Facebook: anonymity is for trolls

Julie Zhou of Facebook would like to rid the internet of anonymity:

Some may argue that denying Internet users the ability to post anonymously is a breach of their privacy and freedom of expression. But until the age of the Internet, anonymity was a rare thing. When someone spoke in public, his audience would naturally be able to see who was talking.

Others point out that there’s no way to truly rid the Internet of anonymity. After all, names and e-mail addresses can be faked. And in any case many commenters write things that are rude or inflammatory under their real names.

It's hardly a surprise that a product design manager from Facebook thinks anonymity is something we might all want to get rid of. After all, the company makes money selling personal information and has been notorious for it's lack of concern about it's member's privacy.

Still, it's hard to believe she hasn't heard that even today there are very real reasons for people to write anonymously. And she'll be happy to know that her concerns about anonymous trolls are shared by the governments of Iran, Egypt and China.

But anonymity was rare thing until recently? Has she never heard of Poor Richard? Or Publius?

Don't you support my right to call you a leftist wacko?

What's more pathetic than watching a FOX news reporter wander into a group of protesters he's just finished describing as a gang of rowdy leftists and then begin complaining that nobody will talk to him?

via michael calderone

97 Senators vote to censure criticism of the military

in two amendments, one sponsored by Democrat Barbara Boxer, the other by Republican John Cornyn.

Russ Feingold was the only Senator voting against both amendments.

46 Republicans thought it was perfectly acceptable to attack veterans like Max Cleland and John Kerry, but outrageous to attack the credibility of General Petraeus.

22 Democrats and Independent Joe Lieberman felt it was reprehensible to ever criticize members of the military.

Joe Biden and Maria Cantwell didn't vote on either measure.


(For comparison, only 5 Senators were willing to go on the record censuring the President for violating the law by spying on Americans without a warrant.)

Free Speechless Zones

Protecting the president from all criticism has been an obsession with this White House.

From the Presidential Advance Manual (stamped "Sensitive - Do Not Copy"):

The first step to keeping demonstrators out of events, the manual tells the president's event staff, is to encourage the Secret Service to "ask the local police department to designate a protest area...preferably not in view of the event site or the motorcade route."

Protest areas and "free speech zones" have no place in American society. Their only purpose is to protect the powerful and muzzle dissent.

Also in the document, we learn the true purpose of rally squads.

These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstators. The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors (USA! USA! USA!).

As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site.

For large rallies... at least one squad should be 'roaming' throughout the perimeter of the event to look for potential problems.

via Americablog

Rudy Giuliani defines political correctness

Apparently now political correctness is when you won't say what I want you to say:

Giuliani saved his sharpest jabs for Democrats. "In four debates, not a single Democrat said the word, 'Islamic terrorists.' Now that is taking political correctness to extreme," he said.

Originally the term was used by old-guard communists to mean toeing the party line, as in: "we're fighting Islamic terrorists in Iraq".

Michael Moore: pinko or capitalist genius?

Rob at SayAnything is outraged at Michael Moore's comments that he doesn't mind if people share copies of his movie "Sicko" over the internet.

“I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people,” said Moore when asked about pirating. “I make these books and movies and TV shows because I want things to change, so the more people that get to see them the better, so I’m happy when that happens. I think information and art, ideas should be shared.”

Rob has decided to call Moore's bluff by posting the whole thing on his site, expecting to be shut down immediately. I don't know if Moore's legal team have shut it down or if Rob's bandwidth is saturated, it wasn't playing when I dropped by.

But Rob shouldn't be so quick to outrage over Moore's "fair use" policy. After all, Moore is already a wealthy man, and there are lots of examples of good capitalists who give away things of value and still make a fortune. Google is the most obvious case in point: most of us use their services daily and never pay a dime for it. And the company’s founders are now billionaires.

Everyone with a blog also knows that they can get set up on a server for free - and I don’t see Blogger or Wordpress going out of business any time soon.

And of course, we’ve been listening to music free over the radio for about a hundred years now.

The key is to find something of greater value than the original item. Michael Moore is willing to trade some revenue for a bigger reputation and a bigger audience (including people like Rob and his readers who would likely never have paid to see a Michael Moore film in the first place).

