Gordon Bell, a 75-year-old legend of computer science, strolls around the San Francisco offices of Microsoft (MSFT) Research wearing what looks like a heavy black necklace. It holds a camera the size of a deck of cards. It's called a SenseCam, and it snaps photos every few minutes, or whenever a change of light signals that Bell has stepped into a different room. Sometimes Bell reaches down and takes a picture himself. One more image for his enormous memory bank.
For the past 10 years, Bell, a senior researcher at Microsoft, has been leading the life of a digital pack rat. He has been recording the twists and turns of his existence and storing all this information in vast digital files. Bell takes pictures and records his phone conversations. He maps the path of his footsteps and scans every shred of paper worth saving. All this effort is to build an electronic memory, a digital adjunct to the faulty and often delusional one between our ears. In an engaging new book, Total Recall, which Bell wrote with colleague Jim Gemmell, he argues that growing numbers of us—strange though it may sound—will soon be following his lead.
It would be easy to dismiss Bell as an outlier. Even with technical help from Microsoft, the digital documenting of a single life—"lifelogging," Bell calls it—is immense work. Yet Bell, a key figure in the development of microprocessors and the Internet, points out that millions are already pouring their lives onto social networks and Twitter. He says that lifelogging "is the next step."
Technology is evolving to support his case. Millions of us already carry a rudimentary lifelogging tool, the cell phone. And as phones add more features, from video cameras and e-mail to global positioning technology, their potential to record daily activities grows.
At the same time, companies are developing a host of specialized gadgets and Web services to sell to the growing ranks of self-observing datahounds. A new sleep-monitoring device called Zeo provides a minute-by-minute record of each user's deep sleep and rapid eye movements. A pen-shaped gadget from Livescribe turns notes into digital images and records audio from conversations and meetings. And a popular data service called Evernote allows people to pile anything they read or see online in to a vast digital drawer. For some of the 1.5 million users, it amounts to a record of their intellectual life. "We want to be a permanent repository of your memory," says Evernote CEO Phil Libin.
One goal for the early lifeloggers is to track and optimize performance, from the bottom line to the waistline. Bell, who has undergone two heart bypass operations, has analyzed his own data to draw correlations between his diet, exercise, and symptoms of angina—and to fine-tune his regime. Esther Dyson, a technology commentator (and an Evernote board member), predicts that markets will open for software to "extract order and meaning from the chaos of proliferating data."
In many areas, electronic memories could provide lifeloggers with an edge. Already, parties in divorce or workplace harassment suits use location data from cell phones and electronic toll booths to supplement or contradict human memories. Data zealots could take this further by producing records of their conversations, e-mails, and dinner meetings.
Yet data could be used against those who collect it, too. Courts conceivably could subpoena lifelogs, much the way the special prosecutors subpoenaed President Richard Nixon's Watergate tapes. And personal monitoring by lifeloggers could threaten other people's privacy. This raises thorny questions. Will people have to establish ground rules for on- and off-the-record recording? "We'll have to come up with protocols," says Bell. (Before Bell's recorded phone calls, an electronic voice announces that the conversation is being taped.)
The ultimate target for Bell is to create a searchable and ultra-detailed memory for all of us. For most people, the last week or two occupies most of the memories, with much of the past largely fading from our minds. Entire months, or even years, can be reduced to a few dinners, trips, or songs. But a record such as Bell's brings back every hour and every encounter. In his book, Bell points to Cathal Gurrin, a lifelogger at Dublin City University who has in a rotating digital photo album on his desk a shot of the moment he met his girlfriend. "Not that I knew she'd become my girlfriend at the time," Gurrin tells Bell.
In a sense, lifelogging is already afoot inside corporations. Faced with tighter tax, legal, and compliance regimes, companies are storing ever greater quantities of documents. But the march of digital data is bound to go much further, with each worker generating growing streams of information. Already, the Pentagon is looking into using such data to profile workers and soldiers and to teach others how to do their jobs. Similar research is taking place at tech companies, including IBM (IBM).
Of late, Bell has eased back on lifelogging. Microsoft opted not to develop its own suite of commercial lifelogging products given other priorities, so he and Gemmell moved on to other projects, such as building databases for cancer research. But even as he walks the streets of San Francisco, Bell still wears his SenseCam and feasts on the data of his life. "Did you know," he asks, studying a lunch menu, "that there are only three calories in a seedless grape?"
Baker is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York. Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.
Carol Jordan, a 32-year-old pharmacy technician, was living in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1999 when she became pregnant. She'd already decided against abortion, but she was struggling financially and her boyfriend was unsupportive. Looking through the Yellow Pages for help, she spotted an ad under "crisis pregnancies" for Bethany Christian Services. Within hours of calling, Jordan (who asked to be identified with a pseudonym) was invited to Bethany's local office to discuss free housing and medical care.
Bethany, it turned out, did not simply specialize in counseling pregnant women. It is the nation's largest adoption agency, with more than eighty-five offices in fifteen countries.
When Jordan arrived, a counselor began asking whether she'd considered adoption and talking about the poverty rates of single mothers. Over five counseling sessions, she convinced Jordan that adoption was a win-win situation: Jordan wouldn't "have death on her hands," her bills would be paid and the baby would go to a family of her choosing in an open adoption. She suggested Jordan move into one of Bethany's "shepherding family" homes, away from the influence of family and friends.
Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), the nonprofit pregnancy-testing facilities set up by antiabortion groups to dissuade women from having abortions, have become fixtures of the antiabortion landscape, buttressed by an estimated $60 million in federal abstinence and marriage-promotion funds. The National Abortion Federation estimates that as many as 4,000 CPCs operate in the United States, often using deceptive tactics like posing as abortion providers and showing women graphic antiabortion films. While there is growing awareness of how CPCs hinder abortion access, the centers have a broader agenda that is less well known: they seek not only to induce women to "choose life" but to choose adoption, either by offering adoption services themselves, as in Bethany's case, or by referring women to Christian adoption agencies. Far more than other adoption agencies, conservative Christian agencies demonstrate a pattern and history of coercing women to relinquish their children.
Bethany guided Jordan through the Medicaid application process and in April moved her in with home-schooling parents outside Myrtle Beach. There, according to Jordan, the family referred to her as one of the agency's "birth mothers"--a term adoption agencies use for relinquishing mothers that many adoption reform advocates reject--although she hadn't yet agreed to adoption. "I felt like a walking uterus for the agency," says Jordan.
Jordan was isolated in the shepherding family's house; her only social contact was with the agency, which called her a "saint" for continuing her pregnancy but asked her to consider "what's best for the baby." "They come on really prolife: look at the baby, look at its heartbeat, don't kill it. Then, once you say you won't kill it, they ask, What can you give it? You have nothing to offer, but here's a family that goes on a cruise every year."
Jordan was given scrapbooks full of letters and photos from hopeful adoptive parents hoping to stand out among the estimated 150 couples for every available baby. Today the "birthmother letters" are on Bethany's website: 500 couples who pay $14,500 to $25,500 for a domestic infant adoption, vying for mothers' attention with profuse praise of their "selflessness" and descriptions of the lifestyle they can offer.
