Center for Citizen Media

NY Times: Internet firms are asked to keep search records. Justice Dept. tells executives it may need data to counter terrorism and child porn.

This is roughly akin to having them follow you around everywhere you go with a video camera, watching everything you do, including in your home, just to have a record later on. It is like capturing a video of every book you simply pull off the shelf at a library, or in a bookstore.

This will have a real chilling effect on communications, including citizen media; when a whistleblower’s every move is tracked by government and the ISPs, telling dangerous truths will be harder than ever.

But the chill will go much deeper, and the danger is truly alarming.

It is all being couched in the guise of protecting children, of course, the refuge governments use to justify these moves. It is another — huge — step toward a pervasive surveillance society.

The Wall Street Journal’s D Conference was notable for several things, but key among them was Martha Stewart asking Sony CEO Howard Stringer why she had to have so many different chargers and add-ons for her various devices. (And, she noted without apparent irony, separate sets for all of her houses.)

Stringer, who was clearly the star of the gathering — witty, direct and surprisingly candid about the company’s failings — handled it with aplomb, noting among other things that she had more houses than he did. But he admitted that these chargers and add-ons are a huge profit center for Sony.

The problem still needs fixing.

Jon Garfunkel: Constructive Activism. From my safe seat in the cradle of liberty, Boston USA, I’m not near any of the physical protests, but I do have a keen eye about what’s happened online. And in my capacity as an occasional journalactivist, I’ve pitched a hand as well. Now I’d like to share what I’ve learned.

This is an extraordinarily thorough analysis. If the topic is of any interest to you, spend some time with this.

Wall Street Journal: Yahoo Defends China Cooperation. Yahoo’s Terry Semel faced tough questions from Walt Mossberg — and the audience — over the search company’s decision to comply with requests for user data from the Chinese government, which has used the information to pursue dissidents.

I’m one of the audience members who asked Semel a question. He did not offer any kind of persuasive reply, because there’s no good way to defend his company’s cooperation with the Chinese authorities.

In my own question I channeled Berkman Center colleague Rebecca MacKinnon, who has appropriately noted that Yahoo “chose to provide an e-mail service hosted on servers based inside China, making itself subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction.” Semel’s answer was both evasive and condescending.

He pointed out that Yahoo put those servers there a while ago, and then said Yahoo’s China presence is controlled by a partner to which it sold a majority share there. This is trying to have it both ways, and it insults people’s intelligence; Yahoo’s name is on the service, after all.

Then he sniffily said his company could do more for human rights than a small NGO (I think he meant the Berkman Center, but I’m not sure). This would be true if Yahoo stopped being such a handmaiden to the dictators.

Semel was also downright misleading when asked about Yahoo’s willing cooperation with a U.S. government fishing expedition of search data — while Yahoo and Microsoft cooperated, Google responsibly did not. He said this data mining operation was about child pornography, and of course who’s going to object to going after child porn, right?

Well, as Salon‘s Scott Rosenberg pointed out, the case had zip to do with child porn. It was about the Child Online Protection Act, which was designed to keep kids away from legal adult sites.

I’m not sure which is more disturbing, Semel’s deceptions or his lack of preparation for questions he surely knew he’d be asked.

Still, to his credit, he showed up to face the questions. His competitors at Google refused. Shame on them.

I’m at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference, where Bill Gates was talking last evening about the future of mobile phones that handle many other functions including video, writing, etc. He referred to these gadgets as — I’m not joking — “Reality Acquisition Devices” that will, if I understood him correctly, be used to connect digitally to various stuff, such as using the phone to read product bar codes to learn more about the product.

Which leads to the following question: What happens when you bring a Reality Acquisition Device into proximity of Steve Jobs’ famous Reality Distortion Field?

I’m at the NetSquared conference (being held at Cisco in San Jose), getting ready to join Ethan Zuckerman, Hong Eun Taek and Michael Rogers on a panel called From a Voice in the Wilderness to the Wisdom of Crowds.

I’d like to see nonprofits and interest groups use conversational technologies to do a better job explaining their own messages. Few have done so, at this point, but there’s progress.

I’m back in California for tomorrow’s opening day of the NetSquared conference. The subtitle of the gathering is “remixing the web for social change,” and we’re trying to do our part here.

Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, is the keynote speaker at the International Press Institute’s 2006 World Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland. He raises three key questions:

First, is public service journalism, broadcasting in particular, under threat? Yes, he says, citing BBC’s commitment to impartial and independent journalism.

Second, should we care? Yes, again, he says. An open market in opinions and ideas is essential in an open society, he says. But “impartial journalism in the public-service tradition,” he says, has a great value as well. It helps create common ground, and helps people be confronted by different values than the ones they hold themselves.

Finally, what can we do about it? It’s not about public service journalism dominating its world, he says, but so that it can persist and remain influential. He suggests that there’s no escaping the civic choice implicit in its existence, which requires investment. It needs public and political support, and then the politicians need “to keep as far away as possible” from interfering; accountability should emphasize independence, he says.

