Wired State

Why #ransackgate Was Inevitable and Why AirBnB and GetAround Will Fail

While this meme of the "Internet people" was popularized by Anonymous with regard to their hacking and their protests in the RL, it might as well be the slogan of Internet services that put you together with strangers to use your property, and tell you everything will be fine.

Silicon Valley right now is embroiled in a scandal that could be as far-reaching at Murdoch's tabloid-empire hacking scandal.

A woman who used the service AirBnB -- an Internet company valued at one time at $1 billion -- which links you up with people who want to rent your room through an online social media service, had her home ransacked, all her valuables robbed and had her identity stolen by users of the AirBnB service.

Reportedly, when she tried to complain she was ignored and then told to shut up. The company apparently tried to suppress her complaint, so she blogged it and it went viral as complaints against high-profile high-funded Silicon Valley start-ups often do (look at the beating that Groupon is taking everywhere, starting at TechCrunch). Then she blogged some more after the tech press took it up, correcting some of their spin. Appalling, she wrote of their co-founder's real concerns -- his next round:

On this same day, I received a personal call from one of the co-founders of Airbnb. We had a lengthy conversation, in which he indicated having knowledge of the (previously mentioned) person who had been apprehended by the police, but that he could not discuss the details or these previous cases with me, as the investigation was ongoing. He then addressed his concerns about my blog post, and the potentially negative impact it could have on his company’s growth and current round of funding. During this call and in messages thereafter, he requested that I shut down the blog altogether or limit its access, and a few weeks later, suggested that I update the blog with a “twist" of good news so as to “complete[s] the story.

In his statement, the CEO Brian Chesky seemed to compound the injury with insult by implying, again, that his company had no responsibility, but only users in a "trust system" could do this with "transparency" (i.e. presumably by ratings -- although as the hapless renter found out, she didn't have any of the personal details of her tenants until after she had left town -- it was delivered at the last minute.)

We’ve created a marketplace built on trust, transparency and authenticity within our community, and we hold the safety of our community members as our highest priority. We will continue to work with our users to stamp out those who would put that community at risk in any way. The vast majority of our community members genuinely respect and protect each other, but we urge users to be careful and discerning with each other and to hold others accountable through reviews, flagging and our customer service channel. Our hearts go out to our host and we will continue to work with her and with the authorities to make this right.

See, the Internet holds your property and the transaction -- the company takes no responsibility for it whatsoever, and urges you basically to, um, file an abuse report and then click "unlike" on somebody's profile.

I asked a question of two of the start-ups at TechCrunch Disrupt: how are you handling the issue of governance, and the problem of customer complaints? You can see their presentation here.

The first company founder I asked David Karp from Tumblr seemed puzzled. Governance? He handed it off to his best friend to do. Er, *one* friend. One guy? On a service with millions of users? He seemed uninterested. He just seemed like a kid.

The second company, Kevin Systrom from Instagram immediately said, "The community manager is the first person I hired". It's a terribly vital role, it's the most important in the business. He explained that you have a problem when lots of your customers don't like the photos of some of your other customers, and you have to find a way to address that challenge. None of this "safe harbour, don't go on the Internet if you don't like looking at porn," sort of stuff from this guy, but a plan for a response and a system.

The Lindens, who have managed an extremely volatile and talkative and neuralgic customer base for 7 years now, know how to do customer relations and "community management". They have sometimes learned from mistakes but not always.

I have cautioned about the downside of "the Internet of things" because of its inherent collectivization philosophy -- it enables coded, interactive objects to become not really your property, but the property of the coders and the Internet services. We already see that with our digital content and our digital lives. Now it is extending to things in the real world, and perhaps some day our bodies as well.

I have a visceral dislike to the basic business notion of both AirBnB, which is wildly popular and was profitable and beloved by investors in Silicon Valley until now, and Getaround, the similar sort of start-up featured at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Why? Because it collectivizes your property.  That it does this with your consent isn't relevant because it doesn't really serve as a good steward. The developers basically look out at the vast wasteland of people's unused cars and unused apartments and views them as "theirs" to "monetarize".  To be sure, the people with this surplus get paid, and it seems like a good enough incentive to give up their privacy and to provide access to their property to strangers.

But while readers will whine that I am raising the specter of communism again, the reality is, you do become pressed into service in a commune when you sign up with these services. It's a commune that pays better than a Soviet commune -- perhaps that's the boon the Internet brings us, as Kevin Kelly has explained, communism that actually works better with its distributive model.

But whenever property is treated as not really something to be respected because it belongs to an owner, but is borrowed or used or exploited by some other meta-system without the rule of law (like Soviet communism), it leads to devaluation of property and contempt. Every worker then steals from his factory or his collective farm and tries to get whatever he can out of the impoverished system; so plundered, these entities then can't sustain themselves.

So not surprisingly, thieves who don't value your property and just want to expropriate it creep into this system readily. In fact, even without the communist overarching explanations I've provided here, for anyone just looking at this system as a capitalist service, it has a big vulnerability in it, which is people who are criminals can exploit it or accidents can happen.

And sure enough they finally did in AirBnB, as a woman had her apartment ransacked, her stuff stolen, and her identity taken.

Now what happened next was also a function of Silicon Valley culture.  While initially handling her complaint after a 14-hour delay, after she published her blog, she was not dealt with, her complaint went unheard, the management didn't talk to her, and they tried to suppress her negative blog. To be sure, they then came round and showered her with offers to pay for new stuff, but a lot of damage was done by then.

AirBnB says they doubled their customer service only after this incident -- not earlier when their billion might have gone to better use -- in their greed. Customer service was put last -- until their very business was at stake.

The police made an arrest (although it's not certain that it's the ransacking culprit), but down deep, AirBnB believed that it really wasn't their responsibility to get involved with the *user* of their online service; their only responsibility was to cooperate with *the police* in prosecuting an *exploiter* of their service. SO typical of all these platforms -- file an abuse report on a griefer, have the griefer perhaps ignored or maybe dealt with, but never hear how he was handled or whether it was permanent, and never be compensated or have a means of seeking compensation -- like real life. That is the heart of the online experience -- no torts and companies eager to claim safe harbours and exemption of responsibility. Blame the users for not sufficiently watching *each other* on myriad social media gadgets -- don't blame the lack of company customer service.

The blogger explained that for her $20 sign-up fee, she thought she'd get some basic vetting -- more than she'd get from a $0 cost Craigslist add. But she didn't -- because the company expects you to check out your own customers -- even as it takes a fee for connecting you to them. This can't work.

Michael Arrington, an aggressive investigative journalist when it comes to certain topics, went after this like a bulldog. And interestingly, despite TechCrunch's cheerleading for AirBnB since its inception, and despite his love of Y Combinator and Paul Graham, the tech tycoon who bankrolls this, he criticized these people over this story and Graham's response -- for reasons not entirely clear to me, and I suspect are not only about altruism, he was able to overcome the Silicon Valley tribal bonds here. And he was, of course, then aggressively attacked right back by his own kind.

Robert Scoble put on Google+ a bunch of suggestions for companies that find themselves in this sort of major PR disaster. Basically, the boil down to a stance that inherently is rejected by Silicon Valley, which is "the customer is always right." And he added that only one person should handle the press, preferably the CEO, and anyone else who steps out of line and starts talking to the press should be fired (!). Well, that was the formula they used over the petulant and unstable Ina Centaur, who blamed Linden Lab for the failure of her Shakespearean Global Theater when the bills came due and she didn't have tier -- and Rod Humble, the CEO, took it at face value and got the problem fixed, changing the way her billing was falling due to monthly instead of yearly as the educational discount sims (discontinued) used to do. She preferred to posture and caper and blame it on everything but her own poor planning instead of just sticking with customer service to get it fixed, as it was a fairly clear-cut case. The Lindens simply dealt with it at the highest level to avoid the further bad PR of seeming to be callous to the arts, which in fact they heavily promote and even subsidize.  They actually took an approach of "the customer is always right" -- an ancient adage in America and one that always serves in good stead.

But Silicon Valley doesn't believe that adage, in fact, they belligerently believe in the opposite -- and usually blames every tech failing on PICNIC -- "problem in chair, not in computer." It's always our fault -- computers too slow, too stupid to understand instructions, unable to read the manual, etc. etc.

Indeed, Scoble exemplifies this nastiness -- astoundingly -- as he continues to call the woman "bat-shit crazy" for pushing her case (!) and for letting a stranger she didn't know rent her house with jewelry in a safe (!). Yeah, Robert is too rich to need to use these services as a renter or tenant, so he has a basic elitist disdain for the grunge, but he's happy to applaud it as a rent-seeking service enriching his fellow Silicon Valley geeks.

Weepy Edge Cases Will Not Convince Google Geeks on Pseudonymity

There's a lot of weeping about the banning of fake accounts on Google -- or people's much-deserved and much-needed pseudonyms and anonymous handles, depending on how you see it. Our gang was very early on this -- and I spoke up in favour of pseudonyms too -- on principle.  The predictable Michael Anti use case was fetched up by the predictable lobbyists. A Linden (Yoz) on July 1 in that thread tried to spin Google policy, "Pseudonyms are fine as long as you're not impersonating someone else, or trying to represent a group." Not true. Thousands are being banned who fit in that category.  His Master's Voice says Google+ is going to come up with a feature for this! (He learned that kind of double talk from Linden Lab *chuckles*).  But people keep getting banned and realizing they may not benefit from the new "feature". So there's more weeping. There's this open letter from a grrl (sigh). There's a blog by Skud, the ex-Google employee with an ever-growing list of people deserving and needful of anonymity.

At least, we think so. We can't be sure they're all sock puppets and alts.

So...I think we need to put an end to the weepy edge-case approach on this as it's not persuasive, won't work, and isn't fair -- it's minority politics.

It sounds harsh but yes, that's the case -- conjuring up long lists of real or imagined victims who benefit from pseudonymous or ever-changing anonymous accounts is not going to convince Google. If it does convince them, we'd also have to worry for evermore about the problem of minority interest groups being able to overthrow the mainstream and what that spells for the future of Google+. Either it's going to be a major social utility like search was, or it will be a stupid geek thing. You decide.

The problem is not that the list of people who include victims of domestic violence, dissidents risking torture under dictatorships, LGBT who face a hostile and even violent public in some areas aren't all people facing real risks. Yes, it's as serious as a heart attack. I get that better than you may know. But that doesn't mean that their needs have to be met on Google+, and that all of Google+ has to be nerfed to accommodate them -- and then suffer all the down side of not having real identity.

Each and every one of those lists of people needing protection in anonymity can get it on Blogspot, Tumblr, Twitter, Plurk, Live Journal --- and hey, Second Life, which now even has its own social media system on top of the virtual world.

As I've explained repeatedly, what people who demand anonymity or pseudonymity really want often is scope and reach -- influence over the masses, the ability to make giant groups with 500,000 people "liking" them on Facebook (like the unaccountable WikiLeaks); the ability to make lists with 5,000 friends without accountability. And they have less attention and less of a huge audience (700 million)

Let's go over what we have to suffer when we allow pseudonymity and anonymity:

1. Secret police operatives can pose as supporters and spy on you or follow you and harass you.

2. Regime sympathizers can gather dirt on you to report to the secret police, and bully and intimidate you without you knowing who they are.

3. Your ex-husband can stalk you easily.

4. People who hate gays or hate any kind of minority or lifestyle can harass and stalk and vilify without any damage to their reputation or any repercussions whatsoever.

5. Your boss can see what you're really saying about him.

6. People can run several sock puppets pretending to disagree or agree with something and cause havoc.

And so on. That is, practically every affordance and boon you can find in anonymity for your pet cause is something that can be turned on its ear or reversed and become its opposite.

More to the point, people in movements in Belarus and Iran have in fact deployed the real identity feature of Facebook to their great advantage -- they know that people following them are their actual friends and colleagues they want to share with, and not police plants.

Courts of law now instruct men who have been violent to female partners that they cannot contact them person or on the phone -- and they now add "or on Facebook, Twitter, or any other means". You cannot posit a situation where a victim of violence has to have her identity and her freedom taken away from her for the rest of her life -- you have to work to prosecute offenders and enforce the law and not merely cringe.

And again, for those that do have to still duck and hide, there are other places.