Now if the music industry ever stops suing it’s customers for pirating music, they might figure out how to make some money on the internet, too.

h/t MvdG

The First Amendment, still the best after 216 years

via C&L, The Guardian attempts to report on the current state of the case against David Keogh and Leo O'Connor, recently convicted of violating Britain's Official Secrets Act.

I say attempts to report, because the absurdity of an Official Secrets Act in a free society leads to pretzel twisting logic like the court's ruling that journalists covering the trial cannot actually mention what it's all about.

We cannot report allegations about what the document contains even though they have been reported time and time again ... by the media, including British newspapers.

That's not strictly true. The judge said we can repeat those allegations but only if they appear on a different page of a newspaper than any reference to the trial or the document which was at the centre of it. We can also report, since it was said in open court, that the Guardian's counsel, Anthony Hudson, argued that it would be inappropriate to restrain publication of the allegation already in the public domain claiming that President Bush suggested that the Arabic TV station al-Jazeera should be bombed.

The background on the story is that Keogh and O'Connor disclosed the minutes of a meeting between Tony Blair and George Bush. Bush apparently speculated about bombing Al Jazeera offices and Blair advised against it. (Al Jazeera has occasionally been hit by U.S. fire)

Europeans and people in most other nations do not have the same freedom of speech we take for granted in the United States, much to the chagrin of the "limits to freedom" crowd.

Of course, in most cases, the real purpose of state secrets is to keep powerful people safe from the rabble:

He, and the government as a whole, seemed particularly concerned about the need to protect Bush from embarrassment, (the prosecution conceded that no "actual damage" had been caused by the leak) and to show the White House that Whitehall is determined to try and keep secrets even though Washington cannot.

Henry Waxman investigates the politicization of science

Science magazine reports on the Congressional investigation into the White House's propaganda campaign against climate science. Once again, we have a case where an industry insider, and lobbyist against global warming science, was allowed to oversee and edit government science reports for political ends.

Waxman and other representatives focused on changes made to drafts of three documents. Beginning in 2001, [the White House's Council on Environmental Quality] officials suggested 113 edits to the Administration's draft Strategic Plan of the Climate Change Science Program that Waxman says played down the role of human activities in global warming. Another 181 changes either exaggerated or emphasized scientific uncertainties, such as changing "will" to "may" in the draft sentence "Warming temperatures will also affect Arctic land areas."

Philip Cooney, a former oil industry lobbyist who was then chief of staff at CEQ, was asked to explain why he had made the changes. He said that many of his suggested revisions were based on a 2001 National Research Council report on climate change and were intended to "align these reports with the Administration's stated policy."

Cooney, now an official with ExxonMobil, made other changes to the 2003 annual report to Congress from the Climate Change Science Program and to a draft of the 2003 State of the Environment report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). E-mails show that EPA staff objected to the edits as "poorly representing the science," and the agency ultimately decided to omit the climate change section of the report. Waxman said he thought Cooney was "sowing doubt" on climate change.

The oversight committee has posted documents online. Among the edits made:

Original report:

Is the Earth's climate changing?

...suggest that the recent warming is unusual and that the 1990's are likely to have been the warmest decade in the past 1000 years for the Northern Hemisphere (Exhibit 18).

Became:

The Earth's climate has changed dramatically throughout history and will continue to change due to natural variability.

...suggest that the recent warming may be unusual.

Putin continues his assault on the press

Via Steve Clemons, Vladimir Putin continues to rebuild the Soviet State:

Putin sparks fear of web crackdown

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has decreed the creation of a new super-agency to regulate the country's media and the internet, sparking fears among journalists that a clampdown on the media could extend to the web, which until now has remained free.

Mr Putin this week signed off on a decree to merge two existing state agencies regulating the media into one super-agency that will issue licences to broadcasters and oversee the content of newspapers and websites.

This story follows the recent assassinations of Putin critics, including several journalists.

"There is going to be so much to hide"

In celebration of the House's recent action, passing 3 open-government bills, during "Sunshine Week"; I thought it would be interesting to see how things were being reported at the start of George Bush's attack on open records laws. Mere weeks after 9/11 the president used the specter of the terrorist threat to push through an executive order sealing presidential records and radically curtailing freedom of information requests. It's amazing to read this Washington Post article and realize that it foreshadowed so many of the scandals that would plague the president in the following 5 years:

Bush Clamping Down On Presidential Papers
Incumbent Could Lock Up Predecessor's Records

Thursday, November 1, 2001

The Bush White House has drafted an executive order that would usher in a new era of secrecy for presidential records and allow an incumbent president to withhold a former president's papers even if the former president wanted to make them public.

