Reporters Without Borders has just unveiled a remarkable how-to guide for bloggers and "cyberdissidents" who want to make their voices heard in/from countries that are hostile to free speech. It's more specialized than EFF's exhaustive Legal Guide for Bloggers, focusing on 1.) how to create an effective voice online and 2.) overcoming the specific technical and practical challenges to free speech and anonymity in the face of government monitoring and censorship.
Here's an excerpt from the introduction:
Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest. Plenty of bloggers have been hounded or thrown in prison. One of the contributors to this handbook, Arash Sigarchi, was sentenced to 14 years in jail for posting several messages online that criticised the Iranian regime. His story illustrates how some bloggers see what they do as a duty and a necessity, not just a hobby. They feel they are the eyes and ears of thousands of other Internet users.
Hong Kong: "I kept my promise to those who died."Iran: "We can write freely in blogs."
Bahrain: "We've broken the government’s news monopoly."
The Washington Post has an article today announcing the guide's release here. Previous relevant Copyfight coverage: Zuckerman on How to Blog Anonymously.
Taking a lesson from the Pentagon's success in controlling negative imagery coming out of Iraq, FEMA has now clamped down on the recalcitrant mainstream media. First they're denying the press permission to photograph anything related to the recovery of the bodies; now it looks like press are being systematically denied access to key points in the city.
Excuse me, but isn't public photography of public officials carrying out official duties in plain view still legal? Ah, but perhaps not in the post-9/11 US. I think FEMA should take a page from Google's book and just refuse to talk to Geraldo for a year.
Note, the original source for this, Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, is pretty overtly partisan and opinionated. Whether that makes him more or less reliable is left as an exercise for the reader.
Update: The NPAA (National Press Photographers Association) has reliable documented reports of their members being confronted at gunpoint and slammed against walls by armed authorities. These, apparently, are not isolated incidents from overtired cops. According to the NPAA, "some television networks have hired armed private security firms to protect their journalists".
Jack Shafer, Slate's editor at large, has a wonderful piece (The Rebellion of the Talking Heads) listing a bunch of times in the past few days when mainstream media (MSM) have had enough and started calling a spade a spade when talking to government officials. I would dearly love to have a functional Fourth Estate in this country again, because I believe that MSM still has a huge influence on the course of thought and political policy in the US. I'm just sickened that it took something of this magnitude to jolt them finally out of their passivity.
EDIT 9/8: As usual, Jon Stewart says it way more funny than I do, comparing MSM to a fat drunk in a NJ bar, stirred to sudden action.
There is Kanye West, whose remarks criticizing President Bush's slow response to Hurricane Katrina were cut from the west coast broadcast of a televised hurricane relief telethon, but can't be cut from the Net.
This is not shaping up to be Google's month. First its digital library plan hits a major speed bump, and now it's getting into a snark-off with news.com and zdnet.uk.
The story apparently starts over on CNET, with a story by Elinor Mills on Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt. Mills starts with the skimpy information on Schmidt at his home page and then - using Google itself - proceeds to reveal all sorts of interesting information about the man, his income, his abode, his hobbies. She then goes on to make the point that Google potentially knows a lot more about you than you might think, particularly if you use services like gmail or its desktop accelerator.
Google apparently took this research endeavor personally, informing Jai Singh, CNET News.com founder and top editor that nobody at Google would speak to him or anyone else at News.com for a full year. According to Adam L. Penenberg's story on WIRED, Singh is taking the high road for now, pointing out that it's really in Google's best interest not to blacklist any news organization, since that organization is going to be writing stories about Google no matter what and it's foolish for the company not to have its voice in those stories. It's not as if they're harming News.com in any way.
Not satisfied with the high road, the UK sister publication ZDNet UK issued a mock apology from apparently their entire staff. The apology is rife with the infamously dry British humor, apologizing for the sin of using Google as a search engine and promising to:
cooperate fully in helping Google change people's perceptions of its role just as soon as it feels capable of communicating to us how it wishes that role to be seen.
I really can't add anything to that. Go read the original.