I'm for calling out the real agendas of people like Jillian York who demanded anonymous accounts from Facebook for her MENA revolutionary friends, and then began to tack on the crowd-pleasing use cases of Michael Anti, the Chinese dissident, and now victims of domestic or societal violence to round out the argument. It's my contention that she has been after influence all along, not protection and has been completely impervious to the real arguments in favour of identity for precisely those revolutionary movements she supports -- if they are authentic.

The least persuasive argument and most stupid meme that keeps cropping up in these debates is that "People sign up with Santa Claus and Mickey Mouse anyway and it's rampant". So what? It's still not the company policy. And if you abuse report them, they get gone. If they don't (like that account that isn't mine on Facebook but is from a griefer, "Prokofy Neva") you can persist in ARing it and discrediting it and eventually it will be removed or you successful discredit it. Santa Claus, even if there are 1000 of them on Facebook, isn't the problem. It's D3dl$ HaXxor that is the problem and John123 who is the problem.

I think there are two arguments to emphasize rather than piling up the weepy use cases. And let me say again that I don't need extra banging on the weepiness of it all. I myself have been in some of the situations that people require anonymous accounts for, or my close friends and family have and I "get it". I'm not impugning their need for anonymity; I'm not somehow denigrating them as vulnerable and needy people; what I *am* doing, however, is questioning their need to do it on Facebook, and I am questioning their need to do it at the expense of all of us of trust and accountability. THAT is the issue.

My friends under dictatorships get to be stalked by secret policeman? So...I get to be harassed by griefers and tracked by anonymous agents of hostile governments that hate my reporting? My relatives get to be stalked by creepy exes? Because why? Because you you are escaping an abusive husband and demand anonymous accounts? Because you live under a dictatorship but have a different view than my friends about how to fight them? No thanks. That's the problem. You're demanding special dispensation that disrupts the peace of other people for whom real identity is a necessity, not to mention a choice -- and that's ok.

If you ratchet up the weepy factor, you're overlooking the fact that probably 50,000 or 500,000 Second Life avatars would like this feature -- and it's ok if they do, and they don't have to explain their business to you. If they need this for cybersex; if they need this to report on atrocities -- it's not really your business. See, that's the problem with the "deserving poor" and "needs assessment" approach to this issue -- it's just not democratic and free. It's based on the eternal whiney identity politics of the left. Either you have pseudonymity because there are lots of use cases for it of a wide variety and that's ok, or you don't, because the few who need it would disrupt the whole by forcing them to endure anonymous fucktards on the Internet way more than they do with real-life identity. That's all.

So there are two arguments to make to Google+ social engineers:

1. There's an easy solution here that involves having "display names" (as in Second Life, only more covert) that manifest to some circles one way and to other circles another way. You sign up with a real life name and indicate a nick name or series of nick name; you toggle which circles get the real name and which get the nick name or names. Very simple. Very doable!

2. The Google line about signing up with "the name people know you by" has to be taken geekily and literally as they like to do things. If I know thousands of people "by my name Prokofy Neva" then I get to sign up with that name, end of story! After all, it isn't Anonymoose or D3dl$ HaXxor, it's a persistent name by which in fact people know me that doesn't keep changing and that has a perspective and an accountability attached to it.

If I signed up with gmail with any old name, pseudonym or nonce handle, then I should get that same feature in Google+ -- I shouldn't be punished for using a long-time gmail account with an pseudonym on G+. Most of all, if I am punished on Google+, I shouldn't be banned from those other services. This is like "banned from the forums, have your land taken from you in SL" -- we were always for decoupling the verbal ban from the seizure of property inworld.

Honestly, I have to say it once again: we who have been fighting it out in Second Life for the last seven years already have gone through every single issue in the Metaverse, and then some. The solutions we have found make sense and can be replicated. In SL, it happened that now they have put display names to enable people who want to put a real name on top of an old fake SL name can do so now -- or for that matter, any name!

Now, what could be wrong with this proposal! Of course someone like Jillian is sure to say that her MENA friends can't sign up for an account with a real name with the secret police looking over their shoulder and monitoring their computer use and connections, and have to have a nick all the way through.

Well, that seems rather narrowly-construed if not naive. The reason the Egyptian police could nab Wael Ghonim even though he had a pseudonym is because, well, they're the secret police. The reason they call them secret is because they're secret! They have their ways, and get the stuff. If you sit at a computer in your apartment, they will find it. If you use a laptop and roam around, they will find it. If you go to an Internet cafe, they'll see you.

The censorship is ironically not always as thorough in the MENA countries or other situations around the world as it is in the post-Soviet countries where they really knew how to do throughough control. In a place like Uzbekistan, they run all the cell providers. They tell them all they have to alert the state to suspicious activity. They back it up with monitoring. They go through entire apartment buildings registering all the computers and laptops. They make you show your passport to use an Internet cafe. I'll never forget that Al Jazeera guy marvelling that they do that in Turkmenistan. Gosh, smart, eh? That makes quick work of those dissidents when you do that! They didn't do that in some of the MENA countries merely because they have a bit more private enterprise there and not quite as blanket control always and a history of people making powerful social movements like parties and unions.

The display name solution isn't going to solve every use case.  We get it that if you use the Internet with your real name you are at risk in some situations. But if you're in that bad a place in your life or in your country, you're in danger anyway -- for other reasons.

Society is about a balance of rights, not taking away the rights of the many to serve the few, or the few to serve the many. And that means the need to protect a few use cases can't be allowed to open the door to abuse by the majority from anonymous accounts.

 

Eli Pariser Wants to Make Sure the Internet Doesn't Filter Your Way But His Way

Eli Pariser, the former executive director of moveon.org, is concerned about how Google gives us customized results that may put us in "news silos" and maintain our world views. His new book The Filter Bubble takes up this concern, claiming that Google is no longer an "enormous library" (don't worry, it still is) and that social media in particular is cradling us in our particularist worldviews and keeping us in an ideological cocoon (yes, they are, but people debate much more on Facebook or Google than you ever could on moveon.org).

In an interview on amazon.com, he sums up his ideological problem with Facebook's ideological cocooning:

Mark Zuckerberg perfectly summed up the tension in personalization when he said “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” But he refuses to engage with what that means at a societal level – especially for the people in Africa.

See the problem? While rightfully exposing the problem of the filtration of Facebook, which we can easily recognize (people chose their friends and colleagues; they tend to be in a comfort-zone of ideological compatability), Pariser intrudes with his own notion -- that "we must" somehow care for the people of Africa; these people are some sort of unified mass with some objective set of problems we "must" sympathize with -- if we care about a squirrel in our front yard and not the people dying in Congo over cell-phone metals, we must be callous white northern Ice People -- well yes, all these associations are indeed underlying a seemingly innocuous phrase like "refuses to engage with what the means at a societal level."

Erm, how would you have him engage? Be fed moveon.org or PCCC tracts every morning in email so he can care more about Africa than a squirrel? But which Africa? By whom? About what? And what will the test of "engagement" really mean, at the end of the day? Coming round to a full-fledged "progressive" set of views like Eli Pariser has? At the end of the day, the people in Africa care more about an animal in their front yards than those dying all around them, too.

So, I suspect he is seized with this filtration concern because he sees it as an obstacle to converting "the masses" to his own "progressive" world view. He says in the amazon.com interview, in a clear instance of Betterworldism:

I’ve always believed the Internet could connect us all together and help create a better, more democratic world. That’s what excited me about MoveOn – here we were, connecting people directly with each other and with political leaders to create change

But that more democratic society has yet to emerge, and I think it’s partly because while the Internet is very good at helping groups of people with like interests band together (like MoveOn), it’s not so hot at introducing people to different people and ideas. Democracy requires discourse and personalization is making that more and more elusive.

And that worries me, because we really need the Internet to live up to that connective promise. We need it to help us solve global problems like climate change, terrorism, or natural resource management which by their nature require massive coordination, and great wisdom and ingenuity. These problems can’t be solved by a person or two – they require whole societies to participate. And that just won’t happen if we’re all isolated in a web of one.

Again, see the inherent problem here with the demand of progressives not to leave media alone, not to leave it free, not to allow the marketplace of ideas to function, but to get it to *live up to that connective promise* by *connecting a certain way*. The Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik used the Internet to live up to that connective promise too -- only he connected up to the English Defense League and various hate sites, some of which found him too weird even for their extremities. Yet Pariser is confident that the Internet as a machine can be tweaked to produce *good* connections that will enable "us all to work together" on urgent problems like climate change.

While Pariser seems to like the idea of the Internet "introducing people to different ideas," what he wants is a very definitive "progressive" result based in hard ideological precepts: they *must* come to a recognition that climate change is a danger; they *must* work together for "national resource management" -- planned socialist methods and outcomes (to be cloaked, of course, first in saying it is merely about "a conversation" and then about "alternatives" and then after that about "reforms").

His frustration with the cadre-run top-down non-social-media organization moveon.org is palpable (I don't know the story of why he left his position as executive director, but probably because it could never attract more than a few million people or...27,000 answers to polls...and so he decided to look for how he could fry bigger fish.) (I'm a big critic of moveon.org and have been since I was initially a supporter, in participating in the campaign to oppose the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the early days of email.)

In a book review of Pariser's new book by Tangled Web's Luke Allnutt, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Allnutt explains how Google "knows" his wife is expecting a baby and serves him up baby stuff -- maybe he and his wife will click and buy. Makes sense. Google is basically a giant ad agency, with a loss-leader called "search," and Wikipedia as its unpaid serf.

But this is creating some kind of "news silo" that is keeping us tethered to world views, says Allnutt, describing Pariser:

The consequences of this social engineering, Pariser argues, is that we interact more with people who think like we do. Rather than fulfilling the early Internet dreams of diversity and freedom of choice, we are living in an echo chamber. As a result, there’s less room for “the chance encounters that bring insight and learning.” Where once we had human news editors who would temper the Britney coverage with a foreign war or two, now algorithms select our news for us based on what we click on and what we share.

Actually, I'm more inclined to think that rather than "keeping us in an echo chamber," the views of the founders of Google -- and the new social media platforms -- are seeping in through their platforms. We now have human editors with bots and algorithms -- and they've set it up so that we get Wikipedia entries on every search.

Allnutt takes the approach that there "isn't any scientific proof" that what Pariser is saying is really the case (nobody wants to think they're a zombie because they get custom search results). He cites a new Pew report, “Social Networking Sites and Our Lives,”  that says there is no relationship “between the use of social networking services and the diversity of people’s overall social networks.”

He also chides Pariser (yes, cool-hand Luke is capable of chiding, just not Anonymous) for wearing "Imagined Analogue Past" rose-coloured eyeglasses, when "things were better before the Internet". If anything, I find the "progressives," especially the gurus like Clay Shirky, making up very customized notions of the past to fit their theories of media, like his fond analogy of the TV age to the industrial age where supposedly everyone was drunk from readily-available gin carts because of the monotony of their machine jobs -- and then eventually (somehow, despite being drunk and risking life and limb on that machinery!) they made their way to the post-war boom of suburbia and roads and cars only to become zombified by the TV set and acquire "surplus value" which they are now, um, accessing for a "better world" because they can now interact on social media.

Luke is only guilty himself of anti-anti bias here because he imagines the past as a time when everyone was solidly in their view-silo, fed by their information-silo, with its limited print form. That strikes me as entirely ahistorical, because he is forgetting (or perhaps never saw, if he was too young), how debates used to work. Alcove 1 and Alcove 2 debaters couldn't endlessly link to factoids on the Internet, in selective and specious ways. They couldn't Fisk, as they were in verbal and not textual warfare. They had to debate face to face with their wits. I wasn't in Alcove 1 or 2, although I would encounter their denizens and political descendents in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. But I remember the book tables in Sid Smith hall at the University Toronto, my alma mater, at which was perhaps a milder version. Perhaps this was among my earliest exposures as to how a variety of ideologies could be presented.

There was the Spartacus League; there was an anti-war movement; there were supporters of Cesar Chavez and the lettuce boycott; there was the Newman Club. I remember myself, as a member of a campus prayer group, manning for a time a table of religious literature -- it was a mix of C.S. Lewis Christianity and evangelical tracts. Naturally, people fought fiercely for their particular ideology or cause -- books, posters, flags, heated debates. People handed out flyers and tracts. This was the little free speech zone that probably administrators had supplied to accommodate some angrier student protest of the previous decade.