Jordan selected a couple, and when she went into labor, they attended the birth, along with her counselor and shepherding mother. The next day, the counselor said that fully open adoptions weren't legal in South Carolina, so Jordan wouldn't receive identifying information on the adoptive parents. Jordan cried all day and didn't think she could relinquish the baby. She called her shepherding parents and asked if she could bring the baby home. They refused, chastising Jordan sharply. The counselor told the couple Jordan was having second thoughts and brought them, sobbing, into her recovery room. The counselor warned Jordan that if she persisted, she'd end up homeless and lose the baby anyway.
"My options were to leave the hospital walking, with no money," says Jordan. "Or here's a couple with Pottery Barn furniture. You sacrifice yourself, not knowing it will leave an impact on you and your child for life."
The next morning, Jordan was rushed through signing relinquishment papers by a busy, on-duty nurse serving as notary public. As soon as she'd signed, the couple left with the baby, and Jordan was taken home without being discharged. The shepherding family was celebrating and asked why Jordan wouldn't stop crying. Five days later, she used her last $50 to buy a Greyhound ticket to Greenville, where she struggled for weeks to reach a Bethany post-adoption counselor as her milk came in and she rapidly lost more than fifty pounds in her grief.
When Jordan called Bethany's statewide headquarters one night, her shepherding mother answered, responding coldly to Jordan's lament. "You're the one who spread your legs and got pregnant out of wedlock," she told Jordan. "You have no right to grieve for this baby."
Jordan isn't alone. On an adoption agency rating website, Bethany is ranked poorly by birth mothers. Its adoptive parent ratings are higher, although several adopters described the coercion they felt "our birth mother" underwent. But neither is Bethany alone; in the constellation of groups that constitute the Christian adoption industry, including CPCs, maternity homes and adoption agencies, Bethany is just one large star. And instances of coercion in adoption stretch back nearly seventy years.
Ann Fessler, author of The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade, has meticulously chronicled the lives of women from the "Baby Scoop Era": the period from 1945 to 1973, when single motherhood was so stigmatized that at least 1.5 million unwed American mothers relinquished children for adoption, often after finishing pregnancies secretly in maternity homes. The coercion was frequently brutal, entailing severe isolation, shaming, withholding information about labor, disallowing mothers to see their babies and coercing relinquishment signatures while women were drugged or misled about their rights. Often, women's names were changed or abbreviated, to bolster a sense that "the person who went away to deliver the baby was someone else" and that mothers would later forget about the babies they had given up. In taking oral histories from more than a hundred Baby Scoop Era mothers, Fessler found that not only was that untrue but most mothers suffered lifelong guilt and depression.
The cultural shift that had followed World War II switched the emphasis of adoption from finding homes for needy infants to finding children for childless couples. Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh, founder of the Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative, has compiled sociological studies from the era, including Clark Vincent's speculation in his 1961 book Unmarried Mothers that "if the demand for adoptable babies continues to exceed the supply...it is quite possible that, in the near future, unwed mothers will be 'punished' by having their children taken from them right after birth"--under the guise of protecting the "best interests of the child."
The Baby Scoop Era ended with Roe v. Wade, as abortion was legalized and single motherhood gained acceptance. The resultant fall in adoption rates was drastic, from 19.2 percent of white, unmarried pregnant women in 1972 to 1.7 percent in 1995 (and lower among women of color). Coinciding with this decline was the rise of the religious right and the founding of crisis pregnancy centers.
In 1984 Leslee Unruh, founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, established a CPC in South Dakota called the Alpha Center. The first center had opened in 1967, but in 1984 Unruh's CPC was still a relatively new idea. In 1987 the state attorney's office investigated complaints that Unruh had offered young women money to carry their pregnancies to term and then relinquish their babies for adoption.
"There were so many allegations about improper adoptions being made and how teenage girls were being pressured to give up their children," then-state attorney Tim Wilka told the Argus Leader, that the governor asked him to take the case. The Alpha Center pleaded no contest to five counts of unlicensed adoption and foster care practices; nineteen other charges were dropped, including four felonies. But where Unruh left off, many CPCs and antiabortion groups have taken up in her place.
It's logical that antiabortion organizations seeking to prevent abortions and promote traditional family structures would aggressively promote adoption, but this connection is often overlooked in the bipartisan support that adoption promotion enjoys as part of a common-ground truce in the abortion wars. In President Obama's speech at Notre Dame, he suggested that one solution to lowering abortion rates is "making adoption more available." And in a recent online debate, Slate columnist William Saletan and Beliefnet editor Steven Waldman proposed that unmarried women be offered a nominal cash payment to choose adoption over abortion as a compromise between prochoice and prolife convictions.
Compared with pre-Roe days, today women with unplanned pregnancies have access to far more information about their alternatives. However, Fessler says, they frequently encounter CPCs that pressure them to give the child to a family with better resources. "Part of the big picture for a young woman who's pregnant," she says, "is that there are people holding out their hand, but the price of admission is giving up your child. If you decide to keep your child, it's as if you're lost in the system, whereas people fight over you if you're ready to surrender. There's an organization motivated by a cause and profit. It's a pretty high price to pay: give away your first-born, and we'll take care of you for six months."
Christian adoption agencies court pregnant women through often unenforceable promises of open adoption and the option to choose the adoptive parents. California's Lifetime Adoption Foundation even offers birth mothers college scholarships. Additionally, maternity homes have made a comeback in recent years, with one network of 1,100 CPCs and homes, Heartbeat International, identifying at least 300 homes in the United States. Some advertise almost luxurious living facilities, though others, notes Jessica DelBalzo, founder of an anti-adoption group, Adoption: Legalized Lies, continue to "bill themselves as homes for wayward girls who need to be set straight."
Most homes are religiously affiliated, and almost all promote adoption. Many, like Christian Homes and Family Services (CHFS), reserve their beds for women planning adoption. Others keep only a fraction for women choosing to parent. Most homes seamlessly blend their advertised crisis pregnancy counseling with domestic and international adoption services, and oppose unmarried parenthood as against "God's plan for the family."
Religious women may be particularly susceptible to CPC coercion, argues Mari Gallion, a 39-year-old Alaska mother who founded the support group SinglePregnancy.com after a CPC unsuccessfully pressured her to relinquish her child ten years ago. Gallion, who has worked with nearly 3,000 women with unplanned pregnancies, calls CPCs "adoption rings" with a multistep agenda: evangelizing; discovering and exploiting women's insecurities about age, finances or parenting; then hard-selling adoption, portraying parenting as a selfish, immature choice. "The women who are easier to coerce in these situations are those who subscribe to conservative Christian views," says Gallion. "They'll come in and be told that, You've done wrong, but God will forgive you if you do the right thing."
Mirah Riben, vice president of communications for the birth mother group Origins-USA, as well as author of The Stork Market: America's Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry, says that many mothers struggle for decades with the fallout of "a brainwashing process" that persuades them to choose adoption and often deny for years--or until their adoptions become closed--that they were pressured into it. "I see a lot of justification among the young mothers. If their adoption is remaining open, they need to be compliant, good birth mothers and toe the line. They can't afford to be angry or bitter, because if they are, the door will close and they won't see the kid."
