Cit Media

Carl Malamud, a hero in providing access to information, has posted online the the 38-volume California Code of Regulations, over which the state claims copyright ownership.

The Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat reports the story.

Free Press and Public Knowledge have put out a report claiming that “NebuAd Wiretaps Consumers and Hijacks Web Sites.” Quote:

Consumers are having their Web browsing intercepted and Web sites are having their computer code altered by NebuAd, a company that provides targeted advertising for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), according to a technical investigation by Free Press and Public Knowledge.

This is remarkably sleazy behavior, if it’s happening the way the report suggests — and the technical ability of the researcher wins him high credibility.

If this is happening, and if it doesn’t violate some federal and/or state laws, then it’s long overdue for Congress to deal with it.

This kind of stuff gives digital media entrepreneurship a bad name.

At UC Berkeley’s Journalism School tomorrow evening, there’s a Screening of “Citizen McCaw”:

the new documentary film about the journalism ethics battle and meltdown at the Santa Barbara News Press. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion on the state of journalism with former News Press Editor Jerry Roberts, “Citizen McCaw” director Sam Tyler and San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Page Editor John Diaz, moderated by journalism school professor Cynthia Gorney.

“Meltdown” is an understatement for what has happened at the Santa Barbara newspaper, a once-respected journal that has fallen under harsh times during the Wendy McCaw ownership.

If I were going to be in California tomorrow I’d be at this screening. If you’re in the neighborhood and have the time (and nontrivial but $50 admission going to the legal defense fund of people who were kicked out of the paper), please consider it.

Glenn Greenwald (Salon) writes:

The most interesting part of the controversy over Obama advisor Samantha Power’s referring to Hillary Clinton as a “monster” — one might say the only interesting part — is that immediately after Power said it, she tried to proclaim that it was “off the record.” Here was Power’s exact quote:

“She is a monster, too –- that is off the record –- she is stooping to anything.”

But the reporter who was interviewing her, Britain’s Gerri Peev of The Scotsman, printed the comment anyway — as she should have, because Peev had never agreed that any parts of the interview would be “off the record,” and nobody has the right to demand unilaterally, and after the fact, that journalists keep their embarrassing remarks a secret.

Read the whole piece for a solid, if repetitive, analysis of U.S. journalists often-pathetic deference to power.

When I was a reporter and then a columnist, I had a rule that no public figure — that is, anyone who’d had experience with being interviewed — had the right to declare anything off the record after the fact. Now I might agree not to publish something if it wasn’t relevant, but if something was to be off the record it would be decided ahead of time.

I didn’t have the same policy with people who weren’t media-savvy. Sometimes I’d actually say to someone, “Do you realize that I what you’re telling me might go into the newspaper?” I’d let them reconsider their words.

In the past several days I’ve had a brief email correspondence with a journalism student (not from my own school) who is determined to conflate citizen journalism with the deliberate and unfair maligning of people for political reasons. He knows what he is going to say and only wants a quote or two from me to reinforce it. I declined to be part of his broad slam on a genre that is much more nuanced than he’s apparently trying to portray.

I will be publishing the emails in another post, with my commentary. My current intention is not to publish his name or institution, because I suspect he — despite his course of study — is not savvy about the media in any serious way.

Sadly, savvy in media for U.S. journalists tends to mean doing what powerful people want you to do. That’s the more serious problem, far more so than Powers’ unfortunate remark.

Boing Boing: Remixing the London police’s anti-photographer terrror posters.
Responding to the London Metropolitan Police’s new anti-photographer snitch campaign, wherein posters urge Londoners to turn in people who might be taking pictures of CCTV cameras, many people have taken a crack at redesigning the posters to point out the absurdity of them.

This is how people, creating their own media, can help expose government (and other) overreaching. Another way in this case would be to encourage everyone to take photos everywhere.

The speed with which the U.K. is turning into a police state is just amazing, and frightening.