But what was sacred, underlying this book-table hall, was the notion that there *was* a hall. There was a substrate, a place open to any ideology (although it was too early in 1972 for LGBT to venture out safely and nobody would have permitted the Nazis to set up a table). It was understood that tolerance of the public space, pluralism, was the tabula resa of this proliferation of causes -- most of which were on the hard left, because those were the ones that bothered to set up book tables. Sitting at my table with the C.S. Lewis and batches of Campus Crusade for Christ tracts, I knew that I was "the enemy" to the Spartacus League guy, but that he wouldn't knock over my table or be able to have me removed. The Save the Whales people may have thought that Spartacus guy was a crank, but they ignored him. And so on. All of us were appealing for the limited attention of hurrying students, mainly in the sciences, who were rushing to class or finishing up last-minute homework assignments or flirting, and were mainly uninterested in having a better-world pamphlet pressed upon them. Even so, the principle was clear: the pamphlet about religion as the "opiate of the people" could be countered by the pamphlet about the saving power of Christ.

Eli Pariser is on Google+, and is flogging his book and his ideas there (as everyone is), and today referenced this article.

My post:

Eli, I am among those people who have noticed this "customizing" of Google for years and have always been annoyed and concerned about it. I've always felt that it would lead to uniformity of political views as the developers of the platforms inevitably bake their views into the tools -- the opposite of what you appear to fear, which is that too many people will retain diverse views of the world instead of "the right" view.

Indeed, I often go on other people's computers to do searches, or chat with friends in Second Life and coordinate searches among different people in different areas to see what comes up. Going on Bing also reveals this problem as entirely different results, particularly on controversial political topics. Example -- type in the key words around a Tea Party demonstration in Google and they don't appear at all; type them in Bing, and they do. (I don't cite this as a supporter of the Tea Party, but as an example of how searches get handled due to the dominance of Wikipedia as the fulcrum.) Type my Second Life avatar into Google, and get the hate pages; type into Bing, and there are no hate pages, even though I haven't done a thing about them in terms of some "SEO". Type "Communist Party" into Google, and on the first view, get a page that sells t-shirts. On Bing, in the same spot is something about Canada's Communist Party. And so on. You could play this game all day.

However, I would like to ask whether the reason this phenomenon troubles you so much is because you don't actually believe in pluralism and a variety of viewpoints and approaches to different issues, like many "progressives". In fact, you may believe that there is some "scientific" or "rational" way of delivering search results so that people will see "the truth". The Google problem bothers you precisely because you cannot "reach the masses" with the truth you wish to deliver, but find them atomized. Really, much depends on whether you believe the truth is absolute but man is imperfect and there may be many different approaches to it, or whether you believe that because the truth is absolute, one approach will be highlighted and now modern Internet technology and our social media "paradise" can lead us to this "way". Or should lead us to the way, if only you can remove this "pluralism algorithm" that gets in the way.

From reading the interviews with you about this, I wonder if you are hoping that somehow, you can harness these tools to deliver "the facts" more readily to "the people" so that they can see "the truth" and hoping you can persuade and harness Google for this purpose.

What would be your solution to the problem of customization otherwise? It must annoy you that some people read the Wall Street Journal and the National Review and watch Fox news and other people, despite reading the New Republic and Huffington Post still can't come around to seeing things as you do on the rigidly ideological moveon.org or the Nation or Amy Goodman's Democracy Now. Can you accept that people have views and gravitate to the publications that continue to feed and reinforce those views and permit them to go on doing this in a free society? Or do you insist that they give up their publications, along with their guns and religion, and get the "truth package"? Or are you willing to leave them with their little magazines, as long as Google delivers the right returns on Palin's "death panels"? Perhaps you don't need to tinker as much as you believe, as Google already helpfully cates to your belief by putting a New York Times story on the issue, with the headline "False 'Death Panel' Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots". Bing by contrast puts in the view "NYT Brooks Promotes Eugenics “Death Panels” Amid Budget Crisis".

If anything, given that Google's devs are closer to your worldview than not, what would you have them do? They can't sell their ads without this customized search return.

Ultimately, a huge variety of searches does turn up the fact that Google doesn't really skew things that much, although it does something that unfortunately helps reinforce the left-of-center worldview you're hoping to bolster -- and that is turn up Wikipedia entries as the first or second return on most topics, merely because it is the most linked, and then because it was once the most linked, it becomes more linked by people looking for an easy solution. Yet Wikipedia has many biased pages and little recourse, although the tentative reform that will enable readers to rate pages may hold out some hope.

And a reply -- typical and predictable -- from someone named Edouard Rabel who imagines that the problem is "reading comprehension":

I think you completely missed the point. There is no "one" filter. Google and others personalize the search results based on the profile they have of you. Regarding politics and many other subjects: this could lead one to ostracize themselves from the rest of the world, only being served with for example: Tea-Party related content.

Another downside of these filters is that in the above (political) example it reinforces existing biases. The argument that increased availability to information of a political nature doesn't lead to a more educated political opinion unfortunately still stands. The trend in this regard is something to be worried about, as it doesn't improve but gets worse.

Dare imagine what happens when someone is only exposed to alternet or foxnews content.

I don't think this article, or Eli himself has anything to do with "selling truth" or "forcing an opinion down everyone's throat" as you seem to insinuate.

And my reply:

No, I didn't miss the point because I...use Google, duh. As do many people. And the first thing you always see on a Google search is Wikipedia, as biased as it is. And that's one of those self-fulfilling prophecies of the algorithm -- it's there because people click on it because it's there, it's there because people link to it because it's there, etc. I just cited some examples of what happens on two different search engines. Google leads you instantly to a criticism of the "death panels" concept; Bing admits a more nuanced view. Google sells you a t-shirt on the Communist concept; Bing gives you yet another return on a Communist Party. So your notion that I'm being given a customized worldview-shaping notion that will inevitably lead me to some worldview doesn't quite happen. I'm a big critic of Communism, Google must "know this", yet it gives me a t-shirt to buy.

You can argue endlessly about the concept of filtration, and you can endlessly find samples to fit your particularly bias, as could I. Perhaps some list of neutral "test terms" could be devised that a double-blind experiment could be performed on (and I will eventually get Pariser's book and see if he does anything like that).

The real question, as I noted, however, is what Pariser intends to be done about this. Fix it so that we all see only the search results that fit his "progressive" and "scientific" worldview whether we wish to or not? Indeed, Pariser's concern about this is because he wants to do something about it to correct it. It infuriates him that people are reinforcing their world views (gasp!) and that those are views he does not share, and are in the majority. That sets him to think how we could "scientifically" crowbar them away from what he sees as their pablum.

 

Everybody Does it So It Must Be OK? The Guerilla Hack of JSTOR

Sometimes it seems as if just everything in the world is getting hacked, eh?

A Harvard University fellow who was studying ethics (!) was charged with hacking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles, the AP reports.

This 25-year-old Bit-torrent kiddie isn't just some sort of over-achiever who likes to read lots of articles.

He's a guerilla in the war on paid content and information architecture  -- anything that uses registration or subscriptions to cover the costs of information procurement and storage.

He's from a group called "Demand Progress" that wants, um, information to be free. It's a typical moveon.org-type "progressive" cadre-run organization with a heavy ideological agenda -- three people whose names are given decide all the issues and 300,000 subscribe and click and sign petitions and "yes" and "like" -- but have no place to debate these cadres. You just mindlessly click, and you can't be sure that many other people are clicking, because you have to trust the site-owners -- there are no counters on the petitions.

But the prosecutor disagrees about the charges, fortunately:

"Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars," U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said in a statement. "It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away."

Aaron Swartz, 25, claims he co-founded Redditt and is co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification. Paging Dave Winer! (And the NYT says the co-found bit is disputed.) He is a product of Y Combinator, Standford University -- Silicon Valley's infatuation with young programmers who don't finish college. So you can absolutely sure that the most powerful men in Silicon Valley will get behind the most high-powered defense of this young felon -- and that absolutely nobody in the Metaverse will compare him whatsoever to Rupert Murdoch's journalists who hacked and stole information. Oh, no, never.

 A $100,000 unsecured bail bond was secured for the script-kiddie, so that means Daddy -- or somebody big in Silly Valley like the EFF gang -- had at least 10 percent of that to fork out to get this white-collar criminal out of jail.

As usual with these hacker scare stories where the journalists often have a sneaking admiration for the hackers, we are told he faces "35 years in jail". VERY unlikely. He will get this plead down to a misdemeanor, especially if he gives all the files back and will likely get community service, not jail time.

Even so, I agree with the prosecutor: this is a crime. It's theft. Nothing makes it right. There should be an adequate punishment. 35 years is extreme, but one year may not be. Especially because this isn't somebody just, um, "over-achieving," as I noted, but someone with a malicious, deliberate, extreme perspective they are willing to put into action with guerilla attacks -- like a terrorist, although, of course "I get it" that taking boring scholarly articles out of JSTOR is not like blowing little children and their moms into thousands of bloody pieces. Are you able to think by analogy and concept? Perhaps not, if you are unwilling to see the parallels.

I often see this argument in Second Life by the "critical educators" ("critical"=Marxist). There's one particular edu-punk named Tony who puts out a Critical Education newsletter (self-acknowledged Australian Marxist) for SL who recently lamented that he may have to cease his freebie website with thousands of downloadable articles because people were "taking too much" or "demanding too much" and no one ever tips, whine, whine. Well, charge for the articles? Or make a subcription or something? He was especially annoyed at people who came and demanded that he make it easy for them and give them a huge zip file of everything on the site instead of making them browse and pick and chose and at least give him some traffic and Google juice. See, that's the problem with free and the open source stone soup -- everybody wants the soup, the whole pot, even. Not everyone has a turnip to bring; some only have stones.

Sure, I find it annoying to get to a paywall/registration wall when I'm trying to read an article, and I get the JSTOR message. But...scholars need to get paid, editors and publication people need to get paid, it's ok. I just think these services should find ways to make payment easier, and especially micropayments -- perhaps a company called Media Wallet could get started where I pay $20 a month and go around easily leaving Media Bucks in virtual microcurrency points to bloggers or journalists I like, or I pay for articles in archives, and they pay me. And it cashes out to real dollars. Getting an article from a JSTOR or the New Yorker then is completely easy and clickable and registration isn't needed because you've already registered with Media Wallet. So, eventually, this will happen and we'll all do this, or at least, many of us who appreciate the hard work of writers.

But what's not an option is to endlessly "liberate" their content.

Arguing about this the other day on Google+ with Fleep Tuque, naturally she dismissed the claims of scholarly journals that say they need to charge money. She's an open source booster and open sims educational cheerleader to cut costs and keep budgets low. Those of us on the consuming side of the educational equation can never understand why it costs so much and where that $40,000 goes, given how the faculties are filled with Marxists and "critical educators" cutting costs on sims and demanding copybot ability like AJ. Who gets paid?

Fleep makes the point that professors take up the job of writing articles and editing and review articles for scholarly journals as part of their already-paid jobs. So why are these journals so costly? If they eliminate paper and postage, need they remain costly?

These are legitimate questions to ask, but that's not how the crit-edu types ask them. For them, its an "information wants to be free" all or nothing. And I keep pointing out that copy editors, managers, services, secretaries etc. still cost money. I'm not seeing that scholarly journals are revenue centers for universities, but they need costs covered.

JSTOR, as the representative rightly points out who is quoted in the AP story, are stewards of material entrusted to them. And it's a system that does require registration, usage fees, limitations of usage. And that's ok. That guerills assaulting this system out of extreme ideological belief think it's ok doesn't make it ok, and let's not whitewash what they are.

Meanwhile, the script kiddies are doing their usual tap dance:

Demand Progress's executive director David Segal said on the website that the charges against Swartz don't make sense.

"It's like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library," he said.

Er, no, David Segal. It's like stealing. Because it *is* stealing. When you check a book out, you return it, or pay a fine if it is late. When you steal from electronic files, you keep a copy forever without compensation. Saying there is therefore no loss to the owner because he has his original copy is your usual Fisking bullshit -- the owner has costs ranging from server storage to management to editors, and it's ok to cover them. Most people *don't* have a problem with upholding this system. Like music, where contrary to the "Demand Progress" types, many people go on paying for i-tunes and even CDs.