... or, doesn't anyone EVER learn? Or, Internet... censorship... damage. It's not possible that this could surprise any sentient being. But here's the headline:
Lynn presentation leaks onto Net
Well, no kidding. For those not following this gem, the Lynn in question is researcher Michael Lynn. The presentation is a talk Lynn prepared on known exploits against Cisco routers. Apparently this is stuff that has been known for some time and Cisco is working to fix amid a sea of misconceptions about the basic security of the hardware/software that powers much of the Internet. And what has leaked onto the Net is a PDF file that contains the presentation Lynn was scheduled to give at Black Hat in Las Vegas.
UPDATE: RickF of InfoWarrior commented that he has recieved a takedown notice and has removed the PDF. Please read his update in the Comments.)
I say "was," because earlier this week Cisco pressured Internet Security Systems (Lynn's employer at the time) into removing the presentation from Black Hat. Lynn then threatened to go ahead anyway and resigned from ISS. Cisco got an injunction; Lynn gave the presentation. Now it's getting ugly. According to blogger Brian Krebs, the FBI is involved and this is after an agreement was reached among Cisco, Lynn, ISS and the Black Hat organizers not to further distribute the material. Krebs' blog has a blow-by-blow including the agreement text. (There's also an interesting aside that at least 16 WIRED reporters were laid off this week - anyone have the story on that?)
Kieren McCarthy at Techworld hits the nail on the head, noting that Cisco has been "heavy handed" and the result has been a backfire of major proportions. The story is everywhere; the presentation is hot. Note to all you control freaks: do not, repeat DO NOT hit the blob of mercury with the hammer. Really.
A nice explanation of why you can no longer buy the (Pensacola) News-Journal at Wal-Mart anymore. Randy Hammer, the paper's Executive Editor, recounts the ultimatum from a Bob Hart, who apparently represents Wal-Mart in that area. Fire your columnist or lose your rack space. Fortunately, Hammer made what I would consider the right choice.
UPDATE: Florida News Web site WCJB reports that Wal-Mart has backed down. Oops, sorry. Forgot about that whole First Amendment thing there for a bit.
Lisa Stone has an audio feature(tte) offering words of wisdom from two hero(ines) in the battle to defend free-speech rights in the digital era: our own Wendy Seltzer and the Stanford Center for Internet & Society's Lauren Gelman. These two need no introduction, but Lisa does a nice job listing just a few things they've done for your rights lately:
Seltzer helped write the EFF's new Legal Guide for Bloggers and Gelman wrote the bloggers' amicus brief in Apple v. Does -- they are, in other words, at the epicenter of ongoing legal efforts to protect First Amendment rights for U.S. bloggers.
As I note in my post below on EFF's new Legal Guide for Bloggers, Kevin Marks has been thinking about whether conscientous objectors should use the much-maligned DMCA as a tool for justice -- specifically, to fight "spamblogs." Denise Howell says yes; Ernie Miller says no:
We should not be so quick to use law to terminate speech merely on our say so. You say spam, I say free speech (until a court rules otherwise).
Many bloggers don't -- and as a consequence, don't stand up for them. Here's something that may help:
Update #2: Kevin Marks weighs in, wondering whether people can/should use the DMCA takedown provision "for good" -- a question I imagine Matt Haughey would answer in the affirmative.
Update #3: Fantastic -- we're starting to get some traction, with more and more bloggers pointing others to the guide. We're going to see many more legal challenges for bloggers as they get more attention (and power), and people need to be armed with as much information about their rights as possible.
Dan Gillmor make an excellent point: "Think bigger than blogging, however. This is important for all people doing bottom-up media, of whatever sort."
Yep. "Blogging" is only a term for how people are self-publishing on the Internet these days. This is about safeguarding our freedom to communicate with one another via the Internet.
Update #4: Viva la fair use! Chris Locke, the master of broken rules, links to the legal guide, which of course contains information about why he's able to break them.
Ernie Miller asks @ Importance Of...:
Late Friday afternoon, C|Net News published an extremely valuable trade secret about Apple and Intel, days before Apple was scheduled to announce it (Apple to Ditch IBM, Switch to Intel Chips). So, where's the friggin' lawsuit against C|Net to find out who leaked? Where is the judge who is going to claim that what C|Net published was "stolen property"?Will someone please explain to me the difference between what C|Net has done and what happened in Apple v. Does?
Previous relevant coverage here @ Copyfight: EFF Files for Appeal in Apple v. Does.
