The EFF have an interesting investigation into WSJ and Al-Jazeera ‘leaks’ sites and terms and conditions which suggest users’ anonymity is anything but protected:

“Despite promising anonymity, security and confidentiality, AJTU can “share personally identifiable information in response to a law enforcement agency’s request, or where we believe it is necessary.” SafeHouse’s terms of service reserve the right “to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities” without notice, then goes even further, reserving the right to disclose information to any “requesting third party,” not only to comply with the law but also to “protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies” or to “safeguard the interests of others.” As one commentator put it bluntly, this is “insanely broad.” Neither SafeHouse or AJTU bother telling users how they determine when they’ll disclose information, or who’s in charge of the decision.”

PHP Freelancer

Following yesterday’s post on the visit paid by two West Yorkshire police officers to an anonymous blogger, the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones has done some digging and spoken to the blogger in question, who explains:

“Someone had traced my IP address to Leeds University and the police had spoken to the university and retrieved some files of mine, none of which contained anything which I hadn’t made public. The police then relayed a message from the head of ICT department that I shouldn’t be using university property in such ways.”

Rory’s piece continues:

The officers asked him to take down his blog, which was at that time being written partly on a university computer, and he agreed to do so. “Why?” I asked him. “I did it because I felt intimidated,” he said. “I felt had to co-operate with the police.”

So why did the police or Leeds University get involved in this argument? The university offered no comment, except to say that the person who knew about this issue was away on holiday.

This is the most worrying piece of the puzzle for me.

• Firstly, that – apparently on the basis of a complaint – the police should request computer files from a university.
• And secondly, that the university should comply.

I’m waiting for a response from West Yorkshire Police and Leeds University for further details – particularly on how the police handle harassment complaints like this (and what the nature of the complaint was), and the university’s policy for handing over student data. This may well be a storm in a teacup, but there are valid questions here that need to be answered.

A roundup of other reports on the story can be found here.

UPDATE: I’ve now received a reply from West Yorkshire Police who appear to be merely repeating what they already told Index on Censorship: “As a result of a report of harassment, which was referred to us by Surrey Police, two officers from West Yorkshire Police visited the author of the blog concerned. The feelings of the complainant were relayed to the author who voluntarily removed the blog. No formal action was taken.”

I’ve repeated my questions about how they handle harassment complaints and requests for data more generally.

PHP Freelancer

This* is worrying on so many levels:

• a blogger links to evidence linking a reverend in the Anglican church with holocaust denial and antisemitism
• the reverend complains to Surrey Police, who pass it on to Yorkshire Police, who pay the blogger a visit, during which the blogger agrees to delete one of his blogs.
• in addition, it appears that the police have also spoken to the university which the blogger attends, where the head of ICT “would like to remind me that I should not be using university property in order to associate individuals with terrorists and Holocaust deniers”
• The blogger eventually chooses to speak up when the same reverend threatens another blogger with similar action (despite them being in Australia)

Forget about the specifics. Here are the questions:

• Why are police getting involved in a libel issue ? Update: West Yorks police say it was a claim of “harassment”.
• Why are they ‘paying a visit’?
• Why are they approaching an educational institution to gather information on that person?
• Why does that educational institution then get involved?

Extremely worrying. Watch this one.

*If that link doesn’t work, try this or this.

PHP Freelancer

When media executives (and the occasional columnist on a deadline) talk about ‘the problem with the web’ they often revert to a series of recurring themes. In doing so they draw on a range of discourses that betray assumptions, institutional positions and ideological leanings. I thought I’d put together a list of some common memes of hatred directed towards the internet at various points by publishers and journalists, along with some critical context.

If you can think of any other common complaints, or responses to the ones below, post them in the comments and I’ll add them in. I’ll also update this blog post whenever I come across new evidence on any of the topics.