The annual subscription fee of $50,000 sounds horrible and scary doesn't it? Like I said, the AP journo could be a 20-something peer of these kiddies who downloads stuff for free himself.

But, given the tens of thousands of students in a university accessing and using this material in their education, it's not some astronomical fee. In fact, it's kinda like the fee that news companies pay AP to access their stories and publish them immediately.

"In November and December, Swartz allegedly made 2 million downloads from JSTOR, 100 times the number made during the same period by all legitimate JSTOR users at MIT." See the difference?

BTW, he's a repeat offender -- having done this same sort of deliberate hack of an open documents repository with the same cunning Haskelling -- it's open, therefore I get to take a zillion of them beyond the regulated number and put automatic scripts out to suck endlessly from the dbases. Liberation!

When you look at the smirking face of Aaron Swartz, when you think of the extremist and false premises involved in his group's guerilla assaults on information storage, ask yourself if you want people like them in charge of your country.

Because if you are not for prosecuting their crimes, you have already empowered letting them take charge by force and anarchy. That's how to understand it.

 

Why You Should Fear the Internet of Things

There was a moment during TechCrunch disrupt when I felt the "thunk" of the unevenly-distributed future arriving.

A woman was demonstrating one of the start-up contestants -- GetAround, a service that lets you rent other people's cars for periods of time, say, $5 or $10 an hour.

She walked over to a fancy electric car on display, and putting her cell phone by it, popped open the door.

This wasn't a remote control that was hers, opening a door to a car that was hers.

This was different; this was her opening a stranger's car, with some bit of information beamed into a device in the stranger's car.

I had that same sort of squeamish feeling I had in the "family photo" of everyone at SLCC1 that Philip wanted everyone to be in -- and I ran running from the room. It's funny how you get funny feelings like that...

Thunk.

I really didn't like GetAround, and argued against it on TechCrunch. Why? It's called, geek-style, "peer-to-peer car sharing." Bleah. So the concept is that your car now is broken up into a kind of time share. If someone needs it just for two hours to go downtown, they rent from you. They find you online, pay you online, work out the details online, and pick up your car. The little gizmo inside has the keys locked into it and you open it with your smart phone. Walla.

So, it breaks apart what was once your property, collectivizes that property, and them that collectivization is monetarized by someone who is  not you, but the company. (This is why it's like communism). So they take a percentage for keeping this collectivizing and Politburo function going as an online service, and you get paid for that piece of your car's time.

Yeah, I'm fully aware that no one else will describe it that way, no one else will see it that way, and it merely garners laughter about seeing reds under the bed and so on -- but I don't care. Think about it that way, and be more fearful -- because fearing bad things isn't a bad thing, and isn't "FUD" that must be dispelled, but part of the pushing back against the exploitative future that transforms things that are bad into something perhaps more tolerable.

Again, walk it through.

You can browse and find the car you like. Of course, immediately the first thing you see about this system is "governance problems". Supposedly they've fixed the insurance thing (I had to wonder who on earth would agree to insure this strange negligence-prone system, and I have to wonder how it will last). They've fixed other things like breakdown response, I guess. So then you have things like this: the lady who says she will only rent to people age 30 above, and only people who agree never to take her car out in the rain, and if you book it and it rains, your order is cancelled. That sort of stuff that happens when people get their stuff collectivized, but didn't really want it collectivized. The push of the monetarizing of that collectivizing is supposed to help them overcome their reticence.

Among the things I really didn't like about this is the nasty, malicious camraderie that immediately formed in the room when this thing was being demo'd. Oh, they'll stick it to the Herz rent-a-car people. Oh, this will really disrupt the rental car business.

Well, um, why? Why do you "need" to stick it to the rental car industry? It's not like they are failing or unnecessary. It's not like they'd still offer a better deal, because unlike that fussy lady with the rain-phobia and the under-30 heebejeebees, they will provide you a car "just any time" that is a late model and not subject to strange clawbacks that "social network" and "peer-to-peer" can lead to.

It's like the Megabus premise -- "we'll give you a much cheaper bus ride but no bus station, just come to the corner and get right on, and we'll take you to a parking lot in another city for less". Except...when they don't, because they don't have another bus and it's overcrowded. Greyhound feels obliged to lay on another bus if more people show up than fit on one bus. Megabus doesn't.

I don't know why it's "required" that you "disrupt" somebody else's business to succeed, but then, the conference is called TechCrunch Disrupt, see...

But, all of this is just a gateway drug to the Internet of Things. That will be pretty awful stuff, with that same kind of "disruptive" and aggressive collectivization, with you getting something, but the collectivizers not only getting money but, well, a slice of your time and your property that they give away to others. How much will get sliced away, until nothing of yours is really left?

Sounds convenient -- hippie types and geek types without cars or who have a yen to drive a fancier car seem attracted to it. Others don't like the feeling that something isn't exclusively theirs and that they are on some kind of timer without flexibility, and they might not be attracted to it.

The GetAround car is only one of billions of things coming on the Internet of Things, however -- or they're already here.

Remember when Anthony Weiner first lied about the tweet of his crotch shot, that it was something that had somehow been "hacked" or not sent by him? (In a way it's true; it was something sent by his lizard brain.) And he joked about how "soon his toaster would be tweeting." Well, yeah, it's like that!

We saw all this prototyped in Second Life some five years ago. Babbage Linden (Jim Purbrick) was making the Internet of Things inside the world of SL. So what that meant is that every object on a parcel was tagged, every object was interactive, and everything talked. So let's say you put out a flower, and someone comes and touches it, it does something, it records the touch, you write something, it saves a message, it puts it all in a HUD, it records everyone coming and going and interacting, endless things. You could go around clicking on stuff and filling up the dbase.

I'm not sure if it was directly because of this work of Babbage's (he's gone now) or some other Linden, but for a time, the search contained every single thing on a parcel and, its XYZ grid location. So you could look up a store, and home in on the object directly without pawing through loads of stuff rezzing, or materializing into view.

Prior to this Linden experiment (since retired, maybe it was too noisy, too dbase heavy), the Electric Sheep, now pretty much defunct, had an avatar bot called Grid Shepherd (yuk yuk), that Chris devised and ran, and it roamed the grid scraping data -- objects on parcels. It popped their name and location into search, because they were trying to make a better search than the Lindens had.

But then when it was shown on the web, people howled. Their belongings that they had thought only visible to themselves and their friends on their parcels were now in search and being fetched up. Stuff they'd accidently left out for sale like a TV to be undeeded or something to pass for a friend could now be stolen. The fisting bench in their sex dungeon was now showing up in red. Or simply anything that they just didn't want others to be zooming in on -- attractive nuisances. The geeks snorted and chided everyone with the old FUD crap (as they will do when they see the headline of this article) and said that the stuff was open to the naked eye or bot anyway, that nothing was private on the Internet -- you know the drill, we've heard it before.

And -- like Facebook had to later in its day, Electric Sheep had to dial their search back. They insisted that it be "opt-out" with people opting out their parcels or the object. That was unfair; it should have been opt-in. But they made the geeks' typical lament -- "We won't have data for our data base" -- not many people would opt-in, see. I started an avid campaign to ban the bot Grid Shepherd from all rentals; I had protest kiosks all over the place. In the end, they pulled it. The Lindens went on to do the exact same experiment later with the exact same problem with people feeling like they were over-exposed. I mean, seriously, what if "The Internet" had a report about your bedroom lamp, bed, side table, book, medications, alarm clock beaming to it 24/7?

That's what we have in Second Life. People didn't like living with that. But...in that integrated and closed world, it was hard to make it otherwise. Even if something like Grid Shepherd isn't getting this data now, the Lindens are, and some third-party scripters who scrape data in various projects. The thing most people hated the most was scraping of avatar data that would either show alts, or proximity to other avatars they didn't want to be known about, or of course, the IP address.

And snotty geeky protestations that these things were all known; that these things didn't lead to your actual home address; that you had to give up privacy on the Internet -- well, they didn't wash.

Now, there's a lot more I could say about the Internet of Things and will, but for now, I'll just paste in this interchange from ReadWriteWeb-- it's priceless!

They've been plotting this in Second Life for ages (Babbage Linden spent years prototyping it using the virtual world of SL and its scripted objects). Here's the worst thing about all this: the collectivization of property. No longer will property I make or buy be mine, whether intellectual or real. It will part-belong to coders on the Internet who can shut it off if they like, scrape its data, do what they want to with it. There will no longer be "toaster" or "car"; there will be "toaster plus integrative code" and "car plus attachment to Internet of things".

So it's really a very vivid manifestation of the technocommunism I've always talked about. Coders will suddenly essentially "own" everything you have that is interoperable and interactive and you will cede more of your life over to them for the sake of "convenience" or "learning" or "life-saving." Meanwhile, you will not have had a say in the governance of this system.

One of the ways that scientist-ideologues propagandizing this put it over on people is by accentuating the "health benefits" or "life-saving benefits". Why, it will stop air pollution! It will diagnose illness! It will run insulin pumps! Or whatever. And by pumping up these possibly real boons to the concept of IOT, they overlook the horrendous consequences of system lock-ups and network totalitarianism that will occur with things like "your alarm goes off and your coffee pot goes on" -- once it becomes more like this (as an ACLU ad warned): "You can't order that pizza sir because you have reached your recommended caloric intake today but we can recommend a yoghurt shake."

Worst of all, there's the "down" factor that geeks never factor in as not an aberration to systems, but integral to systems. This stuff will always be "down" the way computers are always "down" and frustrating you in stores and banks and such. Only now it will be your car, and not just your coffee pot.

aditya menon

Why are you so afraid of us "coders"? Programmers are just people like you. News flash : most of us don't want to 'own' you or take control of your stuff... we are just trying to live and enjoy our life - and we probably contribute more towards the greater good than many other professions.

Richard MacManus, Founder & Editor-in-Chief, ReadWriteWeb.

I agree with you Aditya, the rogue programmers argument doesn't hold water. Prokofy, you have a good point re the 'down' factor though. There will certainly be a lot of tech frustration while this ramps up.

Prokofy Neva:

So, who is adityamenon, Richard, do you think that's a real name? You at least have a real name and a title (I do, too). Can you imagine when a lot of anonymous, unaccountable coders get to programming those 50 billion things, and Anonymous is running wild and causing havoc hacking many of them?

It astounds me that you aren't thinking of these sorts of thing in a system that large, and acting as if "rogue programmers" is some kind of exceptional and rare aberration in the system, when in fact, it is part and parcel of the system. Every single day, thousands of times over, systems are hacked, and sometimes monstrously damaged -- $171 million for Sony. That's not an exception; that *is* the nature of the system at this point, and it accelerates and compounds.

And you want...*that*...to be running my toaster...my pace-maker when I'm old...my bicycle...my work station...my store? I mean, you're not thinking this through.

That you would think there is no problem of rogue programmers in the
Internet of things in the day and age when everything from the Pentagon to a dead teen's phone is hacked is truly astonishing. Do you ever think, well, philosophically instead of technically about these
systems?!

And...to even think in terms of this problem as merely about "rogues". The problem is that even good guys will own too much of your property and your life, your objects and your time, and they will inevitably acquire too much power with it -- just like the maker of computer chips have too much power over many objects in our lives already.

The making of the Internet of Things inevitably involves collectivizing private property -- and we've already seen what a devastation that has been in digital form regarding the music, book, and media industry -- and even government (wikification of files in the US government preceded WikiLeaks' exploitation of that wikification.) So now you want to let that loose on real stuff? On things in the world? On things in my house?! Each toaster, diabetic pump, battle plushie toy will become less of mine, and more of the Internet's -- and the coders and the companies.

We've already lived through the prototype of the Internet of Things made in Second Life. There were huge privacy, governance, scaling, etc. issues all over the place. In fact, each time Linden Lab would try to make a full-scale Internet of things within their world, or a third-party would, they'd end up retiring it because of the complexities.

See, people like you scorn and sneer at Second Life because you don't realize that it's a little petri dish for social media platforms and devices that is forecasting the future and conditioning people to deal with it...

As for aditya, hell, I couldn't script this scenario better myself. I express legitimate concerns, and what does this coder telling me the usual silly mantra about how I'm filled with FUD do?!

He tells us that -- ominously -- the worst sort of hubris, without any sense of irony or accountability..."we probably contribute more towards the greater good than many other professions."

see the problem?