Such was the case for Karen Fetrow, a Pennsylvania mother who relinquished her son in 1994 through a Bethany office outside Harrisburg. Fetrow, a formerly pro-adoption evangelical, sought out a Christian agency when she became pregnant at 24. Although Fetrow was in a committed relationship with the father, now her husband of sixteen years, Bethany told her that women who sought to parent were on their own.
After Fetrow relinquished her son, she says she received no counseling from Bethany beyond one checkup phone call. Three months later, Bethany called to notify her that her legal paperwork was en route but that she shouldn't read it or attend court for the adoption finalization. "I didn't know that the adoption wasn't final and that I had three months to change my mind," says Fetrow. "The reality was that if I had gone, I might have changed my mind--and they didn't want me to."
Although for thirteen years Fetrow couldn't look at an infant without crying, she continued to support adoption and CPCs. But when she sought counseling--a staple of Bethany's advertised services--the director of her local office said he couldn't help. When her son turned 5, she stopped receiving updates from his adoptive parents, although she'd expected they would continue until he was 18. She asked Bethany about it, and the agency stalled for three years before explaining that the adoptive parents had only agreed to five years of updates. Fetrow complained on Bethany's online forum and was banned from the site.
Kris Faasse, director of adoption services at Bethany, said that while she was unaware of Fetrow's and Jordan's particular stories, their accounts are painful for her to hear. "The fact that this happens to any mom grieves me and would not be how we wanted to handle it." She added that only 25-40 percent of women who come to Bethany choose adoption, which, she said, "is so important, because we never want a woman to feel coerced into a plan."
Shortly after Fetrow was banned from Bethany's forum, the local Bethany office attempted to host a service at her church, "painting adoption as a Christian, prolife thing." At a friend's urging, Fetrow told her pastor about her experience, and after a meeting with the Bethany director--who called Fetrow angry and bitter--the pastor refused to let Bethany address the congregation. But Fetrow's pastor seems an exception.
In recent years, the antiabortion push for adoption has been taken up as a broader evangelical cause. In 2007 Focus on the Family hosted an Evangelical Orphan Care and Adoption Summit in Colorado Springs. Ryan Dobson, the adopted son of Focus founder James Dobson, has campaigned on behalf of CHFS and Unruh's Alpha Center. Last year 600 church and ministry leaders gathered in Florida to promote adoption through the Christian Alliance for Orphans. And a recent book in the idiosyncratic genre of prolife fiction, The River Nile, exalted a clinic that tricked abortion-seeking women into adoption instead.
Such enthusiasm for Christians to adopt en masse begins to seem like a demand in need of greater supply, and this is how critics of current practices describe it: as an industry that coercively separates willing biological parents from their offspring, artificially producing "orphans" for Christian parents to adopt, rather than helping birth parents care for wanted children.
In 1994 the Village Voice investigated several California CPCs in Care Net, the largest network of centers in the country, and found gross ethical violations at an affiliated adoption agency, where director Bonnie Jo Williams secured adoptions by warning pregnant women about parenthood's painfulness, pressuring them to sign papers under heavy medication and in one case detaining a woman in labor for four hours in a CPC.
There were nineteen lawsuits against CPCs between 1983 and 1996, but coercive practices persist. Joe Soll, a psychotherapist and adoption reform activist, says that CPCs "funnel people to adoption agencies who put them in maternity homes," where ambivalent mothers are subjected to moralistic and financial pressure: warned that if they don't give up their babies, they'll have to pay for their spot at the home, and given conflicted legal counsel from agency-retained lawyers. Watchdog group Crisis Pregnancy Center Watch described an Indiana woman misled into delaying an abortion past her state's legal window and subsequently pressured into adoption.
Literature from CPCs indicates their efforts to raise adoption rates. In 2000 the Family Research Council (FRC), the political arm of Focus on the Family, commissioned a study on the dearth of adoptable babies being produced by CPCs, "The Missing Piece: Adoption Counseling in Pregnancy Resource Centers," written by the Rev. Curtis Young, former director of Care Net.
Young based the report on the market research of consultant Charles Kenny, who questioned women with unplanned pregnancies and Christian CPC counselors to identify obstacles to higher adoption rates. Young argued that mothers' likelihood to choose adoption was based on their level of maturity and selflessness, with "more mature respondents...able to feel they are nurturing not only their children, but also, the adoptive parents," and "less mature women" disregarding the baby's needs by seeking to parent. He wrote that CPCs might persuade reluctant women by casting adoption as redemption for unwed mothers' "past failures" and a triumph over "selfishness, an 'evil' within themselves." Though Young noted that some CPCs were wary of looking like "baby sellers," he nonetheless urged close alliances with adoption agencies to ensure that the path to adoption was "as seamless and streamlined as possible."
Young was speaking to a larger audience than the FRC faithful. Care Net runs 1,160 CPCs nationwide and partners with Heartbeat International to host a national CPC hot line. Kenny is tied to the cause as a "Bronze"-level benefactor of the National Council for Adoption (NCFA), the most prominent adoption lobby group in the country, in the company of other benefactors like Bethany; Texas maternity home giant Gladney; the Good Shepherd Sisters, a Catholic order serving "young women of dissolute habits"; and the Mormon adoption agency LDS Family Services.
The federally funded NCFA has a large role in spreading teachings like these through its Infant Adoption Awareness Training Program, a Department of Health and Human Services initiative it helped pass in 2000 that has promoted adoption to nearly 18,000 CPC, school, state, health and correctional workers since 2002. Although the program stipulates "nondirective counseling for pregnant women," it was developed by a heavily pro-adoption pool of experts, including Kenny, and the Guttmacher Institute reports that trainees have complained about the program's coercive nature.
In 2007 the FRC and NCFA went beyond overlapping mandates to collaborate on the publication of another pamphlet, written by Kenny, "Birthmother, Goodmother: Her Story of Heroic Redemption," which targets "potential birthmothers" before pregnancy: a seeming contradiction of abstinence promotion, unless, as DelBalzo wryly notes, the abstinence movement intends to create "more babies available for adoption."
Even as women have gained better reproductive healthcare access, adoption laws have become less favorable for birth mothers, advancing the time after birth when a mother can relinquish--in some states now within twenty-four hours--and cutting the period to revoke consent drastically or completely. Adoption organizations have published comparative lists of state laws, almost as a catalog for prospective adopters seeking states that restrict birth parent rights. Among the worst is Utah.
Jo Anne Swanson, a court-appointed adoption intermediary, has studied a number of cases in which women have been lured out of their home states to give birth and surrender their children under Utah's lax laws--which require only two witnesses for relinquishments that have occurred in hotel rooms or parks--to avoid interstate child-placement regulations. Some women who changed their minds had agencies refuse them airfare home. And one Utah couple, Steve and Carolyn Mintz, told the Salt Lake Tribune that the director of their adoption agency flew into a rage at a mother in labor who'd backed out of their adoption, and the mother and her infant ended up in a Salt Lake City homeless shelter. Many complaints have been lodged by birth fathers who sought to parent their children but were disenfranchised by Utah's complicated system of registering paternity.