Meanwhile, here’s a table of contents for easy access:

1. Undemocratic and unrepresentative (The ‘Twitterati’)
2. ‘The death of common culture’
3. The ‘echo chamber’/death of serendipity (homophily)
4. ‘Google are parasites’
5. ‘Bloggers are parasites’
6. ‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with’
7. Rumour and hearsay ‘magically become gospel’
8. Triviality
9. ‘Unregulated’ lack of accountability
10. Cult of the amateur

Undemocratic and unrepresentative (the ‘Twitterati’)

The presumption here is that the media as a whole is more representative and democratic than users of the web. You know, geeks. The ‘Twitterati’ (a fantastic ideologically-loaded neologism that conjures up images of unelected elites). A variant of this is the position that sees any online-based protest as ‘organised’ and therefore illegitimate.

Of course the media is hardly representative or democratic on any level. In every general election in the UK during the twentieth century, for example, editorial opinion was to the right of electoral opinion (apart from 1997). In 1983, 1987 and 1992 press support exceeded by at least half the Conservative Party’s share of the vote. Similar stats can be found in US election coverage. The reasons are obvious: media owners are not representative or democratic: by definition they are part of a particular social class: wealthy proprietors or shareholders (although there are other factors such as advertiser influence and organisational efficiencies).

Journalists themselves are not representative either in terms of social class, gender, or ethnicity – and have become less representative in recent decades.

But neither is the web a level playing field. Sadly, it has inherited most of the same barriers to entry that permeate the media: lack of literacy, lack of access and lack of time prevent a significant proportion of the population from having any voice at all online. And those who are civically engaged online share many of the characteristics of vocal community members offline (although the research at that link notes “there are hints that the new forms of civic engagement anchored in blogs and social networking sites could alter long-standing patterns.”)

UPDATE [12 Jan 2012]: David Brake’s presentation on the ‘representativeness’ of online voices provides more useful resources and frameworks.

So any treatment of internet-based opinion should be done with caution. But just as not everyone has a voice online, even fewer people have a voice in print and broadcast. To accuse the web of being unrepresentative can be a smokescreen for the lack of representation in the mainstream media. When a journalist uses the unrepresentative nature of the web as a stick, ask how their news selection process presents a solution to that: is there a PR agency for the poor? Do they seek out a response from the elderly on every story?

And there is a key difference: while journalism becomes less representative, web access becomes more so, with governments in a number of countries moving towards providing universal broadband and access to computers through schools and libraries (and public media organisations). There is also evidence that social media in particular is more representative of the wider population in terms of ethnicity and age – although as the link above suggests, this is by no means comprehensive.

The ‘Death of common culture’

The internet, this argument runs, is preventing us from having a common culture we can all relate to. Because we are no longer restricted to a few terrestrial channels and a few newspapers – which all share similar editorial values – we are fragmented into a million niches and unable to relate to each other.

This is essentially an argument about culture and the public sphere. The literature here is copious, but one of the key planks is ‘Who defines the public sphere? Who decides what is shared culture?’ Commercial considerations and the needs of elite groups play a key role in both. And of course, what happens if you don’t buy into that shared culture? Alternative media has long attempted to reflect and create culture outside of that mainstream consensus.

You might also argue that new forms of common culture are being created – amateur YouTube videos that get millions of hits; BoingBoing posts; Lolcats; Twitter discussions around jokey hashtag memes – or that old forms of common culture are being given new life: how many people are watching The Apprentice or X Factor because of simultaneous chatter on Twitter?

UPDATE: From Nick in the comments:

“There’s strong evidence that the digital age (and the almost limitless choice it has brought with it) is strengthening common culture, not weakening it. I did an interview with Fred Bolza at Sony Music, who talked about the “compression of the head” (fewer artists getting bigger) here: http://tindeck.com/listen/bpyv and the Economist recently wrote about the same phenomenon, across the entertainment industry. Whether its shows like X Factor or films and books like Harry Potter and Twilight, the hits are getting bigger: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14959982

“We crave common cultural touchpoints and we’re using the digital age to help us find them. I’d argue that Twitter, Google, Facebook, Digg and the rest are doing the same thing for news stories.”

