts at diplomacy.

MUHAMMAD SAHIMI: Some may call it gunboat diplomacy, but it is definitely part of the maneuvers that the Administration is going through hoping that the hard liners in Tehran will come around and reach an agreement.

BELL: Sahimi says Iran’s hard line leadership is already under enormous internal pressure.  It’s confronting a vigorous opposition protest movement.  On top of that, it’s facing the possibility of yet another round of economic sanctions.  Still, Sahimi says stepping up U.S. military capabilities in the Gulf might not be a good idea.

SAHIMI: This will only increase tension in that region. It will only add to the hostilities that Iran may have toward the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, and in the long run, it doesn’t contribute anything to peace and the stability in the region.

BELL: Other experts see the Obama Administration making a pivot on Iran, away from diplomacy and engagement and toward a tougher approach. Robert Kagan is an international relations expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

ROBERT KAGAN: The Administration is now, especially starting in February when France takes the seat at the U.N. Security Council, the Administration is going to be pressing hard for international sanctions on Iran.  And I think that they are preparing for what is going to be a tense period.

BELL: Kagan applauds President Obama’s apparent shift to a tougher line on Iran, and he says anti-missile systems send an important message to Washington’s Arab allies.

KAGAN: Clearly, it’s an attempt to reassure them that the United States supports their defense.  I think it’s also a way of continuing to get their allegiance as the situation gets more tense in the region. I think they don’t want the powers in the region, especially the smaller powers, to start thinking that they have no choice but to accommodate Iran.  I think that when you provide American security assistance to countries, the idea is that you should stick with the United States, and the United States is going to be capable of helping defend you.

BELL: This is also about sending a message to Israel, says Aaron David Miller.  He’s a former State Department advisor on Middle East issues and currently a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

AARON DAVID MILLER: The notion of reassuring the Israelis and trying to create a measure of determination and seriousness on the part of the Obama Administration to constrain or at least rule out the need for Israeli military action against Iran I think is quite high.

BELL: But Miller says the Israelis might be willing to hold off on a pre-emptive strike against Iran for only so long.

MILLER: If sanctions don’t work, if diplomacy fails then it seems to me as matters drift, they will invariably drift to the very real possibility of an Israeli unilateral military strike.

BELL: It’s not clear how Iran might respond in the near term to new and improved U.S. missile defense assets in the region.  Barbara Slavin is the author of a book about U.S./Iranian relations called, “Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies.”  She says the U.S. military moves should come as little surprise to Tehran.

BARBARA SLAVIN: Iranian actions, its nuclear program, missile tests and so on have clearly led to anxiety on the part of the Gulf States. And so this is to be expected I think if you’re Iran, and I would argue that the Iranian leadership is more focused right now on internal developments than it is on anything outside.

BELL: Slavin says the political uncertainty inside Iran makes it difficult to predict the government’s next move.  For The World, I’m Matthew Bell.

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• BBC Audio slideshow: Haiti’s slave children
• A Crime So Monstrous: book info
• Carr Center for Human Rights

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MARCO WERMAN:  Haiti’s children were vulnerable even before the earthquake.  Most had poor health care and little education, and many were exploited as child slaves. E. Benjamin Skinner is the author of “A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery”.  Mister Skinner is currently in Davos, Switzerland, where he attended the World Economic Forum.  Ben, you’re very familiar with the problem of child slavery in Haiti.  Give us the overview.  Where do you think Haiti was in terms of child slavery as of January 11, 2010, the day before this earthquake hit?

BENJAMIN SKINNER: The problem of child slavery in Haiti was an enormous one even before the earthquake.  In terms of gross numbers, Haiti has more slaves than any other country in the Western Hemisphere.  To be clear, first of all, about terminology, slaves are those forced to work, held through fraud under the threat of violence with no pay beyond subsistence.  In Haiti, what we’re talking about is a very particular form of child domestic slavery. This takes place when desperately impoverished, socially isolated rural parents give their children to traffickers in hopes that their children will be able to find a better life and some degree of education.  In fact, what often happens is these children wind up in brutal domestic bondage.

