It’s one thing to deface websites and release email addys, but they actually intercepted a private meeting between NATO country intelligence agencies. I’m bloody impressed.

The literal shoving of things into actual places is much more FBI/CIA than Anonymous.

the beginning..when they quickly discuss cheese…

the Griswalds (Griswolds?) are in the U.K…in a hotel..and the only thing on t.v. are docu’s about cheese.

John Cleese should always be the keynote speaker at every international intelligence conference.

- http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/meetings_considered_harmful.php
- http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

But it’s not just that they’re disruptive (which is bad enough in itself). Most people can’t “meet” properly. There’s a fine (but simple) methodology behind it which is firstly based on these observations:

1) The more people you get into a meeting, the more expensive it gets. Say 10 people in a 2-hour meeting, costs you about 1000$ in salary directly, and another 2000-5000$ in disruption of said makers.
2) The longer a meeting takes the more expensive it is.
3) The more people are in a meeting, the harder it is to talk trough anything, which leads to either just two people talking, and the others being annoyed to have to be there, or more people talking, and everybody annoyed at not getting anything done.

So there’s a simple plan to solve this issues:
1) If you can avoid doing a meeting, don’t do a meeting.
2) If you have to make a meeting, only do it with as few people as possible.
3) Keep the meeting as short as possible.
4) Prepare an agenda for the meeting and send it to the participants beforehand.
5) Keep the agenda short.
6) Don’t do many meetings
7) Don’t missuse a meeting for socializing, this debases any attempt at getting anything done.

So looking back at 15 years of working in IT, I don’t think I’ve had a single meeting/telephone conference that would’ve done it right. In fact, it’s really hard to do right. So if you can’t do meetings right, you just shouldn’t do meetings at all.

That telephone conference call of the FBI is a perfect example of how not to do it. Btw. you’ll be glad to know that you (the taxpayer) are wasting money to get your civic servants to spend time in the verbal equivalent of a 2 hour coffee break.

favorite quote:
MI-5 agent: “steam… some sort of gaming site”

So There

Meetings, the unproductive alternative to working. Telephone conferences, the even more unproductive alternative to meetings.

(referring to earlier post -FBI tells net cafe owners that TOR users might be terrorists)