Seriously, What *Is* This Double Standard on WikiLeaks and Murdoch All About?!

I continue to marvel at the double standards vividly evident on the two stories of Murdoch's news empire and WikiLeaks, as already noted.Why the frenzy about *possible* hacking into the phones of 9/11 victims in the US which is not established as a fact yet, but indifference and even justification of WikiLeaks hack into the pagers of firemen and policemen to obtain half a million messages which indeed did occur?!

On forums and blogs and of course the surging Google+, no amount of indignation is enough for the sleazy tabloid practice of hacking into the phones of officials and private citizens. Jeff Jarvis, the Googlian social media guru, has stampedes of people plussing him in his daily rant against Murdoch. If you try to point out the double standards involved, or suggest that Murdoch at least is addressing this grave breach of ethics, hordes of myrmidons savage you for disagreeing. (And because of these few disagreements that seem so upsetting, Jarvis himself has even editorialized in a post that people who don't agree with him shouldn't read his posts and comment (!).

A VERY BALANCED EQUIVOCATING VIEW

Luke Allnutt, English-editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, considers himself a gatekeeper on this subject (I've stopped posting comments on his blogs about Internet policies because he never engages with them). When I challenged him on Twitter about this double standard, he said in fact he'd been thinking of doing a post on it.

And now he has, and quoted me as "unequivocal" -- implying I may be among one of the "shrill" moral-equivocaters who isn't sufficiently and robustly mad about Murdoch. I rarely read tabloids and have no need to protect Murdoch. I'm glad to be "unequivocal" on a matter of double standards, however. I can actually find it within to condemn Murdoch *and* Assange for unethical actions. He's not. In fact, he is scared to be seen as invoking "moral equivalency" that would involve whitewashing Murdoch in any way, and doesn't want to go too far on Assange.

So after a lot of throat-clearing he does concede that hacking, well, might be bad, no matter who does it, and that it seems to get judged not as a verb, but by the noun of whomever is attacked. Evil Western imperialist governments hacked by anarchists to get classified cables or war films: good! Evil Western imperialist government hacked by tabloid newspaper to get sleazy news: bad! (Especially if it will lionize former socialist heroes like Gordon Brown, who may have been a victim of the newspaper's hacking -- the most emotionally-wrenching piece of this is that hackers gained access into the medical records of his infant son, who died.)

DOES WIKILEAKS ITSELF HACK? YES, IT DOES, BUT YOU'LL BE PRESSURED TO BACK DOWN FROM SUCH A CLAIM

To be sure, Luke also reminds us that WikiLeaks people sniffed the packets of Chinese dissidents and others coming through Tor and obtained millions of documents that way -- so yeah, WikiLeaks *does* hack, as we know from The New Yorker piece. But then he undoes that reminder by equally positioning Assange's denial. No, I don't believe Assange's denial of this claim by Wired and The New Yorker whatsoever. You don't get so many documents via Tor, where you are supposed to be an unconscious conduit, without a conscious misuse of Tor.

Ditto the Tiversa story, where prevaricating geeks and WikiLeaks sympathizers have bent over backward to pretend that if someone obtains huge files from trawling Limewire -- which you'd have to be deliberate about, and not just be looking for songs as most people are -- that this isn't a sign of ill intent. Alnutt, ever even-handed to protect hackers from too much criticism, cites a certain @M_Poulet (Mr. Chicken), with an Anonymous meme cartoon in his profile and 31 followers, likely an Anops operative or sympathizer, who points out a Forbes piece by Anonymous secret-sharer Andy Greenberg, that seems to have Tiversa "backtracking" and claiming now there is "no smoking gun". Luke concludes there is still some "haze" here. I do more: I conclude that all parties have been opped here.

LOOSE COALITION OF ANARCHISTS WORKING FOR THE WHITE-HAIRED MAN

What's always so hilarious about these inevitable justification exercises in which, under pressure, journalists and bloggers start backtracking on allegations about WikiLeaks hacking when all the little anon foot-soldiers start badgering them, is that on the one hand, they constantly tell us that Anonymous is a "loose coalition" and that it "has no structure" and that they can't tie WikiLeaks directly to Anonymous because it is so "loose". Yet on the other hand, Andy Greenberg says something like this as "proof," then, that WikiLeaks "doesn't hack":

What’s missing in this story, crucially, is any evidence showing that those Swedish hackers are directly working for WikiLeaks, rather than merely acting as a few of the secret-spilling outfit’s multitude of sources worldwide.

But...the very "looseness' of the set-up means they could be working for WikiLeaks, and maintaining "plausible denial". These loosely-formed anarchists' collectives online are held together in fact with rigid memes and party discipline even as they are lax about who actually does what operation in their franchise. We could indeed consider those Swedish hackers as essentially indeed working for WikiLeaks, and working directly. Er, how do you define a WikiLeaks staff person? Do they have job descriptions and W-2 forms? (Note to Greenberg's comments' Fiskers: I use this as an example, not as some notion that all people in the world must pay the IRS.)

Do they get salaries? Do they pay social security tax and workmen's compensation? Who's a source, and who's a worker, really? Aren't they pretty much the same thing? I mean, that's the model of the open-source stone soup -- everybody brings a turnip. So if you organize and abet the formation of leaking and hacking networks and benefit from them in this "loose structure," why are you sanitized the way the New York Times, a professional media organization, is sanitized? I'm with Floyd Abrams on this: WikiLeaks is not media; it is a source. It's a source rounding up other sources. That's all.

Most people stupid enough to have Limewire, responsible for zillions of viruses, some of them put in deliberately by the music industry itself, are looking for illegal copies of music to download. To go scraping these networks to look for people careless enough to store their music files right next to their work reports in Word or their Excel files, and then capture all that, takes malicious intent.  The Swedish hackers repeatedly targeting a computer over and over in this way are movement sympathizers looking for compromising material and snagging it deliberately in a climate where they are incited and encouraged by WikiLeaks.

THE NEWS MEDIA AS AN ACCOUNTABLE INSTITUTION, UNLIKE WIKILEAKS

It's truly shocking to see the parade of powerful people falling on their swords over this unethical means of gathering news and how close it has washed up to British Prime Minister David Cameron.

People are willing to resign *for the sake of the integrity of the institution*. Even though tabloids may not seem to have much integrity, they do have a certain public trust in their mission, and the tabloid is hooked up to the rest of Murdoch's empire, which includes the Wall Street Journal. That's because they still believe that a news media institution survives beyond the acts of this or that person within it, and its credibility can be restored by punishing those who violate the law and journalist ethics.

There's no such process at work in WikiLeaks, of course, which only becomes more bold and brazen with each passing day; not content to dog whistle to their bag men in Anonymous to get DDoS attacks on Visa and Mastercard, WikiLeaks has now recently launched a form of lawfare against the credit card company, suing it for refusal of service (!) because the company refused to keep transmitting payments for its operation.

One of the ways the indignation in the Murdoch story has been particularly whipped up is by focusing on the hacking into the slain girl's phone, and another, by allegations that 9/11 victims' relatives were hacked. Indeed, that's wrong and the paper has to discipline the ranks over that, and indeed federal investigations are warranted. You don't give up your phone privacy just because your relative died in an appalling act of terrorism, or if you become a murder victim.

SOME 9/11 VICTIMS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS?

But I have to wonder why there's zero concern about WikiLeaks hacking into the pagers of law-enforcers and firement during the 9/11 events -- when firemen and policemen THEMSELVES were among the largest percent of victims in this crime against humanity.

I went back and looked at the stories surrounding the hacking by WikiLeaks into half a million pager messages. Fast Company epitomizes the casual geeky take on this -- it's historically interesting, to get these messages, they help us understand the events better, they say, and it even helps improve the "negative image" of WikiLeaks by appearing as some sort of public service. (Bonus for conspiracy theorests, some of them taken out of context, or taken as true, fuel their strange theories of an "inside job".) Fast Company at one point muses, "That the site has gotten a hold of half a million pager messages sent by the Pentagon, NYPD, and transit network employees is perhaps a little questionable," but doesn't get any sort of indignation cranked up in the way people do with Murdoch. Indeed, I'm not finding anyone did at the time.

Why is that? It's not just that the response to hacking isn't really about ethics and the law -- but about tribes, as lefties vocal on forums line up to support "their" WikiLeaks and savage the alien Murdoch, that Mr. Moneybags they hate.

It's also because people perceive the two stories as being about "the people" and "taking down those in power" -- in the case of WikiLeaks, anarchists get to incite hacking because it is against those in power; in Murdoch's case, news executives, especially if they are close to government, don't get to use hacking because they are attacking people more vulnerable than them.

The real issue, I assure you, is that hacking itself is the power, and hackers are those who are in power, and that's why hacking itself has to be examined and condemned -- not just its subjects or objects.

What do relatives feel about WikiLeaks hacking and exposing the messages involving their loved ones and officers who fell that day? Surely the same thing that relatives feel about the intrusion from Murdoch's people. Yet...we never heard from them because the tabloid media never whipped them up -- it was mainly a kind of historical and technical story as a result -- and because the litigation industry didn't seize on the potential for lawsuits -- having also not been whipped up by the media. See how that works?

HACKING THOSE IN POWER -- AND HACKING AS POWER

@marc_cart on Twitter replies to my tweet about this double standard issue as follows, "main difference IMO is that wikileaks releases raw data while murdoch tabloids *edit*, shape, & select. public trust edits less now 8 hours ago

Oh, baloney. First of all, the issue isn't whether you edit or release raw data in *publishing*. The issue is *your relationship to hacking*. I believe that the Wired chatlogs show an unmistakeable direct relationship between Julian Assange and Bradley Manning -- one that Glenn Greenwald and others deliberately spin to distract from the implications for an indictment. WikiLeaks is widely perceived as "not hacking itself" but I question that. In any event, it incites hacking and unquestionably encourages hacking as it is the recipient of the stolen goods.

In the same way, News of the World used intermediaries and "didn't hack itself" -- it hired private investigators or paid corrupt cops. Wait, you're going to tell me that agitating and inciting submissions of hacked material isn't as bad as paying investigators and cops?Only because free speech can't be prosecuted in the first instance, most likely, and the second instance is a recognizeable crime. But as *an instrument* is still morally to be condemned, and does not become sanitized merely for being used to attack those in power.

Of course, the geek perspectives that tools are neutral and hacking is a positive activity merely being about bright kids using code or social hacking feeds into this.

BUT WIKILEAKS IS, TOO, EDITED

As for the notion of a "raw feed" from WikiLeaks, there is no more cunning and duplicitous editor of the WikiLeaks cable material than Julian Assange and his cohorts. Remember, there are 250,000 cables, and yet only 15,000 or so have been published. Why those, and not others? Why not the whole thing? They've been sifted, selected, and strategically released, often at crucial times to influence events. That means they've been held back and not published until it is in the interests of these anarchists (like their revelations on Visa and Mastercard and US involvement in the company in Russia); that means even now, they are still holding back.

If that isn't editing, um, I don't know what you call it. Worse, there are myriad deals where the stuff is doled out to various papers, again on a strategic basis, and with deals being made all over the place, that eventually left the Guardian and the New York Times feeling very burned, as they made clear in their reporting. And worst of all, the decisions of whose names to redact is also very subject and/or strategic -- I've seen cables where the Western official mentioned in a source gets exposed, but the Central Asian source doesn't and is X'd out, perhaps out of that anti-Western animus that rivulates through all of WikiLeaks work.

INCITEMENT OF HACKING: WHOSE PUBLIC INTEREST?

So, unlike Luke Allnutt, I don't fear "shrill exercises in moral equivalency" implied by calling out double standards. Yet the Wired chat logs, especially the fuller version, let us know that it isn't just about leaking; it's leaking plus being aided and abetted and encouraged. Of course, these chat logs may not be admissible in court and maybe there will never be a "trial truth" produced showing that incitement and abetting from Assange "beyond a reasonable doubt," just like there isn't a "trial truth" for Casey Anthony. That's how justice works. But you can't hang up a shingle saying "Leak to us" and actively participate in explanations about how to use Tor and how to encrypt communications, and then suddenly claim purity as a mere repository. Really, it's important to distinguish between *non-prosecutability* due to the Supreme Court precedent of Times v. Sullivan and the Pentagon Papers, and *the ethics of dealing with anarchists with an agenda who incite hacking.*

Emma Gerain has pointed out that the news media has always broken the law to get the truth, and if there is a presumably higher public interest, then ultimately society doesn't judge this and the court cases are dropped.