WERMAN: In your book, “A Crime so Monstrous,” which came out 2008, you undertook a grizzly experiment finding out how long it would take to go to Haiti from Mid-Town Manhattan and return with a procured child slave.  Tell us about what you did there.

SKINNER: What I did was essentially was went to a place on the street in Port au Prince, Haiti and this place was five hours by plane and by automobile from what I consider to be the center of the moral universe, the U.N. Secretariat in Manhattan. Five hours from there on the street in broad daylight, I pulled up in a car.  I rolled down a window, and a man came over and said, “Do you want to get a person?”  And at that point, we began to negotiate.  I made it clear that I wanted a child, a 12-year-old girl to cook, to clean, to do domestic work.  And at a certain point the trafficker leaned in and said, “This is rather a delicate question, but do you want this child as a partner as well as a domestic?”  And when he asked that question, my translator made it perfectly clear what he was asking.  I said, “Is it possible to have this child as a sexual slave as well as a domestic slave?”  And he said, “Oui, no problem.”  The asking price for this child, a 12-year-old girl for a domestic and a sexual slave was $100.  And within two minutes I negotiated this child down to $50 U.S. Dollars.

WERMAN: Now, obviously you didn’t purchase this slave.

SKINNER: That’s true.

WERMAN: How easy would it have been to have made the purchase, get the child on a plane and brought them back to New York City?

SKINNER: I’m glad you underscored that.  Throughout my travels, I negotiated the sale of human beings on four continents, but I never paid for human beings.  To do so would be in my estimation to give rise to a trade in human misery.  In many other instances, I was under cover and in this instance, I was completely open about my intention to talk to him about his work.  But at the time, there was no law against human trafficking in Haiti.  And so he was operating in broad daylight without any fear of reprisal or any fear of prosecution.  He said he could make the papers to make it look as if I’d adopted the children.  I didn’t put that to the test, but as I found out through talking to the H.S. officials, through talking to FBI officials and very sadly through talking to survivors, it is quite possible to traffic those children into the United States.

WERMAN: You were in Haiti right after the earthquake, Ben. There will surely be more orphan children in Haiti and I’m sure you saw some already, the population growing there.  Based on what you did see, do you think there are going to be more of these so-called resteveks, these children who are brought in from the country essentially to work in salve conditions in the city?

SKINNER: I think there is no question that what has occurred in Haiti on January 12th and the subsequent major after shock has created a whole nation within a nation of orphans. And what you will see increasingly is not only the orphans, but desperate parents who were already struggling to survive and are that much more down the scale of human needs giving their children away in order to allow their children some degree of survivability.  Whatever markets they had for their crops are going to be that much more decimated, and they will therefore be that much more vulnerable to the lure of traffickers who come in and say, “Mommy, poppy, I know your children is starving. I know your child is dying of a preventable disease here. Give me your child and I will give that child a better life.”

WERMAN: E. Benjamin Skinner is the author of, “A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face With Modern-Day Slavery.”  He’s also a fellow at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights.  Thank you for your time.

SKINNER: Thanks, Marco.

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• Vancouver 2010
• Listen to Jason’s previous story: “Long winter for Olympic village businesses”

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  Was it worth it? That’s what Canadians are asking before the Winter Olympics begin in Vancouver next week and after seven years of planning, construction, and hassles.  All told, Canadians will have spent about $6 billion Canadian dollars just to build the infrastructure for the Games.  That’s about $5.6 billion U.S.  dollars. The World’s Jason Margolis begins his report with an example of how that tab got so high.

JASON MARGOLIS: Top speeds on the new Olympic bobsled track in Whistler, British Columbia top 95 miles per hour. It’s the fastest track in the world, one of the jewels built specifically for the Vancouver Games.  The refrigerated concrete track cost $105 million dollars to build.  All numbers Canadian.  At nine tenths of a mile, that’s about $22,000 dollars per foot. The cost was split between the federal government in Ottawa and the province of British Columbia.  The President of the Whistler Tourism Board, Barrett Fisher thinks the track is great.