Utah isn't alone in attacking birth fathers' rights. From 2000 to 2001, a Midwestern grandmother named Ann Gregory (a pseudonym) fought doggedly for her son, a military enlistee, to retain parental rights over his and his girlfriend's child. When the girlfriend became pregnant, her conservative evangelical parents brought her to a local CPC affiliated with their megachurch. The CPC was located in the same office as an adoption agency: its "sister organization" of eighteen years. The CPC called Gregory's son, who was splitting his time between home and boot camp, pressuring him to "be supportive" of his girlfriend by signing adoption papers. The agency also called Gregory and her ex-husband, quoting Scripture "about how we're all adopted children of Jesus Christ."
What followed, Gregory says, was "six weeks of pure hell," as she felt her son and his girlfriend were "brainwashed" into adoption. She researched coercive adoption and retained a lawyer for her son. When the mother delivered, the attorney had Gregory notify a hospital social worker that parental rights were being contested, so the baby wouldn't be relinquished. Two days later, as the adoption agency was en route to take custody, Gregory filed an emergency restraining order. The matter had to be settled in court, where Gregory's son refused to consent to adoption. The legal bill for two weeks came to $9,000.
Both parents went to college, and though they are no longer together, Gregory praises their cooperation in jointly raising their son, now 8. But she is shaken by what it took to prevail. "You've got to get on it before the child is born, and you'd better have $10,000 sitting around. I can't even imagine how they treat those in a worse position than us. They say they want to help people in a crisis pregnancy, but really they want to help themselves to a baby."
"A lot of those moms from the '50s and '60s were really damaged by losing their child through the maternity homes," says Gregory. "People say those kinds of things don't happen anymore. But they do. It's just not a maternity home on every corner; it's a CPC."
About Kathryn Joyce
Kathryn Joyce is the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.
Before her 21-year-old daughter died in a sledding accident in early 2007, Pam Weiss had never logged on to Facebook. Back then, social-networking sites were used almost exclusively by the young. But she knew her daughter Amy Woolington, a UCLA student, had an account, so in her grief Weiss turned to Facebook to look for photos. She found what she was looking for and more. She was soon communicating with her daughter's many friends, sharing memories and even piecing together, through posts her daughter had written, a blueprint of things she had hoped to do. "It makes me feel good that Amy had a positive effect on so many people, and I wouldn't have had a clue if it hadn't been for Facebook," says Weiss.
And she wouldn't have had a clue if she had waited too long. She managed to copy most of her daughter's profile in the three months before Facebook took it down. (See the best social-networking applications.)
Like a growing number of grieving relatives, Weiss tapped into one of the most powerful troves of memories available: a loved one's online presence. As people spend more time at keyboards, there's less being stored away in dusty attics for family and friends to hang on to. Letters have become e‑mails. Diaries have morphed into blogs. Photo albums have turned virtual. The pieces of our lives that we put online can feel as eternal as the Internet itself, but what happens to our virtual identity after we die? (Read "Your Facebook Relationship Status: It's Complicated.")
It's a thorny question, and for now, the answer depends on which sites you use. Privacy is a major issue. So are company policies to delete inactive accounts.
Facebook amended its policy a few months after Woolington died. "We first realized we needed a protocol for deceased users after the Virginia Tech shooting, when students were looking for ways to remember and honor their classmates," says Facebook spokeswoman Elizabeth Linder. The company responded by creating a "memorial state" for profiles of deceased users, in which features such as status updates and group affiliations are removed. Only the user's confirmed friends can continue to view the profile and post comments on it.
If next of kin ask to have a profile taken down, Facebook will comply. It will not, however, hand over a user's password to let a family member access the account, which means private messages are kept just that.
Rival MySpace has a similar policy blocking account access but has fewer restrictions on profile-viewing. (This inspired an entrepreneur to create MyDeathSpace.com, which started out aggregating profiles of the deceased and has since morphed into a ghoulish tabloid.)
E-mail is more complicated. Would you want, say, your parents to be able to access your account so they could contact all your far-flung friends — whom you don't have in your address book because you don't have an address book — and tell them that you've passed on? Maybe. Would you want them to be able to read every message you've ever sent? Maybe not.
Yahoo! Mail's rule is to keep accounts private. "The commitment Yahoo! makes to every person who signs up for an account is to treat their online activities as confidential, even after their death," says spokesman Jason Khoury. Court orders sometimes overrule that. In 2005, relatives of a Marine killed in Iraq requested access to his e‑mail account so they could make a scrapbook. When a judge sided with the family, Yahoo! copied the messages to a CD instead of turning over the account's password. Hotmail now allows family members to order a CD as long as they provide proof that they have power of attorney and a death certificate. Gmail requires the same paperwork, plus a copy of an e‑mail the deceased sent to the petitioner. (See the top iPhone applications.)
If that sounds like a lot of trouble to put your loved ones through, several companies are eager to help you plan ahead — for a fee, of course. Legacy Locker, Asset Lock and Deathswitch are among the firms offering encrypted space for people to store their passwords and other information. "Digital legacy is at best misunderstood and at worst not thought about," says Legacy Locker founder Jeremy Toeman, who came up with the idea for his company midflight, when he was imagining what would happen to his many Web domains if the plane crashed. "I would be surprised if five years from now, it's not common for people to consider their digital assets alongside their wills."
His San Francisco-based site is looking to handle all the details of your online afterlife for $30 a year or a onetime fee of $300. To determine whether you have passed on, the firm will check with two "verifiers" (people you have designated to confirm your death) and examine a death certificate.
Deathswitch, which is based in Houston, has a different system for releasing the funeral instructions, love notes and "unspeakable secrets" it suggests you store with your passwords and account info. The company will regularly send you e‑mail prompts to verify that you're still alive, at a frequency of your choosing. (Once a day? Once a year?) After a series of unanswered prompts, it will assume you're dead and release your messages to intended recipients. One message is free; for more, the company charges members $19.95 a year.
From Health Care to Wars to Public Anxiety, Obama's Strength as a Leader Is Tested
By Scott Wilson Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, September 6, 2009
As President Obama's senior advisers gathered at Blair House at the end of July for a two-day review of their first six months in office, what was meant to be a breath-catching moment of reflection was colored by a sense of unease.
To a sleep-deprived White House staff, the achievements since taking office that chilly morning of Jan. 20 seemed self-evident. The agenda of necessity they had carried out to stabilize the economy was rapidly making room for Obama's agenda of choice: changing the way Americans receive health care, generate and consume energy, and learn in public school classrooms.
But opinion polls showed support for the president and his policies dipping sharply, and the disheartening numbers had shaken the confidence of some of Obama's staff. Vice President Biden addressed the anxiousness when the Cabinet and senior staff met in the State Dining Room in the White House residence the next morning.
"Did you really think this was going to be easy?" Biden said, according to one participant.