The five-page draft would also require members of the public seeking particular documents to show "at least a 'demonstrated, specific need' " for them before they would be considered for release.

Historians and others who have seen the proposed order called it unprecedented and said it would turn the 1978 Presidential Records Act on its head by allowing such materials to be kept secret "in perpetuity."

This may be the first record of the president signing an executive order for an unprecedented restriction on our rights. FOIA is inverted, the default position was that records would be open unless the government showed a specific need to classify them. Now classification is the default position.

Other critics voiced concern about the impact of the order "in the post-September 11 world," with its wartime atmosphere.

"The executive branch is moving heavily into the nether world of dirty tricks, very likely including directed assassinations overseas and other violations of American norms and the U.N. charter," said Vanderbilt University historian Hugh Graham. "There is going to be so much to hide."

Remember this is 2001: Americans still think that torture is a barbaric act done by evil people, habeas corpus is still a central element of our legal system, people who argue in defense of internment are considered racists, and Iraq is not on the minds of anyone other than the president and his cabinet.

Bush is expected to sign the order shortly. A White House aide said the Supreme Court held in 1977 that former presidents can continue to assert various privileges for their records and the order will simply establish "a procedure by which they can protect their rights." The aide said "great deference" will be paid to their wishes.

The government now works to protect the powerful. The presumption that our leaders are accountable to us is no longer in effect.

The proposed order, dated Oct. 29, grew out of a decision by the Bush administration early this year to block the release of 68,000 pages of confidential communications between President Ronald Reagan and his advisers that officials at the National Archives, including the Reagan library, had wanted to make public.

Proving that this law had nothing to do with national security, and that even the wishes of a Republican hero were unimportant. George Bush is the sole decider.

Relying on an obscure executive order that Reagan issued just before leaving office, White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales prescribed a series of delays so that Bush could decide whether to invoke "a constitutionally based privilege or take other appropriate action."

Obscure executive orders, Alberto Gonzales devising delaying tactics, and the idea of presidential privilege all wrapped up in a single sentence.

The papers in question, some dealing with Reagan-era officials who now have high posts in the Bush administration, were to have been disclosed last January under the 1978 law, which said that the documents could be restricted at the most for 12 years after Reagan left office.

Hmmm, a conflict of interest here. Certainly, the president wouldn't pass such an act simply to avoid a little embarrassment. The man's at over 80% in the polls!

The new executive order would replace the 1989 Reagan decree and cover not only confidential communications between a president and his advisers but, as Graham put it, "almost anything in the White House files."

How did that "almost" get in there. Better call Alberto back.

For 12-year-old documents that are not covered by "constitutionally based privileges" but are subject to requests under the Freedom of Information Act, the order states that the archivist "must withhold" them if possible.

Must withhold anything despite the fact that FOIA declares these records are open and shall be made available to the public upon request - these are unclassified documents being discussed here.

For records that might be privileged as state secrets, confidential communications, attorney-client communications, or "deliberative process" materials, a requester must establish "specific need" for them "as a threshold matter."

There are the classified documents. I wonder if we could retroactively classify documents that are already public?

A former president would then review them and tell the archivist whether they should be withheld or made public. The incumbent president or a designee would then look at them to see if he or she agrees with the ex-president's decision. Unless both agree they should be made public, the records will remain secret unless "a final court order" should require disclosure.

President Bush attacks open records laws

E&P reports on the battle over government secrecy. The House overwhelmingly passed 3 bills which would open government records and protect whistleblowers from retribution. The Senate is following suit:

The measures, highlighting the media-led Sunshine Week, would force government to be more responsive to Freedom of Information Act requests, make contributions to presidential libraries public and overturn a 2001 presidential directive giving the president authority to keep his records from public view.

The White House issued a veto threat on the presidential records bill and voiced opposition to the FOIA legislation. It also said the president would veto a fourth bill the House is to debate later Wednesday on whistleblower protections. Democrats say the bills, several of which were also taken up in past Republican-led Congresses, were needed to shine light on what they say has been one of the most secretive administrations in decades.

Dick Cheney tells his critics to just shut up

Following in the footsteps of his fellow Iraq war architects Bill Kristol and Joe Lieberman; Dick Cheney accuses his critics of aiding our enemies, while simultaneously demanding a blank check for $100 billion.