What if you had a document, potentially as explosive as the Abu Ghraib photos? What if you had on the record comments from British officials saying they "did not dispute the document's authenticity"? What if you then got a US Administration official to describe it as "absolutely accurate"? What if you were a respected member of Congress and you still couldn't get mainstream US media to cover the story?
Then you'd be John Conyers, you'd be holding the so-called "Downing Street Memo," and you'd be forced to turn to blogging and creating your own website in an attempt to get some attention paid to a story that has gotten no publicity in the US.
More to come, I'm sure.
After a number of embarrassing incidents over the past couple of years, mainstream media outlets are examining their use of anonymous sources, reports Lorne Manly for the NYTimes. At the same time, small and independent journalists are pointing out that the pendulum may have swung too far, given the atmosphere of mistrust and ongoing litigation directed at revealing anonymous sources.
If any good comes out of this, I believe it will be in the form of requirements that sources be contextualized, giving the readers more ability to understand the viewpoint and agenda of the speaker. Identifying someone as "a Northeastern Democratic Congressman" may be more informative than just "a Congressman." Likewise, "a defense policy analyst for a conservative think-tank" would tell us more than just the generic "defense policy analyst." Manly reports that NBC News is trying to move in this direction which could, if done well, help the public.
Other organizations are trying to force reporters to identify sources to management at their workplaces, such as a managing editor. This sounds fine in theory - and may serve as as brake on future journalistic malfeasance - but it raises the trust specter and will no doubt complicate the legal situation for media that wish to protect anonymous sources in court.
Rule changes are sometimes adopted hastily in the wake of scandals. Howard Kurtz reports that such a change is ongoing at Newsweek in the wake of the "flushed Quran" story. The magazine is restricting use of anonymous sources and requiring reporters to show why anonymity is necessary. Editors will have to approve anonymous sources. The ironic part about this is that the story that caused the ruckus was well-known prior to Newsweek's posting and in fact the Red Cross has broken its customary silence in order to point out that it gave the Pentagon multiple reports from detainees at Guantanamo detailing the behavior that Newsweek reported and then shamefully retracted.
Anonymous source or not, the story was correct. That is the role of the anonymous source - to bring forth information that cannot or is not being revealed by conventional channels. By deflecting attention onto this secondary phenomenon, detractors such as White House press secretary Scott McClellan are artfully avoiding having to discuss the facts of the matter.
According to an AP story (here on USA Today), an investigation by Adam Penenberg into articles written by WIRED contributor Michelle Delio has turned up more than 40 "color quote" sources who could not be identified. Alert readers may recognize Penenberg as the person who exposed fabricated stories by Stephen Glass in The New Republic.
Delio has pointed out in her own defense that these quote sources were supporting main news points in the stories, which she says have not been questioned.
However, WIRED, in its lengthy report on the matter, noted four stories in which "unconfirmed sources arguably play a more prominent role," and has edited these stories to reflect its findings but left the stories online. Other publications have taken more conservative views: MIT's Tech Review pulled two of Delio's stories, and Infoworld edited stories to remove non-sourceable quotes.
The question here is did Delio make up the quotes or simply fail to keep adequate notes on the contact information for these sources? As someone who is himself habitually disorganized, I have some sympathy for a person who didn't keep notes on things she considered minor that happened some years ago. Given the general air of hostility towards online journalim, it'll be interesting to see how it responds to scandals in the family.
Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Geekcorps, Berkman fellow, and all-around great guy, has written a terrific technical complement to EFF's recent white paper, How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else). Zuckerman's guide approaches anonymous blogging from the perspective of a government whistleblower in a country with a less-than-transparent government -- the kind of person for whom the promise of the Internet as a vehicle for democratic speech is especially desirable and important. Though the guide is about using technology, it's one-hundred per cent accessible to the non-geek -- Zuckerman's hypothetical "Sarah" walks the reader step-by-step through a set of increasingly challenging technical strategies for keeping your identity private on the Internet:
Sarah starts to wonder what happens if the proxy servers she's using get compromised? What if the Minister convinces the operator of a proxy server - either through legal means or through bribery - to keep records and see whether anyone from his country is using the proxy, and what sites they're using. She's relying on the proxy administrator to protect her, and she doesn't even know who the administrator is!Spending quite a long time with the local geek this time, she explores a new option: Invisiblog. Run by an anonymous group of Australians called vigilant.tv, Invisiblog is a site designed for and by the truly paranoid. You can't post to Invisiblog via the web, as you do with most blog servers. You post to it using specially formatted email, sent through the MixMaster remailer system, signed cryptographically.