The slide has only quickened. Emerging from an angry August recess, Obama is weakened politically and faces growing concerns, particularly from within his own party, over his strength as a leader. Dozens of interviews this summer in six states -- from Maine to California -- have revealed a growing angst and disappointment over the administration's present course.
Democratic officials and foot soldiers, who have experienced the volatile public mood firsthand, are asking Obama to take a more assertive approach this fall. His senior advisers say he will, beginning with his Wednesday address to Congress on health care.
His challenge, however, is more fundamental. Obama built his successful candidacy and presidency around a leadership style that seeks consensus. But he is entering a period when consensus may not be possible on the issues most important to his administration and party. Whatever approach he takes is likely to upset some of his most ardent supporters, many of whom are unwilling to compromise at a time when Democrats control the White House and Congress.
"Until last week, he was still trying to play ball with the Republicans who said, 'We're going to bring you down,' " said Karen Davis, 42, a musician from Jersey City who raised funds for Obama last year. "Now I'm thinking, 'This isn't what I voted for.' "
Obama has brought change over his first seven months in office, often through direct government intervention, to areas as different as the conflict in Iraq and the American auto industry.
The economy is improving and bailed-out banks are paying back the money with interest. A smooth Supreme Court selection has brought the first Hispanic justice, Sonia Sotomayor, to the highest bench. America's standing in the world is improving, according to many polls, after Obama's widely broadcast address to the Muslim world, prohibition of torture in interrogation and decision to close the military brig at Guantanamo Bay.
But Obama's spending plans that will require $9 trillion in new borrowing over the next decade have alarmed conservatives in his own party, and he could not head off an investigation by his own Justice Department into the Bush administration's interrogation policies that he had made clear he did not want. Unemployment is still rising. His decision to expand the war in Afghanistan, deploying thousands of additional U.S. troops, has not come with a clear plan for how to leave.
Even though polls show fallen approval ratings, Obama remains more personally popular than his policies. His senior advisers say his leadership strength derives from the ability to remain calm in the maelstrom of 24-hour news cycles, a mark of his once-long-shot 2008 campaign. The anti-government anger that has risen from a thousand town hall meetings over the recess is now testing Obama's celebrated communication skills and a political style one confidante described as "unsentimental."
"I know there is great value associated in this town with the straight right jab and the occasional knee to the groin," said David Axelrod, a senior Obama adviser. "He'll throw the jab when he sees it, when he feels it's necessary. But he's not likely to throw the knee."
Economy Clouds View
The ferment beyond the Beltway and the challenge it poses to Obama's agenda this fall is apparent off the Orange Blossom Trail, a wide commercial strip that runs out of Orlando, past the check-cashing stores, self-storage centers and adult emporiums.
The Hunter's Creek development is a mix of 8,700 homes and condominiums, a middle-class sanctuary with neighborhoods named Falcon Pointe and Osprey Links. Like much of Central Florida, it has burst open along with the housing bubble. Foreclosure filings are pending against 1,000 properties there.
On a recent evening, Rep. Alan Grayson, a freshman Democrat, arrived for a housing forum, which like many of his recent public events involved a police presence. A Harvard-educated lawyer, Grayson offered grim if unsurprising figures in a region where even Disney has laid off hundreds of workers this year.
"We all know that what we need is a healthy economy," Grayson told them. "And it's in times like these that we discover what kind of people we are."
In his summer travels, Obama has argued that the stimulus program's $787 billion mix of spending and tax cuts, the bank bailouts, and the decision to prop up General Motors and Chrysler through bankruptcy have nudged the economy toward recovery.
But the view from the Hunter's Creek Community Center, where 150 of Grayson's constituents had assembled to hear how the government intended to help them keep their homes, was shaded by fear over the president's ventures into the private sector and other planned reforms.
"A large portion of our problem right now is the result of our own fault," John Kulifay, a stout, balding retired engineer, said when called on to speak. "The other problem is the government itself. Please keep your fingers out of this. Let us fix it."
Applause erupted, along with the cry, "Stop the redistribution!"
The anxiety stretches from New England to the Pacific Ocean, judging by recent visits, and is rooted in the measures Obama has implemented to shore up the economy.
A senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly, said that "there were so many things we had to do, and those are the things that feed into the skepticism that government is taking over everything or can't get it right."
"These were things we had no interest in doing," the official said. "That's the irony."
Political Capital
Activist presidents always have spent political capital pursuing their goals, and Obama has proved the same. As he told volunteers at a health-care rally last month, "The easiest thing to do as a politician is to do nothing."
Before Obama's inauguration, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, set out the administration's goals for the year.
Major reform targets, particularly in the health care and energy sectors, would not be staged one after the other, as in past administrations, but pursued simultaneously at a time when the private sector had been battered by the financial crisis.
Emanuel's logic was a warrior's -- that is, the side with the initiative succeeds. Since then, the administration has pushed through a dozen pieces of legislation with little obvious public resistance, including measures to expand health insurance for children, ensure pay equity, regulate tobacco and protect consumers from credit card companies.
But the strategy will likely cost Obama an energy reform bill this year, as the health-care debate drags on past the provisional deadlines the administration had set.
"From a timing point of view, we just don't know if it's possible," another senior administration official said on condition of anonymity in order to describe an internal assessment.
The breadth of Obama's reform plans, coming after the expensive and interventionist economic rescue measures, is also riling conservatives in places like Lebanon, Pa.
"I don't believe this is just about health care," Katy Abram, a stay-at-home mom, told Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) at a recent town hall forum there. "This is about the systematic dismantling of this country."
As the audience cheered, Abrams, who is 35, continued, "I've never been interested in politics. You have awakened the sleeping giant."
Smaller than it was a decade ago, the Republican Party has shed many moderates, leaving few who are willing to work even with a Democratic president who has promised less partisan governing.
"At the root of his difficulties is a misperception on his part of the root cause of the problem," said Obama critic Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University professor and presidential scholar. "He sees the problem as Washington. Fine. But the basic cause is the evolution of the Republican Party."
Like Lyndon B. Johnson, Obama is pursuing a broad reform agenda with large Democratic majorities in Congress.
But Wilentz said it is harder for Obama to work across party lines without the collection of moderate Republican senators present in Johnson's time. The need for him to do so has been made more urgent by the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and the filibuster-proof majority he represented.
"You can have an out-of-touch Republican Party, but in Washington that does great damage to reform efforts," Wilentz said. "He has done what he can to put the country on a new track, and in doing so he can't help but disappoint some of his supporters. But it's not a fan club."
Extreme Street Theater
At a late August town hall forum in Spring Valley, Calif., Robert Billburg, a 49-year-old Air Force veteran and Red Cross worker, watched a scene familiar to YouTube fans this summer.
Police conducted body searches at the gymnasium door. Signs depicted Obama as the Joker; others called him a Nazi. Liberal demonstrators dressed as cartoon-version fat cats in tuxedos and evening gowns held up signs reading, "Save health care, by a Congressman." The far edges of America's political spectrum were acting out street theater.