Finally, he notes, globalization offers “intriguing opportunities” in any number of ways. It could be a democratizing force, and environment for independent, reliable news to “find audiences around the world.”

Whose side is the BBC on? “On the side of the facts,” he says.

The Wall Street Journal has been leading the way in uncovering yet another corporate scandal: stock-option cheating in which corporate CEOs have apparently been rigging the dates of options grants to give themselves what amounts to free money. Imagine that you could enter a lottery the day after the winning numbers were announced, and you have the general idea of what these people have been doing.

It’s nothing less than stealing from shareholders to the tune of millions of dollars. The guilty among these folks should be doing time, not riding their corporate jets.

While other media have begun to get serious about this story (see these Google News search results), the Journal has done by far the most outstanding work on this story since its first scoop, with the knife-edged title of “The Perfect Payday,” appeared on Page One back in March. Not a week goes by without more revelations of yet more probable (or confirmed) boardroom thievery.

(Here is a round-up page, and a clever scorecard on the public part of the site; unfortunately, the best stuff, like most of the news organization’s content, is trapped behind a subscription pay-wall, so many of you will have to take my word for it when I offer such praise.)

Fine as the coverage has been, this story is too big even for the Journal. There are thousands of publicly held corporations in America, and only a few reporters, however excellent, assiduously turning over the rocks.

True, some stock analysts are now racing to determine whether the people running companies they follow have engaged this financial trickery. But again, there aren’t enough analysts, either, to discover just how deep this rot goes into corporate America.

Now, it’s not entirely simple to figure out whether there’s been funny business with stock grants. I don’t know, moreover, whether the Journal has a well-developed system for compiling and analyzing vast numbers of cases simultaneously. All I can say from reading the stories is that the Journal is apparently using methodology mostly of its own creation, vouched for by some (unnamed?) academic experts, to figure out whether a given company’s managers have been pulling a fast one.

So here’s what I’d like to see the Journal do now: Embark on a national effort in which the paper “deputizes” the shareholders and other interested readers to help with the research.
This is made to order as a computer-assisted project with a major online component. How? The Journal could create an online tool into which any self-appointed citizen journalist could:

• Look up the relevant data for a given company, using the Securities & Exchange Commission’s database of corporate filings and other public data sources;
• Plug the correct numbers, along with the URLs of the SEC filings from which the data came, into a calculator that determines, based on the researchers’ methodology, whether the odds suggest that the executives in question are either the luckiest people on the planet or, more likely, engaged in chicanery;
• And, finally, upload the results to 1) a Journal database, which should be made public so that others looking at the same companies will either not bother or, better yet, doublecheck the results; 2) the SEC; 3) federal prosecutors in relevant jurisdictions; and 4) regulators in the state where the company was based (especially including New York, which has the toughest state laws against corporate wrongdoing).

This Web-based toolset should include some serious teaching materials, such as an easy-to-understand explanation of how to find the data, likely to be buried deep in a corporate report or even a footnote. (This alone — helping investors and potential investors better understand the arcania of corporate filings — might be worth the effort all by itself, given its educational value.)

In relatively short order, I predict, the Journal and the cops on the financial beat would be well on their way to determining whether this is a scandal of limited scope or, as some fear, an all-too-common rigging of the system by the insiders against their purported bosses, the shareholders.

I’d want the public database to show all companies, not just ones where the options dates are suspicious. I’m a shareholder in several public companies, and would like very much to know that the people running them are honorable, at least in this regard. I’d like even more to learn that we’ve already learned about the worst of this scandal, that it doesn’t go as deep as we might suspect.

I suspect the Journal, which has a terrific collection of online resources already devoted to this story, will balk at the idea of putting the data online before the paper’s own journalists have vetted the data that comes in. In today’s litigious world, that would be understandable.

But if so, I hope some other entity — perhaps a foundation or even another publication — will step up and do create this public database. It might be a good Wiki project, with some controls to prevent gaming by people who want to make unfair accusations or delete fair ones.

Whatever the hurdles or flaws in what I’m suggesting — please point them out — we need something like this. I’ll do what I can to help if someone wants to put it together. (If the Journal doesn’t want to consider it, maybe the New York Times — which is so far behind on this story as to be almost invisible — would be interested in using this method as a way of catching up and even going ahead.)

Some kinds of big projects lend themselves to what I’ve called “distributed journalism” by citizens. This is one, and it would work well as a a collaboration among the professionals and the members of the former audience who care enough to join in a valuable effort.

Newspapers and other traditional media organizations need to involve their audiences in the journalism. But the professionals can’t assume that everyone else knows the techniques and principles that become second nature to those of us in the business.

In the future of journalism where we work together in a more diverse and robust ecosystem, the professionals need to be teachers, too. Here’s one of those moments when we could help each other, and do some genuine good.

I was out of the country last year but plan to be at this year’s BlogHer Conference in San Francisco at the end of July.

Great work is appearing on the site, meanwhile. Check it out.