It took Sarah a few tries to understand that last sentence. Eventually, she set up GPG - the GNU implementation of Pretty Good Privacy, a public-key encryption system. ...She generates a keypair that she will use to post to the blog - by signing a post with her "private key," the blog server will be able to use her "public key" to check that a post is coming from her, and then put it on the blog.
She then sets up MixMaster, a mailing system designed to obscure the origins of an email message. ...She sends a first MixMaster message to Invisiblog, which includes her public key.
Here's a stunner: the Rhode Island ACLU has found that libraries inconsistently apply Internet filtering. They overfilter, don't know the law, don't permit the filters to be turned off by adults, et cetera. Librarians are not cops. They shouldn't be. Laws that try to force librarians to act as cops are... work with me here.... STOO PID. The underlying law, CIPA, should be thoroughly trashed as soon as possible, SCOTUS decisions to the contrary notwithstanding.
To put it mildly, Justice Antonin Scalia got "more than he bargained for" when he agreed to answer NYU Law students' questions. Student Eric Berndt asked Scalia to explain his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, the case that overturned Bowers v. Hardwick and struck down sodomy laws. Not satisfied with the answer, Berndt asked Scalia, "Do you sodomize your wife?"
In an open letter (here reprinted as an op-ed in The Nation), Berndt explains his reasoning and why he felt it necessary to engage in what was clearly a hostile form of expression.
According to an article in the Madiscon, WI, Capital Times former Onion Editor in Chief Robert Siegel said that Janet Jackson nearly killed The Onion with a threatened lawsuit over a headline: "Dying Boy Gets Wish: To Pork Janet Jackson." The story actually satirized the Make-a-Wish Foundation but Ms. Jackson was apparently not amused by being mentioned in the headline. God is definitely an iron. Now if someone would just drop an anvil on certain parts of the FCC...
Hear that whistling sound? That's the sound of heavy artillery arcing overhead. Apple's getting pounded. Hard on the heels of amici from individual journalists, some big names of journalism are laying down some covering fire arguing that the journalists need to be able to keep sources confidential.
Talk about an "A list": the Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times, Hearst Newspapers' San Francisco Chronicle, Knight Ridder Inc.'s San Jose Mercury News, The Copley Press Inc.'s San Diego Union-Tribune, Freedom Communications Inc.'s Orange County Register, and The McClatchy Co.'s Bee newspapers in Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto. Oh and the Associated Press.
This is quickly spiraling way out of control. Apple should cut and run as gracefully as possible. This is a company that lives - and can die - on the buzz it receives in the public zeitgeist. There is such a thing as bad publicity, guys, and this is it.
Big news over @ Deep Links, where a new kind of bloggers' "A-list" has taken shape:
Groups working to protect journalists' press freedoms, the creator of a blog-search tool, weblog publishers, and more than a dozen individual online journalists/bloggers filed a friend-of-the-court brief (PDF) today in Apple v. Does -- the case in which Apple Computer is seeking to unmask online journalists' confidential sources for articles about forthcoming Apple products.The amici urged the court to adopt "a functional test for the newsgatherers' privilege that does not discriminate between reporters, regardless of the medium in which they publish." They ask the court to "adopt a test that will not impede journalists' use of the Internet to report news by limiting their constitutional protections when they publish there."
The amici are (in alphabetical order):
- Jack M. Balkin
- Julian Dibbell
- Feedster, Inc.
- The First Amendment Project
- A. Michael Froomkin
- Gawker Media, Inc.
- Gothamist, LLC,
- Groklaw
- Happy Mutants, LLC
- Ben Hammersley
- Joichi Ito
- Joel Johnson
- Kimberly A. Kralowec
- LawMeme
- Rebecca MacKinnon
- Joshua Micah Marshall
- The Media Bloggers Association
- Markos Moulitsas
- Reporters Without Borders
- Glenn Harlan Reynolds
- Peter Rojas
- Jay Rosen
- Scott Rosenberg
- Doc Searls
- Silicon Valley Watcher
- Kevin Sites
- Eugene Volokh
...and they don't like what they see [Seattle Times]:
"We thought the order would set a dangerous precedent and make it more difficult for journalists to cover stories," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee and lawyer for the news groups."There's a trend right now toward government and private parties using journalists as investigators for their cases."