BARRETT FISHER: You are so up close and personal to see this incredible speed going by, and it’s just takes your breath away.  So, no, I’ve found it quite phenomenal.

MARGOLIS: Jordan Sturdy, the mayor of Pemberton, the village just up the road from Whistler has a more nuanced perspective.

JORDAN STUDY: You know, if we were to invest whatever, $100 or $150 or $200 million, whatever it is, into our children, that would not be the first thing I would choose. However, if it’s there, we’re going to use it. Don’t be surprised when you see a kid from Pemberton winning the gold eight years from now.

MARGOLIS: That’s not quite enough to convince public policy analyst Seth Klein with the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives.

SETH KLEIN: You know, I’m one of these people who thinks both the summer and winter Games should always be in the same place.  I think we should just go back to Lillehammer every four years.  Because, you know, we don’t need all those luge runs all over the world. They’re not practically useful.

JAMES BRANDER: None of this is necessary.  It’s a party. None of it’s necessary.

MARGOLIS: And so goes the Olympic spending debate in British Columbia. That last voice was economist James Brander from the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business. He says, sure it can be hard to justify the cost of a new bobsled run or spending $38 million for a new curling facility, but  consider what else British Columbia got for $6 billion dollars in spending.

BRANDER: Most of the money is on the big infrastructure projects. They’re sometimes called the legacy projects. So the big ticket items are the rapid transit line, the highway upgrade between Vancouver and Whistler itself.  There’s a convention center, and there’s a large housing development, which is Olympic Village.

MARGOLIS: Now whether that’s all worth it, depends on who you ask.  Brander says the upgrade to the notoriously dangerous Sea to Sky Highway as well as the new rapid transit line that connects Vancouver to the airport were overdue and good investments.  But he’s not so keen on the Olympic Village, which will be converted into public housing after the Games.  It costs more than $1 billion dollars.

BRANDER: This social housing is probably the most expensive social housing that’s ever been built.  It’s just not the way you want to go about building social housing.

MARGOLIS: Many argue that these big infrastructure projects shouldn’t really even count as Olympic spending, that these projects would have eventually happened without the Olympics coming to town. But on the flip side, things got done now because the Olympics were coming.  For example, with the highway upgrade and new rapid transit line, the Games acted as a catalyst.

MAURICE LEVI: Yeah, I think catalyst is the right word, and in the names of the Games, you know, there were some people who were willing to accept more disruption than they otherwise would have done.

MARGOLIS: Economist Maurice Levi teaches at the University of British Columbia.

LEVI: I think that we would probably never been able to get around to putting in a major transit system like the Canada Line. And I think most people and most reports I’ve heard are very, very positive. And, you know, while the retailers that were affected somewhat adversely, I think the net benefit has been quite terrific. And it’s going to be a legacy of the Games.

MARGOLIS: The Games have also been a good deal for the resort village of Whistler, which is hosting many of the skiing events. The village got $100 million dollars worth of upgrades.  Whistler Mayor Ken Melamed says it’s been fantastic.  His village only had to pay for about a tenth of the costs.  The village got things from a new CT scanner at the hospital to repaved parking lots.  And because Whistler is hosting the Olympics and Paralympics, Melamed says much of Whistler was redesigned to improve accessibility for the disabled.

MAYOR MELAMED: The athletes’ village will become the Paralympics athletes’ village as well. So it has been designed with accessibility in mind. And about a hundred of the units are accessible, as is the Athlete Center.  And we will become a national training center for able and disabled athletes across Canada and internationally.

MARGOLIS: And with 10,000 members of the media descending on British Columbia, the phone company laid down a lot of fiber optic cable.

MAYOR MELAMED: Whistler will be one of the most connected towns on the planet; way more capacity than we would ever need, but it provides us for lots of opportunity for the new digital era.