Daniel Solove: Facebook Banishment and Due Process: (Y)ou exist on Facebook at the whim of Facebook. The Facebook dieties can zap your existence for reasons even more frivolous than those of the Greek gods. Facebook can banish you because you’re wearing a blue T-shirt in your photo, or because it selected you at random, or because you named your blog Above the Law rather than Below the Law.

On the one hand, this rule seems uncontroversial. After all, it is Facebook’s website. They own their site, and they have the right to say who gets to use it and who doesn’t.

But on the other hand, people put a lot of labor and work into their profiles on the site. It takes time and effort to build a network of friends, to upload data, to write and create one’s profile. Locking people out of this seizes all their work from them. It’s like your employer locking you out of your office and not letting you take your things. Perhaps at the very least banished people should be able to reclaim the content of their profiles. But what about all their “friends” on the network? People spend a lot of time building connections, and they can’t readily transplant their entire network of friends elsewhere.

He has it right the first time: It is Facebook’s site, and they have every right to enforce ridiculous and counterproductive rules. Due process? It’s not a judicial system and we shouldn’t treat it that way.

But the issue is why users put so much of their own lives up on the site in the first place — particularly when it’s clear enough that Facebook doesn’t give anyone an easy way (or, really any way other than endless cut/paste) to take the data elsewhere. The fact that they can’t “readily transplant” their network and data is too bad, but Facebook makes no pretense about its unwillingness to provide this service in any useful way.

When you start a blog at Wordpress.com, you can always take the data with you in a portable way that you can then import into a new blog. That’s how it should be done.

Facebook isn’t interested in giving people those same kinds of options, and it’s a shame. But let’s put some of the onus on the users, who find it so useful that they risk losing everything at the whim of the little gods who make the decisions.

Citizen Media Law Project: Judge in Wikileaks Case Reverses Course, Wikileaks.org is Back Online.

I have a column running on the Guardian’s website today. It’s entitled “Freedom of information” — and is reprinted below:

What does a Swiss bank that does business in the Cayman Islands have in common with a Hong Kong actor who jets around the globe? They are object lessons this month in a reality that anyone handling information needs to understand. Like toothpaste squeezed from a tube, information, once out in the wild, is all but uncontainable.

The Julius Baer Bank is a protagonist in the now-famous Wikileaks case. The bank’s lawyers managed to persuade a US federal judge, Jeffrey White, that the first amendment of the US Constitution had no meaning, obtaining an injunction and follow-up order that, among other things, required blocking the visibility of the domain wikileaks.org in the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). A former bank employee had posted documents on the anonymous whistle-blowing website, allegedly describing shady dealings - hmmm, Cayman Islands, Swiss banks - on behalf of clients.

“The orders don’t just direct the take down of existing content, they also enjoin any future publication of the material,” says David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (of which I’m a co-founder). “Even more significantly, the second order requires anyone who receives notice of the order to refrain from publishing, distributing or linking to the documents.”

In a blog post on the project’s site, Ardia called the judge’s action “unthinkable”:

“He issued an order that is so broad I haven’t been able to find a single example in the US that comes close: he ordered the complete shutdown of the Wikileaks website. He did this not by ordering that the parties shut off access to the offending documents (that came in a second order), but by ordering that [Wikileaks's domain registrar] erase the ‘navigation information’ that directs people to the site … . That is like telling a newspaper it can continue to print its paper, but the delivery drivers all have to go home.”

The judge blatantly abused his power. Luckily, due to the nature of the internet and the anger of the online community, it had precisely the opposite effect of what was intended.

First, Wikileaks’s proprietors are not stupid. They have several “mirror” sites with other domain names (such as wikileaks.be) where the bank documents, among 1.2 million other documents contributed by whistle-blowers around the world, can also be found. Meanwhile, people sympathetic to Wikileaks immediately began putting up their own mirrors and distributing the documents in question. And due to the judge’s (and bank’s) utter cluelessness about how the internet actually works, the injunction (essentially a rubber-stamp of something the bank’s lawyers wrote) didn’t prevent the Wikileaks site from being visible via its more direct URL - http://88.80.13.160/ - which the DNS translates into words we recognise.

