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?
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