So again, it's about who is the keeper of the sense of "the public interest." Is it a bunch of lefty geeks cheering themselves hoarse on Jeff Jarvis' blogs and G+? Is it more mainstream readers who feel reticent about WikiLeaks and believes it was harmful, but wouldn't tolerate hacking into a dead girl's phone? Is it the courts, who will do nothing about Assange and the New York Times, as they don't appear to have a case, but will probably sentence Manning for hacking and theft of federal files -- and in the UK, will may try but not likely sentence heavily big news executives?

 

Two Pieces of Red Meat for Civil Libertarians

Two big pieces of red meat for civil libertarians to chew on today:

First, the US use of biometrics to track Afghan men of fighting age.

I'm familiar with biometrics -- did you realize that Turkmenistan, that might not even have running water in some of its towns this summer, despite its gas and oil wealth, incorporated biometrics into its passports (which are also helping to weed out Russian-speakers and force them out of their dual passport status). Yes, biometrics from a repressive post-Soviet near-totalitarian regime -- understood -- although none of the same people now salivating about this story ever cared about it, even though Turkmenistan is just over the Afghan border.

So, what is my first reaction? Naturally, there is revulsion that we are penetrating into the privacy and the lives and the affairs of this war-torn nation even further. Does the end justify the means? We naturally ask that about everything to do with this war. But this really seems excessive (and also likely prone to hacking, glitches, technical false firings, etc. etc.) Does it even accomplish its goal? Wouldn't terrorists by nature avoid this sort of process anyway?

I have to wonder, however, as usual when I see the left in indignation about each new outrage of this sort, just what is the plan for restraining terrorists. Terrorists from the Taliban kill 85 percent of the civilians in Afghanistan, not NATO, as you can read on my other blog, Not Killed by American Troops which I started in order to try to get an awareness of this fact. Even the UN is now admitting this and Ban Ki Moon is protesting it. That's really quite a development.

When you see horrific terrorist acts of suicide bombers killing 30, 40, 80, 100 people, you think that the biometric approach may be justified. There's the rationale. Does it accomplish it goals? 

But all you have to do here is to practice a basic Christian truth: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Would you like yourself and your children to be subjected to biometric scanning of this sort? By your own government? By a foreign government? Ok, then.

Whatever the justification, and there are serious ones, when you reach the point in a war where you a squatting down and scanning the irises of Afghan farmers, maybe it's time to go home? You've lost.

Now, as to the other red meat, boy, we'll see endless anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hollering about this one.

Shelly Palmer tells us about a new techno-intrusion.

He mines it not so much for its political value but the larger issues of states and borders and people.

It seems Israel is using "social media listening posts" to gather data about incoming flotilla activists and then ban them at the border. Good! says I. Because I think that inciting and inviting violence is not the role of any decent civic movement and I personally have condemned this sort of activity.

It was very clear during the first flotilla that people were openly plotting and planning deliberately to goad and harass and disrupt border protection in order to force it into some knee-jerk action that would then enable the activists to plead the victim. And that worked perfectly as planned, in true socialist-cadre organization fashion.

But I think it's absolutely disgusting for movements calling themselves "humanitarian" to use those sorts of "direct action" violent tactics. At least admit what you are: extreme political sectarians, not humanitarians guided by the rule of law.

So if the Israeli government wants to sift through the blogs and tweets and pull out names of people planning to provoke like that, I can only say "Go to it," and those people planning confrontation and the instigation of violent responses deserve what they get, which is a block at the border precisely to prevent them from inciting and causing violence. Again, good!

Yes, the civil libertarian flinches at the thought of government trawling social media to compile lists. But, what would you have them do? These are democratically-elected liberal states. There might not be recognition of that on the left that yes, both Israel and the US are democratic, liberal states in the sense that they are free and governments are elected democratically. So why should they be available to have their borders run over by anarchists and have their streets turned into mayhem with anti-globalist demonstrators? They shouldn't. There isn't some social crime in maintaining order in a liberal democratic state -- and there's where I would disagree with the socialists and radicals.

I first saw this phenomenon at the Republican Convention in New York some years ago. I showed up to follow the, um, people's demonstration and was hoping to cover it as a freelance reporter. The ranks swelled larger than anticipated and police were challenged how to deal with the larger column. The organizers insisted on changing the route after the fact, in contradiction to their permit. The police in fact adapted to an extent but insisted that they could not come closer to the venue of the Republican meeting, a hotel on the West side behind Penn Station if I recall correctly.

I remember acidly noting to myself, as the Keningston Welfare action people came marching into view, that the young people marching bedecked with both still and video cameras and cell phones were rather belying the point of their poor welfare status -- their social media apparatus would feed a family for months. These were the sort of affluent lefty urban youth that attach to such movements. I watched in fascination as these new media morons posed and capered and cavorted so that they'd get some great photos for their blogs and emails and edgy radical websites (Facebook wasn't quite as popular then but was available). These new-media characters would climb utility polls and perch dangerously or climb over the curb and stand on police sawhorses and such, and naturally would be told to get down.

Some of them more rambunctious who bragged to indymedia.com and got their photos posted may have been surprised to have the NYPD come hustle them off the scene rather quickly. It didn't take rocket science to see how the police had already figured out how to follow the social media and track trouble-makers. The question is really whether you trust the police to pick out genuine instigators of violence from those merely peacefully protesting. I do. Others may not. It's again, whether you respect the notion of a liberal democratic state or not.

We came to a phalanx of policemen on bikes and there was such a crowd some of us started getting pushed up on to the sidewalk willy-nilly, and found police giving orders to get back in the street that we couldn't always easily fulfill.

I walked up E. 23rd Street by the post office, and was troubled to see suddenly, about 3-4 policemen materializing in the midst of the crowd of marchers and grabbing very specifically several people walking along or carrying banners, and hustling them away. It was the sort of thing you wouldn't see if you blinked. Of course, there were legions of ACLU and other monitors and they hustled off yelping about this in some instances and naturally there was an adversarial process. I don't know what the reason was for these types of arrests; I'm going to guess it was about the photo bragging, or tips that involved these leaders were going to go off route.

Which is of course what happened -- groups began to storm the police barricades up by the hotel and not take the restraints as justified, even though it went against the permit. And of course here, too, the police response was troubling -- I saw a phalanx of police on motorized bikes drive right into a crowd, deliberately, knocking over some unarmed and non-aggressive protesters who weren't doing anything but just standing nearby. And that's what happens when you provoke and provoke and provoke, and then get that police brutality you wished for that allows you to pose fabulously for your movement newsletter, perhaps even with ripped jeans. Or get in the hospital with a broken leg, which isn't what you planned. I still felt it was wrong, and I still felt the police could have found other ways to address the challenges than drive into a crowd. But, so could the demonstrators.

Then a group of us who were reporting got pushed back into a parking lot with no exit and held there for a time by a long row of police who had readied themselves with huge rolls of plastic handcuffs. There's something very definitely creepy about seeing dozens of police vans roll up 7th Avenue with huge rolls of plastic cuffs that haven't been used yet, but will be. We crouched down in the gravel and tried to avoid getting in the way.

There are numerous photos and videos of police brutality on other occasions, including of the NYPD, and sometimes they are presented in highly tendentious fashion.

The point of all of this for me is that if the protesters are watching and shooting images and publishing them, they have to expect the police are, too. And that ultimately, if you come planning to incite and cause violence, you get what you paid for.

There just isn't enough questioning of the violence inherent in the flotillists or the radical demonstrators of New York. I do question it.

No, Let's Leave the Internet Alone, Rebecca MacKinnon

TED is a cult, and now Rebecca MacKinnon is spreading her ideas in concert with the TED cult.

This popular video (by geek standards -- it has 91,000 views already) seems deceptively appealing. Who isn't for Internet freedom? Who isn't for stumping for citizens' movements fighting authoritarians in oppressed places like Egypt or Yemen or Belarus or China? Say, who isn't booing at those Western corporations that sell technology to those totalitarians? Boo, hiss!

But as I often find with Rebecca, who shares some of the same causes and colleagues and ideals that I have, there are some very, very significant and troubling differences in this form of the agenda that I have to call out.

Mainly, what this is about is the prescriptive role assigned to the Internet and social media that she and her supporters favour, and it's about insufficient respect for freedom of association -- which is also at the heart of freedom of expression -- and lack of faith in free markets, which engenders a call for state planning and intervention.

DON'T IMPOSE CONTENT ON CARRIERS

MacKinnon  illustrates her talk with the famous 1984 Apple ad, smashing Big Brother's screen. Then -- as if this was morally equivalent to Orwell (Apple was silly enough making it seem like a gadget would free you as much as a moral struggle against communism) she mentions the "censorship" of aps on Apple's smart phones.

Yet "censorship" is not what non-state actors -- corporations -- engage in, as that is something only governments can do. A freely-formed association with freely-made membership and use of its services can set rules like guidelines for content to ensure the maximum number of customers and minimal legal problems. That's okay to do. So if Apple doesn't want to sponsor the intifada ap, that's fine. That's a good thing! Why shouldn't it be concerned about inciting hatred of Jews and Israel and abetting a violent movement?! (MacKinnon's curious tone-deafness to that problem of incitement of violence is of course one of the urgent moral issues of the professional human rights industry today.) If Apple does this after pressure from influential community leaders, that's ok. That's what good corporate citizens do.

If some other comic strip ad seemed it might be offensive; if there was content that was too adult on some other ap, why can't the company do what it wants?! You can't have a government imposing the porting of content a company doesn't want, and most customers don't want in the name of some vague do-gooder's notion of civil society. That just doesn't apply here. These are classic cases of the sort of prescription of morality that usually leftists blame the morality brigade on the right for indulging in.

Because there's a simple solution. Don't like Apple's blocking of the intifada ap? Rather than devising blanket-wide content-imposition policies for all carriers, go over to CREDO, a lefty "progressive" cell phone company that pays you to switch from your evil capitalist oppressive cell company to their service, and is no doubt welcoming the intifada ap with open arms. If they aren't, maybe Al Jazeera is in the ap business. Or some other Arab League-sponsored cell company. You're in a free market -- Apple is not required to serve every customer or verge on breaking the law. Let CREDO take the heat if that's the kind of customer it wants and needs.

And that is the solution to MacKinnon's urgent agitation about the "unfree" Internet  (that is, the shallow part of the unfreedom that is nothing like the unfreedom in China or Syria). In fact, it's what the Internet is in fact doing very well, without her ministrations. Go elsewhere. If that "elsewhere" doesn't exist, maybe there isn't a market demand for it. Maybe philanthropists can't even support it! But don't make the imposition of content on private corporations your goal -- it's wrong, and it's unfree.

AMAZON IS NOT A VICTIM

MacKinnon, like several other human rights groups, wrongfully raise the notion of Amazon "having" to host WikiLeaks as well. That's also in fact an oppressive interference in the right of association. Amazon's a big boy and doesn't have to host anarchists inciting theft of government documents if it doesn't want to. This recurring raising of Joe Lieberman as a bogey man here is silly -- he's an elected official, he gets to question corporations about their conduct. Is MacKinnon not for congress people questioning corporations about their conduct?! She'd want that to be done on environmental causes and other trendy causes the left supports. Same principle! Lieberman called Amazon to account on their TOS compliance. Their system works with abuse reports. He made a high profile abuse report. Good! Because Amazon shouldn't risk the livelihoods of its authors and used book and other sellers, and shouldn't risk its own business, on hosting the dox of a bunch of anarchists bent on bringing the US to its knees.

There's a market. They can go elsewhere. And so they did, to wikileaks.ch, which is the neutral domain of Switzerland, so to speak. The solution is not for governments or activists to impose certain content or activities in support of certain "progressive" goals (ill-defined) on corporations; the analogy here is not the sweatshop or the toxic waste campaigns that had visible and tangible and concrete goals. The goal is to ensure there is a free market and that the government enforces the law.