If I were a customer of that bank, I’d quickly withdraw my business on several grounds, not least the institution’s inability to keep records secure in the first instance but also the way it flailed about once the records were public. (If I were a member of the US Congress I’d be launching an official inquiry into judge White’s fitness for office as well, though Congress is not noted these days for its understanding of, much less appreciation for, the Constitution.)

But the bank’s dilemma does elicit some sympathy, and suggests a larger issue that proponents of whistle-blowing and transparency - count me loudly among them - should acknowledge. The dissemination of information may be all but unstoppable, barring an absolute crackdown on and censorship of all online data (which could never be fully effective in any event). But there are troubling implications.

Consider, in that context, the sad case of Edison Chen, a Vancouver-born actor who now makes his base in Hong Kong. He famously took photographs of himself and at least five women (sequentially, not all together) in sexual situations and stored them on his laptop computer. After he took the machine for repairs, the photos made their way to the internet, apparently copied by a technician at the shop and then put online. It is trivially easy to find the images online now.

This was not about blowing whistles on possible corruption. Chen doesn’t deserve this, however foolish he was to leave the pictures, unencrypted, on a disk that he put in someone else’s hands. The women especially don’t deserve it, however foolish they were to participate in the photo sessions. These pictures were never meant to be public, and the people who participated in their distribution - including, in my view, anyone who continues to send them around - are morally and legally wrong. (Disclosure: I did obtain them to verify how easily this could be done, and then immediately deleted them from my computer.)

Chen, the women and the authorities can and probably should pursue various legal remedies to punish whoever put the photos on the internet. Apart from asking the rest of us to be decent and honourable, however, they have few further options.

The situations of Julius Baer Bank, Edison Chen and a host of others are fodder for the control freaks of our age. Governments and big business fear their power will dissolve. Moral crusaders fear almost everything. They all quake at the consequences of what they consider liberty run amuck.

So there are powerful forces at work to clamp down on this infinitely valuable medium. It can never be a 100% solution, of course, because digital information can be encrypted, disguised and otherwise manipulated to make porous even the most seemingly impenetrable barriers. But the rich and powerful interests that want to control our lives can make it vastly more difficult to have any measure of free speech.

I tend toward the absolutist side of the argument. Yes, there are negative consequences to freedom. Liberty brings risk. We take those risks because they are essential to progress, and to fundamental human rights. Abuses by the wielders of great power are much more dangerous than those by the rest of us.

But that doesn’t absolve us from doing the right thing. Let’s keep the control freaks at bay, but exercise some self-control, too.

Hilariously, but unintentionally so as always, an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled “Lawsuit Inc.” wails over connections between trial lawyers and state politicians:

Should state Attorneys General be able to outsource their legal work to for-profit tort lawyers, who then funnel a share of their winnings back to the AGs? That’s become a sleazy practice in many states, and it is finally coming under scrutiny — notably in Mississippi, home of Dickie Scruggs, Attorney General Jim Hood, and other legal pillars.

You will look in vain, of course, for Journal editorials complaining about the fact that Big Business practically owns the regulatory agencies in Washington, or that business interests have pretty much been the deciding factor in just about every environmental, labor and social-welfare decision from the Bush administration. Whoops, move along, nothing to see there!

Christopher Hitchens: Who needs a state censor when the press bites its own tongue so effectively? Do you ever wonder what is the greatest enemy of the free press? One might mention a few conspicuous foes, such as the state censor, the monopolistic proprietor, the advertiser who wants either favorable coverage or at least an absence of unfavorable coverage, and so forth. But the most insidious enemy is the cowardly journalist and editor who doesn’t need to be told what to do, because he or she has already internalized the need to please—or at least not to offend—the worst tyranny of all, which is the safety-first version of public opinion.