MARGOLIS: But going back to the original question.  Was all the money, the inconvenience, and the aggravation worth it?  Again, it depends on who you ask.  After every Olympics, the costs and the benefits will be analyzed and re-analyzed.  The boosters will come up with one conclusion and the skeptics will reach another.  Economist James Brander says it’s impossible to reach a consensus on the whether the Games are ultimately worth the cost.

BRANDER: It’s not a money making enterprise, but, you know, we do it because we like it, it makes us feel good.  Okay, we’re throwing a party, and more than most parties, of course, it’s a party that it generates civic pride, national pride, and might actually produce some additional community spirit and so on.  So there are some intangible benefits from the Olympics. And I’m smiling as I say this, but they’re important.

MARGOLIS: If history holds true, the Vancouver Olympics will probably lose money in the end.  But if Team Canada wins gold in say men’s hockey, Canadians everywhere will probably forget about the price tag for at least a little while.  For the World, I’m Jason Margolis, Vancouver, British Columbia.

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• Charlotte Gainsbourg
• Guardian article
• NY Times article

Stone: In a Berlin studio, A two-woman design team known as Mongrels in Common are rushing to get their latest looks ready for the runway. A soft grey dress with short puffed sleeves is displayed on a mannequin. The dress is made up of rectangular panels with a subtle but familiar pattern. And while this material is easy to sew, structure is key, says Christine Plüss.

Plüss: “You’re a bit more limited space-wise because a salmon is as big as a salmon can get really, so you have to think about where you place seams and how you are going to cut it because a cow is much bigger!”

Stone: The designers are using salmon leather for dresses, shorts, and handbags. It appeals to them aesthetically and ecologically, says Livia Ximénez-Carrillo. And to their clients as well – with a little explanation.

Ximénez-Carrillo: “Yeah yeah – the first thing they say is, “Does it smell like fish?” But it cannot. It’s leather. It cannot smell like fish, just like leather.”

Hain: “Normally I don’t like to use this word garbage. But of course, in the industry it’s garbage. But that’s our advantage. That’s our raw material.”

Stone: Holger Hain is the man behind the fish. That is, he’s the managing director of Nanai, the firm that produces chrome-free vegetable-tanned salmon skins in the small Bavarian town of Bischofsmais. Back in 2004, Hain was an investor in Laschinger, a fish processing company.

Hain: “We were the biggest producer of smoked salmon all over the world. And at this time built our second factory. “

Stone: One day, while visiting the company founder, Hain noticed an attractive folder on the desk that looked like snakeskin. The founder told him it was actually made from their salmon — he’d been experimenting with the tanning process since the 1980s. Hain was taken with the idea, and started doing research and testing.

Hain: I googled on the internet fish skin, fish leather and something else. And always was coming this name Nanai, Nanai, Nanai.

Stone: Nanai is a region in Eastern Siberia. The indigenous people there have long tanned fish skins for clothing, boats and tents. Hain contacted some Nanai craftsmen, and worked to integrate their traditional techniques with custom-built machinery.

Stone: Now they no longer package salmon in this small Bavarian factory. Instead employees concentrate on make salmon leather from the constant flow of raw material. The salmon is farmed in organic aquaculture in Ireland, then sent to Poland for curing and packaging. The remainder of the fish is frozen, and then trucked here — 100,000 a day — more than 80,000 tons a year.

And at this point in the process, it definitely smells like fish.

Stone: Machines strip the remaining flesh from the skins, which are then washed and salted. Workers rinse the skins, dye them, and use pressurized air to strip off the shiny scales, which go flying through the air like sequins off a party dress. Then the fish skins are dried, ironed, and softened. At the end of this time-intensive process, what’s left is light and flexible and less than 1 millimeter in thickness. It takes 25 skins and two weeks to make one square meter of Nanai leather. This former leftover is now a luxury product.

Hain: “280 Euro we are starting, up to 380 euro. Depends on the colors. Glossy non-glossy, bleached or non-bleached, natural or vegetable. So that’s the range of the prices in square meters.”