"I think the best description of him is a centrist technocrat," Billburg said of Obama, whom he supported. "So those on the extremes are going to be very disappointed."
Increasingly, they are.
During the campaign, Obama pledged to run an administration less concerned by partisanship than by ensuring effective government.
But from his first weeks in office, as his administration worked to secure a stimulus bill the president believed was essential to preventing a broader economic collapse, winning Republican support has been hard. Even the pursuit of it is now viewed by his Democratic base as a sign of weakness.
Only three Republican senators voted for the stimulus measure, written in large part by Congressional leaders but pushed through in the final hours by the White House. One of them -- Specter -- is now a Democrat. Not a single House Republican voted for it.
At the time, several senior administration officials said the amount of Republican support for a White House initiative would no longer be a measure of its success.
Yet Obama has allowed weeks of bipartisan Senate negotiations to take place over health-care legislation, and he has signaled a willingness to abandon a government-run insurance option to secure bipartisan support.
Many of Obama's senior advisers were schooled in Washington politics at least in part on Capitol Hill, including Emanuel, a former House member and pragmatist like the president who thinks allowing Congress to take the lead on legislation is generally the best way to ensure its passage.
But to Democrats like Grayson, who is defending Obama's agenda before sometimes unruly audiences, the president should be more forceful in the face of mounting opposition.
At his recent appearance at the Tiger Bay Club, Grayson told the lunchtime audience of business leaders that "there is a fight in Congress right now, not between Republican and Democrats, but between those who want to help and those who say, 'Thank God we're not helping.' "
Later, in an interview, Grayson said his advice for the president based on his experiences this recess is "to not only combat the lies, but to combat the liars."
"He must recognize that he has reached out his hand to the Republican leadership and they have spat on it," he said.
Holding Onto 'No Drama'
In addressing volunteers from Organizing for America last month, Obama warned those who had been central to the field operation of his grass-roots campaign that "everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up" in August and September.
It was meant as a warning not to believe the Beltway analysis that Obama, a skilled communicator and player of the long game, was losing control of his message and his broader agenda.
Governing requires the ability to appeal to Congress and the electorate simultaneously, and Obama is attempting to do that with the patience and unflappability that were the hallmarks of his "no drama" campaign.
To Obama and his senior staff, that means ignoring the "cable chatter," the president's catch-all term for media punditry and Hill partisanship, and the Washington ethic of winning in real time.
But a traditionally fractious Democratic Party is also finding that it is easier to remain united against an unpopular Republican administration, as it did during the Bush years, than it is to govern. And Obama stands at its head.
"There is something that has grown into the Democratic DNA over the last 30 years that makes our first reaction fear," said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House deputy communications director. "And we can't keep our fear to ourselves."
Beyond the Beltway, many Democrats say they would be less afraid if Obama appeared less fearful himself, including on issues such as race and the legacy of torture that he has eloquently addressed in the past. In office, Obama has tended to view those subjects largely as distractions from his reform ambitions.
Rickey R. Hendon, a Democratic state senator in Illinois who served with Obama in the legislature there, said the president has always been "conciliatory, a consensus seeker" and that "hasn't changed in Washington, much to his detriment, I believe."
Obama's tentative leadership on race, as the nation's first African American president, has disappointed Hendon, who is also African American.
Even during the controversy over the arrest of the African American Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., which prompted Obama's "beer summit" to smooth hurt feelings, Hendon said the president "did his best to dodge it, to duck and dive."
"He probably does it just to avoid anything that could be racially charged," he said. "I disagree with it, but that's been his mode of operation. Why change now?"
Axelrod said the White House has been receiving advice, much of it unsolicited, to push back harder against the opposition, particularly as the health-care debate heads into the fall legislative session. He said the president intends to do so, but on his own terms.
"He's not going to get punked or pushed around," Axelrod said. "On the other hand, I don't think he's going to fill his day with gratuitous partisan back-and-forth, because it isn't productive and it's not healthy."
Polling director Jon Cohen and staff writers Kari Lydersen, Alec MacGillis, Keith Richburg, Philip Rucker and Karl Vick contributed to this report.
Wayang Golek is proclaimed a masterpiece, but what is its future?
Sarah Anaïs Andrieu
The puppeteer Dadan Sunandar Sunarya performing the story Cepot Kembar
As often happens in West Java during November, rain had been falling all day, so Bandung’s central public space, known as the Gasibu, was half-flooded. A large temporary stage had been erected, in front of which stood a large tent sheltering about two hundred chairs. Forty chairs were prepared with white covers for use by government officials, but only about ten were present. Only a few spectators sat behind them. TV and radio crews busied themselves trying to protect their equipment from the rain.
Dawala (left) and Cepot (right). Cepot is the most popular character amongst Sundanese audiences
A performance of wayang golek, the traditional rod puppet theatre from West Java, was scheduled to take place for the entire night. The troupe was already on stage waiting patiently behind their gamelan instruments. The show should have already started, and a crowd should have already gathered around the stage as customarily happens, but very few people had dared to brave the rain and the cold on this night. The improvised market that always appears besides wayang golek performances was barely visible, with only a few sellers offering food and snacks from the shelter of huge umbrellas.
At last, the show started at around half past nine with speeches reminding the audience of the purpose of the performance, namely the protection of the national cultural heritage, of which wayang golek is officially a part. After the audience was reminded too that the event had been sponsored by the National Department of Culture and Tourism and its provincial subdivision in West Java, the committee finally gave a sign to the puppeteer, or dalang, that he could start performing the story entitled Cepot’s Twin (Cepot Kembar).
But soon after the first scene, the dalang stopped and introduced three famous Sundanese comedians who launched into an interactive dialogue with the audience. Spectators asked questions via SMS, which were relayed by the comedians to specialists from cultural and governmental institutions to be answered. After an hour of jokes and questions, the humourists retired from the stage and the wayang performance continued. The dalang recommenced his task of guiding the well-known characters through diverse intrigues and adventures. The rain had stopped, but there were still only a few spectators. Even fewer stayed until the performance ended at three o’clock in the morning.
The structure of the performance, something usually subject to quite strict convention, was upset by the intervention of the humourists just after the story commenced
What happened that night raises many questions about contemporary wayang golek. Government officials left the performance – if they came at all – long before its end. Much more seriously, the structure of the performance, something usually subject to quite strict convention, was upset by the intervention of humourists just after the story commenced. Such a thing could not happen in performances sponsored by rural communities or households. Moreover, the radio and TV broadcasts stopped after the comedians had withdrawn from the stage, even though the wayang performance would continue for a further three hours. For the broadcasters, the entire performance was too long and convoluted.
Local heritage, global value
There is some irony in the rather shabby treatment granted to the performers on this occasion, for it was not long ago that wayang was given its own space on the world’s cultural stage. In 2003, UNESCO proclaimed ‘Wayang Indonesia’ as a ‘Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’. Indonesia’s cultural bureaucrats responded to this recognition: the performers at the Gasibu were advised by the organisers that the performance was being held to honour Indonesia’s commitment to the preservation of humanity’s cultural heritage. But the events of the evening indicated that wayang golek, despite its global value, was encountering difficulties negotiating its status in contemporary West Java and Indonesia.