PRETTY THREADBARE STORY

Indeed, the Lieberman story is getting pretty tired. This "big threat" to Amazon doesn't really stand up to prolonged scrutiny. Lieberman didn't run again, and Amazon never complained about "pressure" from "the government" in this form. They didn't want to host stolen documents --  you must warrant that the content is your own when you rent Amazon servers. Really, the charge here of government interference has gotten rather threadbare, when the WikiLeaks have been published all over the world, and are now mostly a bore to everybody except people interested in regional affairs -- I'm one of the few people actually left writing about actual cables in actual countries, and remain continually concerned about the individuals exposed and vulnerable to harm in these cables.

MacKinnon might have dusted off the anecdote of the State Department official who called SIPA grads in a panic and warned them they wouldn't get jobs in the government if they accessed WikiLeaks -- but since she moves in those circles she would likely concede that that story isn't a very good example of evil government oppression either -- it's just a one-off, from some guy who thought he'd tell a few friends not to harm their careers.

In fact, the virtual absence of any statements, let alone legal action, since Harold Koh's Cease & Desist letter from the government, and some impounding of Twitter account data, there's been precious little in the way of "oppressive actions" from our government. To say that there is some sort of "chill" over WikiLeakers and their friends is preposterous.

GO WHERE THE REAL ABSENCE OF FREEDOM IS

And that's what really clinches it for me, and so separates me from what might seem a common cause with Rebecca MacKinnon. When I fight for Internet Freedom, I don't want to be "fighting" for "freedom" from giant corporations like Amazon that can indeed decide not to host what are clearly stolen documents even before a trial of law (she seems to think that it has to wait until a jury verdict before complying with its TOS -- it doesn't.)

I want to save it for the struggle against the jailing of my friends in Charter97.org, whose arms and legs are broken or brused who are languishing in prison, their computers confiscated. I'd rather save it for exposing the issue of half a country's cell phone users losing service on a government whim, as happened in Turkmenistan. I'd rather have it raising with officials the plight of Syrians trying to get out the news via Youtube and Twitter. I'm sorry, but the fight against...Joe Lieberman asking a...big corporation if they could follow their own legitimate TOS doesn't strike me as on the same moral or philosophical plane, and I won't confuse them in fake equivalencies.

Joe Lieberman didn't run for election again. New senators get elected. Problem solved, Rebecca? It's a democracy. Vote as you wish for the policies you favour rather than having NGO lobbyists coupled with one set of companies (Google, Electronic Freedom Foundation) gang up on another set (Facebook).

RUSSIA DOESN'T NEED TO BLOCK THE INTERNET, IT BAKED IN THE KGB

There's other sections of her TED talk that don't work for me -- the perpetually reiterated notion (courtesy of Evgeny Morozov) that Russia "doesn't block the Internet." But of course it does. Live Journal was down for days -- deliberately -- in pre-election flexing of muscles in Russia by forces with those muscles. Sites are blocked all the time. Friends lose their privileges on ZhZh all the time for content on specious grounds.

More importantly, those security services that "somehow" obtained the data on the users of RosPil aren't a one-off; the reason the KGB's successors don't have to crudely shut down the Internet is because they already control it; the domain name process, various licensing processes, etc. Most importantly, they don't have to resort to crude blockages like Turkmenistan  because they are  monitoring the Russian Internet intensively, and interfering with state sock puppets  in discussions everywhere, and they can and do prevail. They win, over and over again because they are baked into the Internet's tools. The entire "managed democracy" concept is a Kremlin inspiration. The anti-corruption movement; the bar camps; Skolkovo and "innovation"; Ushahidi; all of these things aren't "blocked" because...they're already soaking in it, and the boundaries are already circumscribed.

That's what happens when there isn't a free market, with a free and vibrant civil society, the state takes over the Internet even with the fiction of private companies still providing services, when really their portals are open to the secret police's SORM at any moment.

NO, NOT JUST A CITIZEN-CENTRIC INTERNET

MacKinnon may overdiagnose lack of Internet freedom or risk to the web in places I wouldn't (Amazon); she may situate the heat of blame on Western corporations for selling the technology more than on the Chinese Communist Party, as I would; but these aren't really the important debate to have.

Because what MacKinnon calls for a "citizen-centric Internet, a broader and more sustained Internet freedom movement."

This sounds absolutely lovely, and the sort of thing I'd click and join in a heartbeat. Yet, knowing how the concept of "citizenry" can end up in the hands of "progressives" -- cadre organizations, the stealth socialist techniques of moveon.org which are out in full force now -- I have to pause. Do we want a certain kind of Internet run by only some certain kind of thing like that? No.

The question here is obviously this: which citziens? Who gets to decide what those "citizen-centric" Internet policies are all about? GNI? No thanks.

It's also part of this international jet-set of the "civil society -- c'est moi" set who run the global organizations and conferences to call for "citizen" stuff that they know they can control. There's this glamourization of the role of the NGO, as if they are halo'd actors, never doing wrong, always pure in intent, never striving for power, always doing good. I'm not buying it.

PLURALISM ON THE INTERNET

The Internet is as free as it is now in its freest places because it is a combination of individuals, associations, and governments, as well as multilateral organizations, civic and state. It's that pluralism that ensures its viability and health and freedom. Citizen-run things can often be fake, especially in settings like the UN, where bad-minded states make GONGOs and call them civic groups. How do you set up that citizen-run Internet? I don't want to run the Internet as a citizen along with Gulnara Karimova, the Uzbek president's daughter who runs a GONGO that has accreditation at the UN now, for example. I don't want to fight for policies among cadre NGOS run essentially by the intelligence services of Cuba, Hamas, Iran, Pakistan, and so on. No thank you.

When people talk about "citizen-run" stuff, they imagine some merry round table of their friends on the conference jet-set meeting in, oh, Ljublana or something. But that's not what you get when citizens take power; when they do that, the powerful come rushing in as wolves in sheep's clothing. I really don't see a viable and true way to make "a citizen-centric Internet" other than just...to make one where you stand without this almost infantile demand that corporations and governments step aside. Believe in citizen-centric Internet branches? Make one. Fill it with content. Do it. Don't impose that methodology on the entire Internet. I'm happy to have Facebook and even Google manage things, even with their bad TOS that cripple user-generated content creator rights and so on, instead of having a People's Democracy kind of affair, or some ineffectual, large and baggy INGO that has various insufferably bossy personalities in it.

Why? Because MacKinnon wants to make a citizen-centric Internet that cannot respect Amazon's right of association; that can't respect the idea that companies should not be forced to hold stolen documents; that can't respect the idea that it's morally wrong and criminally liable to steal the classified documents of an elected government. That's where I want my citizen-centric-ness -- on my democratically-elected government that is entrusted to classify documents -- not in the hands of anarchists who decide without my involvement and against my will to steal documents. The idea that the government is doing wrong in my name is a powerful motivation for civil disobedience.

But WikiLeaks' Cablegate has not shown us that, has it Rebecca.

So, really, seriously, let's leave the Internet alone. Organic growth is a pretty good thing.

NO HUMAN RIGHT TO THE INTERNET REQUIRED

And here's where my major difference with MacKinnon rests. She calls for a Magna Carta of the Internet. Hell, no. I've been in many such discussions in the virtual world realm for seven years. Again -- hell, no. *Shudder*. The constituents for such an assembly aren't defined and can't be properly represented in the non-democracies of social media software platforms -- full stop. They are not suitable for a fair political fight. They are not transparent. They are not accountable. The anonymity that Rebecca demands becomes a huge problem in a voting and a debate system -- huge. They are not representatives. Countries are -- with legislatures.

Proof of the inevitable extremist and authoritarian impulses of the online "saviours" is what happened on like day 7 of Google+ -- Infinity Linden (Meadhbh) immediately started drafting a constitution and inviting her pals, the influentials of Silicon Valley, to start brainstorming with her. Let's have net neutrality! Let's have free Internet! And as I pointed out, these sorts of activities are always suspect. There are no committees of correspondence. No constituent assembly. No drafting committee that faces then ELECTED representatives. It's done backward, by the cadres. And as we know, from Stalin, "The cadres decide everything." Again, NO THANK YOU.

BETTERWORLDISM

The philosophy Rebecca MacKinnon brings to the table here  is one rooted in a kind of cyber-utopian premise that is ultimately instrumental, and she articulates it well:

"The only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens," she says. Yes.

And one might add -- to protect citizens from each other. That's the most difficult part of governance, after you solve the problem of making the people safe from the state, and get the king to follow laws. Protecting people from each other. That's the part the social media platforms fail at in many ways.

Then MacKinnon continues:

"The only legitimate purpose of technology "to improve our lives, not manipulate or enslave us."

Well, no. This may seem like an inconsequential point, but it's actually quite subtle as we victims of the "Better World" movement in Second Life can tell you. Technology is just a tool. It can't improve our lives, by itself. And -- news flash -- human nature isn't capable of improving; it can only be restrained or ajudicated.

Technology isn't an animated, "bettering" force. Left to its own devices, technology often devastates our lives, with identity theft, cyberbullying, financial loss , industry and job loss. Netflix needed to sell that $2 DVD on top of the stream offer for $8 -- and four video parlours close in my neighbourhood and all the jobs and offerings in them disappear. Now Netflix raises its prices 60 percent. That was worth destroying the livelihoods of those companies just in my 20-block radius?

Tom Friedman tells us an awful social Darwinist truth in the Times: all these big huge billion dollar new media companies, taken together, have only 20,000 people working in them. That's it. They don't create jobs. They do not distribute value in the form of livelihoods for people and revenue for communities. They create wealth for a few people at the top. That's a reason to start an Internet freedom movement, yet the solution isn't to make the Internet then inhospitable to business and to restrain corporations so that there is no freedom.

WE DON'T NEED AN EXTRA INTERNET HUMAN RIGHT

Rebecca is consumed with "consent of the networked now" (and it's the title of a forthcoming book).  But, you consent when you log on and sign the TOS. The task is surely to make better TOS. But you also have other options rather than to log on to a service that you don't like.

Amazon didn't wish to host WikiLeaks' stolen documents. The market in the world provided other options. Volunteers stepped forward and risked independently storing them; finally some hosting company in ch did. This happened spontaneously; the problem isn't Joe Lieberman doing his job for his constituents as he sees fit; the problem is not getting in the way of the Internet's diversity as it already exists.

I don't want a Magna Carter for the Internet. There isn't a human right to the Internet that has to be concocted and negotiated with the bad-minded at the UN. "The right to receive and impart information regardless of frontiers" is a concept already enshrined in International law. We never had a telegraph or telephone or fax or email Bill of Rights of special "human right". That's because they were only tools, tools that people made, and it is people who organically make policies, not machines that must be coded to automatically provide "freedom".

We don't have a right to drive cars. We have a right to freedom of movement. We don't have a right to a temple. We have a right to freedom of belief or non-belief. The means and mechanisms of delivery of rights have never been fetishized themselves before, and we don't need to start doing this with concocted "Internet rights".

MacKinnon even talks about "changes to software and code" that has to accompany her Magna Carta. No. No "code as law," please, we're already a free democracy. The real task for Internet Freedom isn't to pick up these "progressive" causes which are parochial political fights inside the US like "net neutrality" which are really resource-dividing fights, and instead focus on the places where the Internet really is blocked by bad actors, whether Sudan or Turkey or Belarus or any other country with restrictive laws.

 

 

The Shocking Double Standards over Murdoch and WikiLeaks

I've been absolutely appalled at the double standards -- the screaming double standards -- on the story of Murdoch's hacking of public and private persons' cell phones and the hacking exploited by WikiLeaks.

It truly boggles the mind, how many people are plussing up the Google+ waves with puffed-up chests in indignation about what Murdoch's paper has been caught doing who were never, ever available to utter a word of criticism about WikiLeaks, doing the exact same thing (and, arguably, with more far-reaching damages to more people and governments around the world).

To my mind, they are very similar; hacking is wrong, unethical, and criminal in both cases and should be prosecuted, and yes, in both cases, there is not a direct relationship to actual hacking, but intermediaries are used. That doesn't sanitize it in either case.

What enables most of these lefty geeks and Internet-bred freaks to be unable even to compare these two very, very similar acts of criminality is that they maintain that WikiLeaks "doesn't hack".

Oh, no? Of course they hack. They have hacked in the past to get certain things, and they incite hacking, and exploit hacking. They are a very concerted operation dedicated to the instigation of hacking. That's what they do.  They aren't a news operation and Assange is no journalist, not with his ideology of "the worse the better" for the US. As Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer, beautifully summarized it, Assange is a source, not a journalist. Full stop.  A particularly fickle and manipulative and even smelly source, as Bill Keller has explained.