Holger Hain

Hain: “Now I can say we are using 100% of the salmon. 100%.”

Stone: He’s now shipping the salmon heads to Japan, selling the fishbones to the supplement industry, and making the waste from the leather processing into pet food. His latest experiment is with a new recipe — turning salmon skin scraps into savory snack chips.

For The World, I’m Susan Stone in Berlin.

• Laschinger Aqua Group
• Nanai Leather

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MARCO WERMAN:  Iran’s opposition has shown no sign of retreating since the presidential election seven months ago.  Protesters say that vote was rigged to secure the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Authorities deny that.  Opposition websites are inviting people to stage rallies on February 11th.  That will mark the 31st anniversary of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.  But hardliners are warning that they won’t tolerate any more anti-government protests.  Nazila Fathi covers Iran for the New York Times.  She’s currently in Toronto.  Now, where is the Iranian opposition right now, Nazila?   What’s left of the grass roots movement that shook the country last year?

NAZILA FATHI: The opposition is scattered all over the country, and actually among various classes of people not only in the capital city of Tehran, all over the country.  Unfortunately, we’ve been hearing more about the protests in Tehran and that is because of the better capability that protesters in Tehran have.  But as far as we know, the protests have been going on in other cities and they are vowing that they are going to com out again on February 11th.

WERMAN: How would you characterize the leadership of the opposition in Iran? I mean, what are the chief differences between the politicians and the rank and file within the opposition.

FATHI: This movement does not have a clear leadership.  When you talk to the protesters themselves, they say that every protester is a leader.  It seems that Mr. Karroubi and Mir Houssein Mousavi are going to be the two candidates during the presidential elections. They are the official leaders of the opposition, but they have said themselves as well this movement is very grass roots. And they are not the leaders of the movement.

WERMAN: So Karroubi and Mousavi say they are not the leaders, it’s grass roots, but do the grass roots and do the rank and file kind of actually see them as de facto leaders?

FATHI: Yes, they have become the symbolic leaders of the movement because of the way they’ve been speaking, because of their outspokenness, because of their willingness to stand up to the opposition, and because of the vow that they took right after the election that they’re going to fight along side people who voted for them, and will try to take their votes back. In those symbolic ways they are the official leaders of the movement.  But it is not clear that if the authorities go as far as arresting these two men whether they are capable of ending the protest.  That’s why they have said that they are not the leaders of the movement.

WERMAN: Now last week two men were executed in Iran.  They were convicted of defying God and belonged to armed organizations and were hanged.  What was their connection to the opposition?

FATHI: The two men were arrested two months before the elections. They were both linked to the opposition groups outside of the country. They were the concession broadcasts on the English language Press T.V. that chose one of the men, Mr. Ali Mohajerani [PH] saying that he had links with Americans, Israelis, as well as royalist agents outside the country.  And Mr. Mohajerani confessed that he had plans to bomb religious locations.  However, the two of them were lumped with protesters who tried after the June unrest and they were linked to the protests.  And the message that the [INDISCERNIBLE] have been sending is that the government wants to intimidate protestors ahead of the protest plan for February 11th, and there are concerns that they authorities might go as far as executing even more people.  They have put 16 people on trial this week and for those 16 they are asking for the death penalty for at least five of them.

WERMAN: So will these death sentences actually affect the opposition?  Will it intimidate the opposition to the point that they won’t go ahead with these protests?

FATHI: It is very hard to tell that now.  We have to wait and see what’s going to happen on February 11th.  There are two possibilities.  Maybe the opposition would become more radical and they would come out more forcefully.  There have been messages on Facebook and websites saying that they have come a long way since seven months ago.  And so they will come again despite these executions.  However, there are fears that it might, the executions might have an effect on people and they would stay home.

WERMAN: Nazilah Fathi of the New York Times.  Thanks indeed.  I appreciate it.

NAZILA FATHI: Thank you very much for having me.