A patron inserts money in Cepot’s clothing
Wayang golek is still considered an essential social and political media, as well as a mark of Sundanese identity within the national context. It also forms the basis for proud family heritages, as artists typically learn their puppetry skills directly from individual teachers who are often their own fathers. The UNESCO proclamation gave these performers hope of a worldwide audience, and since then, they have tried to have some say in the destiny of wayang golek. However, they feel it loses out on a national stage dominated by the culture of Central Java. The government, on the other hand, sees wayang golek as not only a distinctive regional genre, but also as something shared by the national Indonesian community. Since Indonesian independence in 1945, national cultural policy has attempted to gather the most important, aesthetic and spectacular traditions of each region as part of a unifying Indonesian culture. These icons are then disseminated throughout the country by the mass media and educational institutions as distinctive hallmarks of the regions – a practice that freezes regional culture and contributes to its standardisation. The UNESCO Proclamation enhances this process: after it was made, the government proposed a national action plan that included the creation of wayang schools, which would dispense standard teaching about wayang with adjustments for each regional ‘variant’.
Only bait
The Bandung performance illustrates an important paradox. On one hand, the government’s emphasis on heritage legitimises and supports the continued practice of wayang golek. But, on the other hand, it turns the puppet performances into a (profitable) museum exhibit, standardising them and preventing them from evolving.
Very few of the white chairs prepared for government officials were filled
On that November night, the wayang were simply bait, used to attract the audience’s interest, then all too quickly relegated to the background as ethnic scenery for the transmission of other messages. In the process, this event intended to support and safeguard traditional cultural heritage was turned into a demonstration of the government’s lack of confidence in wayang golek. ii
Sarah Anaïs Andrieu (sarahanais@gmail.com) is a PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology and Ethnology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris where she is writing her doctoral dissertation about the political anthropology of the Sundanese wayang golek and its process of patrimonialisation.
Partial view of charred debris of Roger Buttin Social and Sports Center owned by French oil company Total, set ablaze in Port Gentil, 05 Sep 2009
Security forces in Gabon continued to clash with opposition demonstrators following the announcement that the son of the country's long-time ruler has been elected president. The French oil firm Total has evacuated foreign workers from Port Gentil, at the center of the violence.
Interior Minister Jean-Francois Ndongou told French state radio that two people killed overnight in Port Gentil were looters shot by a home owner.
Rioters in Port Gentil burned the French consulate and looted nearby shops Thursday following the announcement that former defense minister Ali Ben Bongo won last Sunday's presidential election.
That violence brought an overnight curfew to Port Gentil which was repeated Friday and will continue, Ndongou says, "as long as necessary if calm does not prevail."
Prisoners in Port Gentil were broken out of jail and demonstrators attacked facilities of the French oil firm Total. Expatriate staff and their families have now been evacuated to the capital, Libreville, where Total says they will remain until it is safe to return to Port Gentil.
The French Foreign Ministry says French nationals elsewhere in Gabon should stay in their homes.
Ali Bongo greets supporters in Libreville after being declared winner of bitter presidential election in Gabon, 03 Sep 2009
Opposition demonstrators are targeting French concerns because of the long relationship between French leaders and the 42-year-rule of Gabonese PresidentOmar Bongo. His death in June raised expectations of change in Gabon. The election of his son in a vote that opposition candidates says was unfair has renewed allegations that Paris backed Ali Ben Bongo's candidacy.
The French Foreign Ministry says it was not involved in the campaign. It says Sunday's vote took place under "acceptable conditions" and losing candidates who want to contest the result should do so in Gabon's constitutional court.
Opposition leaders do intend to challenge a result that gave Bongo 42 percent of the vote. The electoral commission says former interior minister Andre Mba Obame and opposition leader Pierre Mamboundou each received about 25 percent.
Obame says the results are an "electoral coup." Mamboundou's party is calling on its supports to "resist" the outcome. Politicians allied with Mamboundou say he has gone into hiding after he was injured when police tear-gassed demonstrators following the results.
The African Union is calling on Gabonese to show "great restraint" and abstain from acts that might compromise peace and security.
PANIPAT, India -- Amir Jahan can spin thick, white thread into magnificent cloth, but the 46-year-old weaver has been unable to unravel her health plan to pay for stomach surgery.
Under a health-insurance program introduced a few years ago, the Indian government has provided health-insurance coverage for the country's hand-loom weavers, a group of 6.5 million workers, 60% of them female, who are mostly illiterate and invariably poor. Yet holding an insurance card hasn't helped Ms. Jahan, who says the coverage only pays for minor ailments and not for major problems, such as the removal of a stomach tumor.
Amir Jahan spins thick white thread into magnificent cloth. She puts in 12 hours of work every day to earn about $15 a month.
"The health care is all a sham," Ms. Jahan says angrily. "I was refused treatment on grounds of huge expense. I won't ever go to be humiliated again."
Ms. Jahan's health-care issues represent the problems that come with trying to provide insurance to India's poor. Access to quality care remains a distant dream for many in this country of 1.1 billion.
Last year, the Indian government launched the National Health Insurance Program on promised health coverage of $700 per person for families earning less than $100 a year.
Holders of health cards have to register in their home states to access benefits, thereby precluding a large population of migrant laborers. Those who can get past the complex state-identification and qualification process often can't cope with hospital bureaucracies.
One of the biggest problems: Getting the impoverished weavers to pay $1 for the card that provides free access to health care for one year. Many weavers feel the investment in the card is a waste of valuable household income.
Other plans aimed at farmers, construction workers and other low-income groups have been dogged by problems.
In India, the hand-loom industry is the second-largest segment in the economy, after agriculture. The Handloom Weavers Health Insurance Program was backed by a private insurance company, ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company Ltd., a joint venture of India's ICICI Bank Ltd. and Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. of Canada.
An initial payment of $1 entitles a family of four to coverage totaling 15,000 rupees, or about $300 -- but no more than $150 of that can be for any one family member. Beneficiaries receive coverage at designated hospitals and clinics, or are reimbursed for treatment at centers not on the list -- after upfront payments that can be difficult for weavers to afford.
According to insurance-company officials, the program has been implemented in 26 states across India, and covers 1.9 million weaver families. In the Lalahar Memorial Prem Private Hospital, here in Panipat, nearly 70 weavers line up each day for health services under the plan.
Many weavers work six days a week in factories, under poor conditions and with few benefits. Others, like Ms. Jahan, work from home, making clothing, rugs and other woven items for a variety of companies.
Ms. Jahan started working at the age of eight. Today, she says she works 12 hours, seven days a week, to earn about $15 a month. That isn't enough to support her seven kids, and the insurance card can only cover four family members.
Ms. Jahan's stomach surgery was $200, but she was told she could only use $150 from the card because of the spending cap for each family member. The remaining $50 had to be paid from her own pocket. She continues to work with the untreated stomach tumor.
