So The Matthew Keys (@thematthewkeys) is going down. The feds have issued a warrant against him on charges of interstate computer wire fraud because he gave the hacking collective Anonymous the passwords to his former corporate news site and helped them break into the Los Angeles Times and deface its news stories. Here is the press release about the indictment.
You know, I hope he is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And I think that will be the Aaron Swartz six months' treatment at worst, maybe even lighter. And we'll never hear the end of the squawking from the hacker set about this, but it doesn't look good.
Lots of the open source coder cultists think of this sort of action as a prank, on the order of soaping a window on Halloween. Not me. If you want property rights to be upheld on the Internet, which are part of what upholds human rights, then you can't have technocommunist neo-anarchist movements depriving you of choice like this by destroying your property or your media, even for a day, even for damages that don't seem like much.
This is my new aphorism about about companies and social media.
"Like the client in MMORPGs, social media is in the hands of the enemy in any company."
I remember people like Raph Koster, the great games designer used to explain how game designers always had to fear the client, i.e. the browser of their game, being in the hands of "the enemy," i.e. the game player, as he was constantly trying to hack and mod and copy and steal the game scripts or pieces and cheat and they constantly had to foil him in this.
Hey, the rest of the Internet is no different, you know?
(Of course, as Yoz Linden cheerfully explained on an old post about copybot I just noticed, that's only about what goes "over the wire"; what is server-side is "safe". Sort of.)
I'm not as extreme as Loren Feldman, who has a bunch of great videos and tapes about how corporations, especially these big ones like Burger King and such, really don't need social media and are just making themselves look stupid by even having this liability. True enough.
I'm sure social media guru Beth Kantor and others who tout the wonders of social media would blanche at my claims, but I've become more invested in them from real experience.
Don't forget I got on Twitter in 2007 (on my account @prokofy) and on @catfitz on 2008, so I wasn't born yesterday and I'm not a newbie egg. To be sure, I don't have as many followers as socialist socialite Katrina vanden Heuvel, a factoid that she thinks puts me right up there with...nationalist professors at MGU for some reason (or just about everybody else who isn't Blake Hounsell or Alec Ross) but...whatever.
And what I've always said about social media is that it is merely a political movement, mainly for the left, but to some extent for extreme libertartians of the #tcot Ron Paul sort, and that they use it to take power, not for any "empowerment of the people" or "more democracy" or "A Better World".
Reuters' social media is, of course, the kind of company that "needs" social media because it "needs" more traffic to its website. Reuters can only sell so many stories and so many story products, i.e. consulting or analysis -- they age out after 4 hours or sooner, and become "yesterday's newspaper" which is worthless -- you can't even wrap fish in a day-old Internet news story.
So social media gives them away of constantly infusing their sites with traffic and ad clicks and buyers.
At Reuters, the main social media guru is Anthony de Rosa who I occasionally spar with on Facebook but who hasn't blocked me (like Lara Kolodny of Fast Company or now-ex-State Dept. official Alec Ross) merely for standing up to his propaganda within the TOS.
But he uses this position to flog a very distinct "progressive" political line that goes to the left of the actual corporate managers, who are liberal but not THAT extreme -- how can they be, when they're in business as capitalists?
Reuters is notorious as a liberal media outfit for doing things like not calling terrorists "terrorists" but other things like "militants" but they may have eased up even on that.
So Mathew Keys, as deputy social media editor, is that much more out there.
And he swaggered around in the IRC channel with the Anonymous kids and gave them the passwords to his former employer's site, and said for extra measure, go get 'em.
Classig geek swagger -- which is what now passes for gonzo journalism now. David Corn didn't so much do investigative journalism, as he parleyed his connection to Jimmy Carter's grandson, who had discovered the bar tender's social media, so to speak -- his home movie of Romney where he considered the most damning statement was about moving business to China, not the 47%. So David Corn is a typical new-age journalist in that he exploits the social media artifacts of his adoring fans and the larger networks but then he gets his Pulitzer Prize for this: the ability to tell that the real story isn't the China thing, which had been already done with another "scandal" about jeeps being made in China that blew up in Romney's face. The real story was the supposed snub of the "47 percent".