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MARCO WERMAN:  Also in the Middle East today, the Israeli military said it’s disciplined two senior army officers.  The two were reprimanded for an incident during the fighting against Hamas militants in Gaza last year.  That conflict left more than 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 900 civilians dead.  Thirteen Israelis were also killed.  Today’s statement by Israel that two officers were disciplined is the first admission by either side of any high level wrongdoing during the offensive.  Linda Gradstein has the story from Jerusalem.

LINDA GRADSTEIN: The details of the reprimand of the two soldiers came in a report that Israel submitted to the United Nations on Friday.  That was the deadline for a response to a U.N. report that demanded that both Israel and Hamas investigate alleged war crimes during the fighting in Gaza last year.  The incident occurred on January 15th, two days before the fighting ended.   Israel fired artillery shells at a U.N. compound where 700 Palestinians had taken refuge.  Israeli officials say they were responding to Hamas fire at their troops.  The Israeli shells set fire to a U.N. food warehouse.  Three Palestinians were injured.  Israeli Army spokesman Barak Raz says two senior officers were disciplined.

BARAK RAZ: One brigadier general and one colonel were, in fact, reprimanded as a result of what has been deemed as inappropriate use of artillery shells in a built up area.  And this is the reason that they were reprimanded, which is something that will escort them through their military careers. Obviously, at any point where it’s time for a position change or a promotion this is something that will be looked at.

GRADSTEIN: There’s some confusion over what kind of shells were fired.  The Ha’aretz newspaper and an Israeli human rights group say the shells were white phosphorous, which international law bans in a populated area.  The Army says the shells were regular artillery.  In any event, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum says Israel’s statement is tantamount to admitting war crimes.

FAWZI BARHOUM: [Translated]  But this is a protective measure to avoid having to prosecute these officers in the International Criminal Court.  So according to this clear recognition from the Zionist enemy, the international community should take practical steps to start prosecuting the leaders of the Zionist enemy as war criminals in the International Criminal Court.

GRADSTEIN: Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon disagrees.  He says the move is proof that the Israeli army can investigate itself, and that there’s no need for an independent investigation.

DANNY AYALON: We keep our high standards on morality and the fact that we took disciplinary action against very high and senior officers is just the proof.

GRADSTEIN: Ayalon says the Army is investigating 150 incidents, and he says 36 have been referred for criminal investigation. But Israeli human rights groups say the Army cannot conduct an independent investigation.  Activist Yael Stein says the army investigation is not serious.

YAEL STEIN: This case shows the whitewash of the report that Israel submitted. The report itself does not specify the circumstances in which those officers were acted and, therefore, just the revelations, they just show how extreme the case is.  We think that this case show that the military system cannot investigate itself.

GRADSTEIN: It’s now up to the U.N. to determine whether the Israeli investigation meets international standards for an independent inquiry. For the World, I’m Linda Gradstein in Jerusalem.

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH/Boston.  Humanitarian efforts in Haiti are still mostly focused on meeting the basic needs of earthquake survivors. Aid workers continue to work around the clock to get food, water and medicine to those in need. But you don’t have to be in Haiti to help.  For the past three weekends, groups of volunteers have gathered in cities across the globe to figure out how to harness technology to assist relief efforts.  The gatherings are called Crisis Camps.  The World’s Clark Boyd went to one in Montreal.

CLARK BOYD: Ten people braved sub-zero temperatures to gather on Saturday in some donated office space here.  Their goal?  To figure out what they could do to help the Haitian relief efforts.

LORRAINE CRAIG: At this point after that, I was on the Internet and I was seeing people from Haiti asking for help and so I …

BOYD: Lorraine Craig organized the Crisis Camp in Montreal. She said it all started when she used Twitter and Google’s People Finder to help a Haitian man locate family members after the quake hit.

CRAIG: Well, I was very happy to see that an average citizen, without a great tech background that, you know, was somewhat nerdy could actually participate in helping people halfway across the world.

BOYD: That sentiment was shared by Laurent Castellucci, who came to offer what he could, his time.