The ICICI doesn't deny treatment to any individual, but "the weavers think it is an ATM card and want to get it cashed to the maximum limit," said ICICI manager Milan Maheshwari, based in New Delhi. "The government has fixed a cap, so that the benefits … can be extended to the entire family."
One of the program's goals was to cut out government intermediaries. In a past program, the Indian government was running a health package for the weavers that involved complicated payment procedures that deterred many participants, according to B.K. Sinha, development commissioner of hand-looms at the Ministry of Textiles in New Delhi.
The new program has won support among those who have been able to get long-neglected medical problems addressed. Working 12 hours a day on the loom from her dimly lit house, Janmati, who uses one name, suffered from blurred vision before she had eye surgery for $80 through the health card.
"Initially the hospital authorities hesitated, but finally agreed," says Janmati. "Thanks to the card, I got my vision back."
But broad participation hasn't panned out. The government acknowledged that only 40% of weavers are covered under the health program.
Insufficient funds -- 1.2 billion rupees ($25 million) preclude covering more, even if the weavers are willing. Nevertheless, "We intend to cover every handloom weaver in the country in the next two years," Mr. Sinha says.
On a simmering afternoon in Panipat, outside India's capital of New Delhi, a group of irate weavers surrounded an insurance agent to complain about the health-insurance scheme.
Mohammad Ali, 25, said he was denied treatment at one of the private hospitals in Panipat and ended up paying from his own pocket. Another man, Mohammad Irshad, grumbled that he couldn't get his wife covered under the same card because he couldn't provide proper identification for her. "Getting the insurance card is tedious," he says.
PAKA LUE SONG, Thailand — The soldiers patrolling this hamlet racked by insurgent violence measure their progress modestly: two years ago, when villagers saw them coming, they closed their shutters. Now, they say, most residents peer out of their wood-frame houses and offer strained smiles.
“The local people have started to open their hearts,” said Capt. Niran Chaisalih, the leader of a government paramilitary force garrisoned at the village school.
Paka Lue Song, only a 15-minute drive from the provincial capital, Pattani, is a starting point for Thailand’s influx of troops into the country’s troubled southern provinces, where ethnic Malay Muslims are battling for autonomy from Thailand’s Buddhist majority.
The number of people in security forces, including the army, the police and militias, in the region has doubled over the past two years to about 60,000, said Srisompob Jitpiromsri, a leading expert on the insurgency and the associate dean at Prince of Songkla University in Pattani.
The huge increase in security forces initially helped reduce the violence as well as the death toll, which fell by 40 percent last year. But the number of killings has risen in recent months. More than 330 people have been killed so far this year, compared with 285 in the same period last year. Among the dead are civilians — including many Malays — soldiers and insurgents.
There have been so many killings in the three southern provinces — about 3,500 since 2004 — that the government began distributing a glossy brochure last year guiding victims’ families through the process of applying for government compensation.
Although the insurgency has been active for decades in the south, the current phase is considered particularly dangerous because the militants appear to have more of an Islamist agenda and because apparently sectarian attacks have strained the mutual tolerance between Buddhists and Muslims. It also comes at a time of deep political turmoil and social unease in Thailand that has hobbled several governments in the last three years and last year drove away many of the tourists who help sustain the country’s economy.
The surge in troops is palpable across the three southern provinces, only a few hours’ drive from Thailand’s main tourist beaches. There is now the equivalent of one soldier or police officer for every seven households. Soldiers in Humvees patrol the main roads, and police and military checkpoints screen motorists every few miles.
Sa-nguan Indrarak, the president of a federation of schoolteachers in the south, questions whether the army’s presence has been worth the $3.2 billion that the government has spent in the south over the past five years. (Teachers, obvious symbols of the Thai state, have been prime targets in the insurgency, with 95 killed since 2004.) Troops should leave and the government should train local security forces, who have a better understanding of the terrain, Mr. Sa-nguan argues.
Soldiers are resented in part because they behave inappropriately around both mosques and Buddhist temples, drinking, dancing and flirting, he said. But there have also been reports of human rights abuses; in January, Amnesty International published a report saying security forces “systemically engage in torture” — including using electric shocks — in their attempts to gather information and to force communities into withholding or withdrawing support for the rebels.
The insurgency has been distinct from other rebel movements in the region because the perpetrators remain shadowy, ill-defined groups that do not claim responsibility for the violence. Experts say they believe that the aims of the groups, among them the Pattani Islamic Mujahedeen Movement and the National Revolution Front-Coordinate, are to drive Buddhists from the area, discredit the government and put into place strict Islamic laws.
Although they say they believe that some financing for the groups comes from abroad, several counterterrorism experts in Thailand and elsewhere discount significant connections with other militant movements, like Al Qaeda and the Indonesian group Jemaah Islamiyah. The movement here, they say, appears to involve a localized struggle over territory and control overlaid with historical resentment over the domination of the Thai state.
Malay Muslims make up about 80 percent of the 1.7 million people living in Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala Provinces.
The ouster of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a military coup in 2006 raised hopes that the generals who took over, including several senior Muslim officials, would be more conciliatory than Mr. Thaksin, who had blamed bandits for the violence and oversaw a hard-line policy toward the area. But despite an unprecedented apology for Mr. Thaksin’s iron-fisted policies by a military-installed prime minister, the insurgency has ground on.
In Paka Lue Song, a village considered dangerous enough that local journalists refuse to enter it, army medics are trying to win over villagers by giving them free medical treatment. As soldiers prepared to walk through the village on a recent day, one raised the antenna of a radio to hear a dispatcher issue a bulletin: a police officer had been ambushed in Yala Province.
The soldiers proceeded on their mission, handing out vitamin C to children.
Second Lt. Pongpayap Petwisai, a 27-year-old army doctor, walked through the village prescribing medication for eye infections, dispensing balms for aching muscles and monitoring blood pressure.
“What we are trying to do is get people on our side,” said Dr. Pongpayap, who was partly inspired to become a doctor by the 1998 film “Saving Private Ryan.”
More recently, the government has also stepped up its program of providing weapons to local militias and “village guards,” especially in Buddhist enclaves. These volunteers now number about 71,000, according to Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, who monitors the insurgency for the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that aims to prevent deadly conflicts.
She said she feared that the program could backfire, leading to vigilante killings if the weapons fell into the wrong hands.
Those who cooperate with the military are already at risk of being attacked by insurgents.
In Paka Lue Song, Dr. Pongpayap examined the injured hand of Gade Yusoh, a 57-year-old rubber tapper who soldiers said had been helpful to them.
Gunmen suspected of being insurgents fired into Mr. Gade’s house one evening three months ago while he was watching television. “I’m not afraid,” he said. His nervous laugh suggested otherwise.
It remains unclear if the programs aimed at winning the hearts and minds of villagers — a standard counterinsurgency practice — are working. When this reporter toured a neighboring village without the army medical team, local officials heaped scorn on the government initiative.
“They just want a photo opportunity,” said one local government official, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution by the army. Other criticism has been more public. Outside a village Dr. Pongpayap visited, graffiti appeared the day after.
“Don’t come back here,” it said. “If you shoot one of us, we will shoot two of you.”
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