But unlike Kristol and Lieberman, who are only asking us to shut up for the next 6-9 months, Cheney tells us to just shut-up, period.

Wounded soldiers silenced

Walter Reed patients told to keep quiet

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

Soldiers say their sergeant major gathered troops at 6 p.m. Monday to tell them they must follow their chain of command when asking for help with their medical evaluation paperwork, or when they spot mold, mice or other problems in their quarters.

They were also told they would be moving out of Building 18 to Building 14 within the next couple of weeks. Building 14 is a barracks that houses the administrative offices for the Medical Hold Unit and was renovated in 2006. It’s also located on the Walter Reed Campus, where reporters must be escorted by public affairs personnel. Building 18 is located just off campus and is easy to access.

The soldiers said they were also told their first sergeant has been relieved of duty, and that all of their platoon sergeants have been moved to other positions at Walter Reed.

The Pentagon also clamped down on media coverage of any and all Defense Department medical facilities, to include suspending planned projects by CNN and the Discovery Channel, saying in an e-mail to spokespeople: “It will be in most cases not appropriate to engage the media while this review takes place,” referring to an investigation of the problems at Walter Reed.

h/t nickpicker

in 2003, asking questions was the definition of media bias

Trolling through Google, I stumbled across an interesting post from early 2003. The Media Research Center, which bills itself as America's media watchdog "Tracking Liberal Media Bias Since 1996" had issued its 1,435th CyberAlert. Complaining that Peter Jennings had aired comments critical of the administration's push for war, instead of simply reciting the party line without comment or analysis.

Jennings Again Delivers Most Anti-Bush Spin of the Night

CBS and NBC were satisfied Tuesday night to note how Secretary of State Colin Powell contended Osama bin Laden's audio tape offered proof of his links to Iraq and then to point out how others in the government fear it's a signal of an impending terrorist attack on the U.S. But ABC's Peter Jennings wasn't satisfied with just doing that. He once again offered the most anti-administration spin of the night with a trilogy of three stories addressing subjects not touched by CBS or NBC.

Jennings argued that “a lot of people say they’ve made the connection” between Iraq and al Qaeda, “but haven’t proved the connection.” Reporter Martha Raddatz seemed to imply the administration's tough line toward Iraq may cause more terrorism: “Well, there are some people, Peter, who are saying the administration has created this link, linking up al-Qaeda and Iraq, because of the possible invasion of Iraq. And many believe this may backfire, saying, 'Who stirred up this hornets nest?’”

Jennings charged that taking on al Qaeda and Iraq “might well be stretching the United States quite thin” before highlighting “dissatisfaction” on Capitol Hill from Bush Iraq policy opponents over plans for a post-war Iraq.

Jennings: “Well, certainly one thing this does today is point out that you’ve got Osama bin Laden on one hand, Saddam Hussein on the other, and this might well be stretching the United States quite thin.”
Raddatz: “Yes, remember the war on terrorism. It would certainly stretch the United States military thin, especially Arabic speakers, special forces and intelligence analysts.”

Setting up another story, on a hearing not mentioned by CBS or NBC, Jennings asserted: “There was more about Iraq on Capitol Hill today. And the headline is dissatisfaction. At a Senate hearing, Senators from both parties wanted to know what the Bush administration intends to do in Iraq after the military phase. ABC’s Linda Douglass reports that if you believe the witnesses today, the administration may not know.”

Throughout the post, we're told CBS and NBC were satisfied to simply report the party line. Jennings was constantly bringing up counter arguments. Questioning whether an attack on Iraq would divide our attention, drain resources from the fight on bin Laden and inflame the Muslim world. Mentioning that some Senators were concerned about what would happen after Saddam fell.

That was considered unacceptable bias in 2003. Today, even many Iraq war supporters wish more questions had been asked and plans made for the consequences of opening up a second war front.

Apparently, dissent is treason in Australia too

Prime Minister John Howard of Australia Says Al-Qaida Is Praying for an Obama Victory

Australia's conservative prime minister slammed Barack Obama on Sunday over his opposition to the Iraq war, a day after the first-term U.S. senator announced his intention to run for the White House in 2008.

"I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory," Howard said on Nine Network television.

"If I were running al-Qaida in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory, not only for Obama but also for the Democrats."