LAURENT CASTELLUCCI: I’ve been hit by the economy. I have no disposable income right now. I can, you know, throw in some fun.  This isn’t really the best use of what I can do to help. So I have some time. Between stressing out, tearing my hair out about, you know, trying to find a  job, I may as well help people who are in worse shape than me.

BOYD: Other attendees had more personal reasons to come to the Crisis Camp.  Stephane Jolicouer-Fidelia is a computer programmer by trade.  Just a few weeks ago, he was planning to visit his mother’s family in Haiti.

JOLICOUER-FIDELIA: I was supposed to go there in mid-February. This is something that kind of  happened all of the sudden.  I had a lot of family that was impacted, but thankfully everyone is safe and everything’s going fine now. It’s just a matter of seeing how I can help from afar.

BOYD: But the question for those assembled in Montreal was, “How best to help?”

NOEL DICKOVER: There’s a whole set of tasks that anyone with a browser can do that are very meaningful, but there’s also some very high-end things that we can get folks working on.

BOYD: Noel Dickover is one of the overall organizers of the Crisis Camps, which continue to take place in cities across the globe.

DICKOVER: We aren’t moving concrete.  We’re not delivering water, and we’re not doing anything with rescuing people. But we can provide situational awareness.  We can provide technology tools that the NGOs and other folks in the field.  And it’s this self-organized groundswell of people that really do care, and come to the table with some incredible thoughts and ideas.

BOYD: More than 30 different projects have sprung up from the crisis camps.  Those projects range from translating text messages, to helping create good maps of Haiti.  It all revolves around the idea of crowd sourcing; ordinary citizens using tech tools to gather and organize information that’s needed on the ground.  In the aftermath of the quake in Haiti, that information could be critical to saving lives even now.

DICKOVER: If everybody starts sharing the data, sticking it on something like an open street map, and everybody else can sort of self organize and making better decisions. And you already see folks like the U.N. and the World Bank looking at how they can make that happen as well. So, crowd sourcing techniques, we think, have real viability to getting a better sense of what’s occurring in an area that you otherwise wouldn’t know anything about.

BOYD: The Montreal Crisis Camp ended without any concrete plans for projects, but there were a number of good ideas.  Attendees with family ties to Haiti were looking into how to tap into the wider Haitian Diaspora community in town.  One woman was looking into whether her website for helping people with post-traumatic stress disorder might be useful for Haitians. Laurent Castellucci, a writer, said he wanted to help translate complex technical jargon into plain French.

CASTELLUCCI: Mini instruction booklets written clearly, concisely, getting that translated into French.  We have Francophone speakers here.  We have some access to some Creole speakers.  If we can get stuff translated directly into Creole that’s written as simple instructions to

be whatever we want to implement to make it directly available to them, there is something we could do. And you know, if it ends up being that I’m another body, you know, tagging some geo source tags and doing whatever to help out, that’s the joy of crowd sourcing, you know, that every little bit of that helps.  And I’m fine being an anonymous part of the crowd.

BOYD: Another attendee told me, “We need to figure out where we can fit in without interfering.”

We plan our actions, he said, and then move forward in a fast, furious but focused manner.”  There will be a second Crisis Camp meeting here next weekend.  For the World this is Clark Boyd, Montreal.

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MARCO WERMAN:  Part of that hefty Olympic price tag pays for security, and apparently a good chunk of that budget goes toward closed circuit security cameras.  Today, officials powered up a network of about a thousand security cameras in and around Vancouver.  Most of them are monitoring the various Olympic venues. This massive deployment of electronic surveillance is making Canadian privacy watch dogs nervous, but security officials have promised that the cameras will be dismantled as soon as the Vancouver Games are over.  And the images recorded by the devices will only be kept for a limited time unless they become evidence in a court case.

By the way, the system reportedly had a real world test last week. An intoxicated man apparently tried to breach the security perimeter surrounding a cruise ship.  What he didn’t know is that the ship is being used to house visiting police during the Winter Games.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.