I still don't think that's really journalism; I think it's expert political work of the sort the stealth socialists are really good at and have gotten superb at under Obama. But Corn is still a good journalist anyway.
There will be all kinds of wailing and gnashing of teeth and attempts to prove that what Matthew Keys did wasn't wrong. But it was wrong. And a crime. You don't get to take your employer's website log-in, hand it out to criminals who then deface and harm it -- inciting them to mayhem on the way -- and except to just get a journalism prize.
Already Adrian Lamo -- and he should know! -- is telling us that Keys may be an asshole (but we should understand that he had a hard life and make excuses for him) but that he doesn't deserve the "interstate commerce" charge.
Well, why not? The Los Angeles Times isn't only read in California. I read it. In fact, trying to shed its social media and email spam is really, really hard, it's one of the more clingy ones that even an unsubscribe doesn't free you from.
Reuters should instantly fire him if they want credibility. And the prosecution should go forward.
I got this insight about the social media movement from nonprofits first. I saw that people who were the Marxist-Leninist stealth socialists who had many years of hardcore "community organizing" training and tactics under their belts were naturally gravitating to the "community manager" or "social media manager" or even "Chief Communications Officer" role (newly created to accommodate their inflated egos) in many nonprofits.
I saw them swagger around, collecting their tens of thousands of followers, many of them just SEO gurus and prostitutues, just to be able to look like they were a valuable property. They would use these accounts to flog the line, as full-time staff or consultants. They learned how to tweet all day with "constant partial attention" as Mark Wallace used to call it. Then when they "went too far" promoting their own agenda and got in hot water, they merely picked up their entire social media guru/community organizer role and went off, nomad-style, to their next high-paid gig. I've seen this personally in a number of operations.
Then I started to see it in companies. Either they had interns or their grandchildren doing the social media or they had these types.
This is how you get somebody like @noneck running all of New York State's online information systems, a horror that I used to regularly pronounce about and write my assemblyman about, as this freak supported WikiLeaks, Anonymous, DDoSing as a form of "speech," etc. -- so it was only a matter of time before residents of New York State found their health, tax, etc. information "doxed" if he or his friends didn't like what they said. I also saw they burned through tens of thousands of dollars of giddy social media budget money on totally stupid non-working geeky code projects that I kept asking about and not getting answers about, because there were never hearings about this, and never a democratic procedure around it -- it's just scared managers signing checks for importunate technical managers who intimidate them into thinking they are left behind if they don't staff up on social media and run faddish projects. New York City is going through this now. And who isn't?
The entire gov2.0 thing covers a multitude of sins of racketeers and political operatives who don't just do tech but weld their ideas right into the very code of the tools (like Drupal, like Clay Johnson).
Lamo told me on Twitter that he is innocent until proven guilty.
Sure. But there are IRC chat logs. And Anonymous informants that blew him in. Sabu tweeted about his involvement back in 2011.
It's like the point Morozov is saying about how perfect crime-stopping in fact makes for a society that you can't reform (I don't buy his concept completely and want to think about it some more, but it's a useful discussion). And the correlary of that which Morozov doesn't likely want to admit because he's soft on Anonymous is that the chat log is the new indictment. It's a one-man, er, robot grand-jury. Once you have the chat log -- plus the truth that comes out in the comments, as Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar always said), i.e. that "confession that is the crown of evidence" that Vyshinsky, Stalin's prosecutor general, so loved, why, you don't need a judge and jury.
The server does not lie. Sure, you can redact and distort and re-do chatlogs and their screenshots. But if the feds ask for the chatlogs and get them, they will have to be the machine's artifact that will be unimpeachable, right?
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