You could say Murdoch's News of the World didn't hack either, you know. They hired private investigators. The PIs do the dirty week reaching unscrupulous phone people or gaining access through social hacks or actual hacks. (In fact, most of it seems to have been accomplished by "blagging," i.e. dealing with rogue police and other officials willing to sell information). In the same way, WikiLeaks winks and nods and gets Anonymous to do the hacking -- dog-whistling to their hounds.  Or they find fellow travellers like Manning. They don't have to buy and sell; they are ideologues and cultists and attrack fellow conspirators.

Now that the full Wired chat logs are in the news again, I have to say that they are getting a serious validation by Wired and Gawker and others. And these chat logs leave no ambiguity:   despite his counsel's lies that he had no contact with Manning, these chat logs show Assange directly communication with Manning several times, and with Manning discussing him and with Lamo, the "rat" who squealed on him to the FBI, even asking why Manning seems to be doing Assange's bidding.

None of this may stand up in anything other than the court of public opinion, but the same people who say piously "WikiLeaks does not hack"  will also say, not batting an eyelash (like some nerd just did on Google+) that "WikiLeaks is not even remotely connected to Anonymous." *Bursts out laughing*. Or that WikiLeaks has nothing to do with Manning. But of course they are intimately connected.

Yeah, right. That's why Anonymous is *still* to this day hacking and disabling the sites of Visa and Mastercard because it refuses to process payments to WikiLeaks. And that's why someone like Manning can come forward so easily to Assange -- it's not like they are disconnected. What, blagging by a rogue police officer to a sleazy journalist is terrible, a crime, an indictiment of the entire Western world and capitalist social system for the media? Yet a troubled soldier casually downloading a ton of files from a system already weakened by the wiki-cult, running to an anarchist collective of like-minded political extremists, that's ok? Because...why? Because "you have to fight the man"? Or what?

More seriously, what most of those arguing that these two have nothing to do with each other is a moral question, and a very heart-breaking one: the Murdoch journalists reportedly hired the private detectives to hack into a missing teenage girl's phone. She was later found dead. So that's a hugely emotional issue, obviously, and of course, the kind of mud-covered tabloid journalism that makes people scorn Murdoch and the yellow press.

It's awfully hard to get any critical distance on a story like that when it is in the fierce heat of outrage as it is in these recent days. But let's try.

First of all, there is no evidence whatsoever that the Murdoch journalists *deliberately* tried to cause the girl's family anguish. There's no evidence that they intentionally tried to foil police work, either. Yet these charges are made constantly in loud decibals in every forum, merely because they did something self-serving and stupid and unthinking -- they deleted some of the messages on the dead girl's phone to make room for more to come in.

Anguished relatives were calling and calling to see if she would come home. And seeing that messages deleted off the account, they were thinking she might be alive, although she was long dead. Horrible!

But that wasn't deliberate. The newspaper reporters were trying to get the story. It's sleazy, but it's   not malicious. Perhaps they believed she was a runaway, and not missing. Perhaps they thought she was kidnapped and they might get a clue before the slower police would. I don't know. I haven't researched it and they don't seem to tell.

Yet you definitely don't see any of that malicious glee that you find with Anonymous when *they* harass the parents and friends of dead kids. Which is of course, something they are notorious for. Which is  precisely why they are screaming the loudest in faux outrage at Murdoch, the mainstream press, claiming his journalists are guilty of doing what they do -- all in an effort to undermine the establishment media (and tabloid is still more establishment than WikiLeaks!) in their general anarchic and terrorist plan to sow mayhem and destruction.

I will never forget years ago first encountering the fiercely griefing creepy avatar An Hero in Second Life. He was an account of a b-tard who kept swooping down and harassing tenants in private moments or just as they walked around, swarming everywhere and maliciously enjoying people's suffering. He was banned everywhere and constantly abuse reported but the Lindens left him in the list for a long time. I didn't realize he was a meme-name at first until it was explained to me -- as you can read, this is the Internet name for a dead teenager taken from a sentimental poem about him. The boy committed suicide over another student stealing his i-pod -- a very modern tale.

Horridly, the 4channers (this is the site owned and operated by Chris Poole or "Moot" whom Fred Wilson and Ron Conway finance in the other venture called Canvas) went and bullied this boy's family. They called them and laughed at them and told them they'd got the ipod back.

4chan and ebaum and similar Anonymous offshoots have done this a number of times with the families of dead children. It's what they do. There are horrific accounts of this, documented in essays like the Wikipedia essay on Cyberbullying. When people recall these known and documented facts about 4chan and Anonymous, you'll often find people like the griefer-apologist professors saying oh, but they fight the Iranian or the Syrian regime. Um, ok. But they do this, too. And keep doing it. It's what they do. For the lulz.

This is deliberate harassing. Malicious attacking to make people hurt on purpose.

That's way, way different than rowdy tabloid reporters just trying to get messages, and deleting some unthinkingly of the consequences.

We're constantly told that this harmed the police investigation. Indeed it may have. But...what were those messages? If the News deleted them, were they really of news value? They were either the anguished calls of the family, or, something that is common in all these cases which you can read about on Wikipedia as well -- the sickos who call the number with things like job offers and greetings and whatnot -- there were a number of impersonators doing that and some of them were criminally charged. It's copycat sick stuff. So if the journalists' erased one of those messages, after presumably recording it, no harm no foul.

But...what *did* they erase? We never know. And we don't need to know. But what's clear is that this was not deliberate, in order to cause anguish, or stop police from doing their job; it was just careless and arrogant and wrong. Say, can anyone make moral distinctions like that anymore? I guess not, when they're busy whitewashing WikiLeaks and blackening Murdoch because he's old media, but mostly because he's a rich capitalist, one of those "Mr. Moneybags" that the LulzSec parodies.

The police were indeed hampered in their work if they thought the girl was still alive -- but if they were doing their job, they'd have to be following up any number of hypotheses. The seriousness of this act's *consequences* if not its *intent* may rightly bring criminal charges. But I don't find anyone worried about the chilling effect that the notion that you can be charged with "interfering with a police investigation of a crime" by *attempting to cover it* could have. And indeed it will. Like it does in countries like Kazakhstan where "interference with the secrecy of the investigation" is a severe offense leading to imprisonment of reporters.

And of course, there are all the other public figures. Now with cases like Gordon Brown, we're getting into truly exact moral equivalence because WikiLeaks pries open the private communications of public political figures just as well, and just as casually, and of course, in the end, more maliciously, as it comes with a theory, which is to cripple the US deliberately. At least the tabloid press has a notion of "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable" or the "public's right to know," although of course it feeds the public's prurience.

And ultimately, Murdoch is more of a gentleman than Assange; when caught doing something he wrong, he fell on his sword and closed his tabloid. You don't find the white-haired wonder doing that as he endlessly tries to self-justify.

The news business isn't such a lucrative affair these days, knocked for a loop by the Internet and smart phones, that even the left can't really speak of evil money-grudding newsmen -- you would think. But they do. So rabid is their aversion to the rich, the profit-making, the capitalist (except, of course, when the company is Google and the Mr. Moneybags is Larry Page) that they imagine that these tabloid types cravenly do everything just for money.

But at the level of those journalists, I think it's more about trying to hang on to their jobs -- and even back then when the story of the young girl's death took place, it was about getting ahead in their profession, such as it is, and being the best at what they do.

Ultimately, the Murdoch story is a story about unethical -- and possibly even criminal! -- hacking. And so is WikiLeaks. And so is Anonymous. Yet in those cases, there are legions of lefties ready to excuse and distract from the crimes of those Internet vandals and extremists. They won't make the same excuses for Murdoch merely because he is a capitalist. That's all.

Another way in which the protectors of WikiLeaks attempt to distract attention from the similarities in the two unethical acts of Murdoch's papers and WikiLeaks is by screeching, "But Murdoch hacked the phones of 9/11 victims!" They hope that sure-fire third-rail will get people absolutely white-hot livid in the remaining grief even after 10 years, and clinch the story.

Well, it doesn't. Hacking the phones of dead 9/11 victims is appalling and disgustingly sleazy; it's wrong and possibly even criminal. That doesn't somehow exonerate the hacking into the government files of the US, which is itself a 9/11 victim. Naturally, individual firemen and office workers are more emotionally vivid to us all (I live here) than the abstractions of "the Pentagon" or "the US" as a country, but there is still the fact that it is a victim of a crime against humanity. That's why crimes against humanity are called such when at the scale of 3000 people.

P.S., we don't know for a fact that there *was* a hacking into the 9/11 victims' phones; the story involves a corrupt former cop willing to sell the information -- but it's not clear he did or what was obtained.

The justification for WikiLeaks -- that there are two unjust wars, that, as some nit put it in a forums, "they reveal that the first world exploits the third world" (hardly the case, from WikiLeaks revelations) -- just doesn't stand up. Nothing we have learned from WikiLeaks in Cablegate ever justified the damage caused, and yes, people are harmed, and yes, they are endangered and don't worsen their situation by telling you about it.I've actually written about these cables far more than anyone else and actually studied them more than most, and I can validate that. There isn't the care with redacting out sources everyone imagines, my God, go and read them, that's easily established.

As for the revelations before Cablegate about Iraq, did it end the war, did it lead to justice? No. And not because that's the way of the wicked world, but because it's not a compelling story. Whatever crimes committed by the US in the invasion in the first place and the killing of civilians are dwarfed by the appalling death toll of civilians killed by terrorists, aided by Iran and Al Qaeda. WikiLeaks didn't work because it wasn't a just cause and it wasn't sincere and it was really not about righting wrongs, but about cultic self-aggrandizement.

Netflix Destroyed All the Real Video Businesses In My Community For What, Again?

One of my chronic sights as I stroll around my neighbourhood is the four shuttered video stores, still with the ghostly type of "Blockbusters" and other independent company names on the storefronts. Dark, cluttered, unrented for months on end...

All destroyed by Netflix, the way other bricks-and-businesses have been destroyed by the Internet. All in the name of "better".

The price-hike of Netflix is so very Second Life. It reminds me of that 60 percent or more price hike on the homesteads (the void sims); on the islands before that. They did it because they could; they did it when their loss-leading low price suddenly caught them in a crunch of costs.

Netflix has the California business model of clicking and endless pushing of ads and offers -- it's relentless. A day doesn't go by that I don't try to close the window on some Netflix ad chasing me.

And of course, it's too good to be true. That incredibly low cost wasn't sustainable. Pogue claims after an extensive drilling of the Netflix exec that it's about the cost of mailing DVDs that wasn't anticipated to be such a big part of the business. He doesn't mention it, but the cost of postage going up surely is a factor.

Funny, isn't it, that people wanted DVDs in the mail, and weren't happy with just the stream. Now why do you think that was?

o some movies weren't available in the stream, possibly due to licensing issues or because Hollywood still needs to sell objects to make a living -- and that's ok

o but more to the point, some people just don't want to sit up in a chair in front of a computer screen. They want to sit on a couch or a lounge and put a DVD in a video player or hey, one of those jimmied Playstations! It's just more comfortable for them that way.

o Or maybe the streaming just doesn't work well if they get Internet outages or slow downs, and even putting the DVD into their computer and watching it sitting up in an uncomfortable office chair is still better

OK Pogue, stay on this all the way, now. Please watch this Internet dynamo that destroyed other bricks-and-mortars businesses because it was "better" and what it does, and whether it survives or even stays "better". As I said, I have at least four empty video stores shuttered in my neighbourhood (in about a 10 block radius), of Blockbusters and various independent outlets that used to rent videos. They are all gone now, and disappeared with them the *jobs* and revenue to the community that they used to represent.

Gone is the ability to stroll around aisles and pick up boxes and read descriptions and talk to real-life neighbors and store clerks about movies that we used to have, which isn't substituted by the tiny mobile phone screen or the Internet computer screen. Gone are all the independent and foreign films we could rent that just aren't offered on Netflix, which is deceptively large in its offerings but always so disappointing when you sit down to browse it.

So yeah, we get it that this Internet-driven machine put these slowpokes and bad decision-makers and failure-to-get-with-its out of business and it was all that Schumpeter creative destruction, eh?

And...for what again? Please keep your eye on that ball, and report on it honestly in 6-12-18 months.