From the EFF press release:
The [news organizations'] brief [PDF] signers include the Associated Press, the California First Amendment Coalition, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, Copley Press, Freedom Communications, Inc., Hearst Corp., Los Angeles Times, McClatchy Company, San Jose Mercury News, Society of Professional Journalists, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Student Press Law Center.The US Internet Industry Association and NetCoalition, which represent Internet companies including Internet service providers (ISPs), search engines, portals, and hosting services, also filed a friend-of-the-court brief [PDF]. These trade associations argued that the journalist's email messages are protected under the federal Stored Communications Act. They further contend that if the trial court decision is not reversed, it will place an undue burden on service providers and will severely compromise email users' privacy.
EFF's Annalee Newitz in our latest white paper: "Blogs are like personal telephone calls crossed with newspapers. They're the perfect tool for sharing your favorite chocolate mousse recipe with friends -- or for upholding the basic tenets of democracy by letting the public know that a corrupt government official has been paying off your boss."
(Anyone who doesn't get the title pun should go read Operation Clambake.)
In an update to a story I hadn't realized was still ongoing, XS4All News is reporting that Dutch Attorney-General Verkade has just delivered an opinion in the Spaink case to their Supreme Court. The AG's position seems to be that copyright does not (or ought not) trump free speech and freedom of information.
The case is convoluted and involves questions of what constitutes "publication" - in this case an apparently accidental event, what can be protected as trade secrets (shades of Apple v Does maybe?), and a number of other issues.
Spaink appears to be on good grounds but a final ruling is not due until July.
EFF today filed a petition for appeal [PDF] in Apple v. Does, arguing that the central issue in the case is not "the merits of Apple's trade secret claim nor even the potential liability of these non-Party reporters should Apple ever sue them (it has not). Rather, the question is only whether Apple may ride roughshod over the reporter's privilege and the reporter's shield in its eagerness to obtain evidence."
In other words, can Apple do an end-run around the California reporter's shield and the journalist's privilege under the federal First Amendment by forcing a third party (in this instance, Jason O' Grady's ISP) to divulge a reporter's confidential sources? If so, can it do so without first exhausting all other means of securing the information?
Remember, these reporters did not steal any information from Apple, bribe any Apple employees, or break any non-disclosure agreement. They are not defendants in any criminal action, and no criminal investigation is underway. Yet the trial court applied the consitutional reporter's privilege as though this were a criminal case. It even compared these journalists to "fences" in stolen goods.
EFF has prepared an FAQ to complement the official press release on the petition for appeal; we're hoping it helps clarify what's happening and why it matters for journalism.
Update (March 23): From my referrer logs, an astute appraisal of the situation: "Maybe I'm missing something here, but it does seem kinda like Apple is supposed to rip apart its own house before ripping apart those of journalists."
The San Jose Mercury News gets it:
Consider the following scenario. A drug company's research determines that one of its drugs already on the market is dangerous. The company decides the research results are proprietary trade secrets and bottles them up.It's clear that the public would be served by a conscientious insider leaking the research data to the media.
But after a ruling that could limit the public's access to vital information, insiders may now be reluctant to leak that kind of information. That's because Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg said a reporter's promise of confidentiality may not be worth anything when the leak involves trade secrets.
This is a core function of journalist's shield laws that protect the confidentiality of sources. These laws allow the whistle-blower to blow the whistle. They protect us from companies that might otherwise harm us.
You might argue that no one's life is at stake in Apple v. Does and that stripping these journalists of their ability to keep their sources private is therefore a small matter. But Judge Kleinberg's ruling [PDF] is broad-brush. If it is allowed to stand, it can and will be used liberally by deep-pocketed companies to keep business journalists of all stripes from reporting on whatever they decide to call a "trade secret."
The Mercury News editorial concludes with the following warning:
What's more, Kleinberg seems to indicate that he's in a position to decide what is newsworthy. Saying that "an interested public is not the same as the public interest,'' he suggests that information about upcoming Apple products is little more than gossip.That's a dangerous precedent. Would a leak last month about Hewlett-Packard's imminent firing of Carly Fiorina be news or mere gossip? Could a wide swath of information about private businesses become off-limits to reporters?
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