The ‘Echo chamber’/Death of serendipity (homophily)

When we read the newspapers or watched TV news, this argument runs, we encountered information we wouldn’t otherwise know about. But when we go online, we are restricted to what we seek out – and we seek out views to reinforce our own (homophily or cyberbalkanisation).

Countering this, it is worth pointing out that in print people tended to buy one newspaper that also supported their own views* with one particular political leaning, whereas online people switch from publication to publication with differing political orientations. It’s also worth pointing out that over 80% of people have come across a news article online while searching for something else entirely. Many websites have ‘related/popular articles/posts/videos’ features that introduce some serendipity. And finally, there is the role of social media in introducing stories we otherwise wouldn’t encounter (a good example here is the Iran elections – how many people would have skimmed over that in a publication or broadcast, but clicked through because someone was tweeting #cnnfail).

There’s also evidence that people seem to become more broadly and locally connected when they connect to the internet. From a Pew study:

“Ownership of a mobile phone and participation in a variety of internet activities are associated with larger and more diverse core discussion networks … Social media activities are associated with … having discussion networks that are more likely to contain people from different backgrounds. For instance, frequent internet users, and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race. Those who share photos online are more likely to report that they discuss important matters with someone who is a member of another political party … Internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with having a more diverse social network.”

Social media activities are associated with several beneficial social activities, including having discussion networks that are more likely to contain people from different backgrounds. For instance, frequent internet users, and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race. Those who share photos online are more likely to report that they discuss important matters with someone who is a member of another political party.

» When we examine people’s full personal network – their strong ties and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with having a more diverse social network. Again, this flies against the notion that technology pulls people away from social engagement.

That’s not to say homophily doesn’t exist – there is evidence to suggest that people do seek out reinforcements for their own views online – but that doesn’t mean the same trend didn’t exist in print and broadcast, and it doesn’t make that true of everyone. I’d argue that the serendipity of print/broadcast depends on an editor’s news agenda and the serendipity of online depends on algorithms and social networks. So, not worse, not better, just different.

UPDATE: A study by Hargittai, Gallo and Kane (PDF) looked at this question relating to political bloggers and found, as one of the team explained:

“Overall, it would be incorrect to conclude that liberal bloggers are ignoring conservative bloggers or vice versa. Certainly, liberal bloggers are more likely to address liberal bloggers and conservative bloggers are more likely to link to conservative bloggers. But people from both groups are certainly reading across the ideological divide to some extent. There is no clear trend toward becoming more isolated in conversations over time.”

*UPDATE: From Stuart in the comments:

“I’d dispute the claim “people tended to buy a newspaper that also supported their own views” – Sun readers have always been considerably to the left of their paper (MORI research in the guardian). There’s quite a lot of research in network formation in the political blogosphere, and research suggests that left-wingers in particular read/link almost exclusively to left-wing blogs (example) whereas they’re far more likely to read right-wing papers – at the 2005 election 40% of Mail readers and more than half of Times readers voted Labour or Lib Dem.”

Fair point – I’ve clarified the sentence quoted. I would, however, argue that the evidence above (in the ‘unrepresentative’ section) about the political formation of the broader population vs that of the press would lead to that result anyway: if there are more right-wing papers than there are right-wing voters, then a significant proportion of readers will be to the left of the editorial position. The fact that they are more likely to read left-wing material online merely suggests that there is more opportunity to do so than there is in print.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis meditates on serendipity.

UPDATE: Axel Bruns explores this concept in some depth in his wonderful book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond (2008) where he says:

“Such threats have been thematized ever since taste subcultures first came to be studied, and have as yet failed to materialise as dramatically as may have been expected; a reason for this is that no taste subculture ever operates on its own, and that no one community member ever serves as part of only one taste culture. In reality, our tastes and interests are always multiple, and more or less diverse and contradictory, our personas never unified or uniform; through our everyday interactions with others, and with culture itself, we sustain the continued engagement between the different cultural and social perspectives and communities in our society.” (more from this quote here)

UPDATE (Jan 2012): Research undertaken by Facebook (also here) – and the source should be taken into account, although I’m not sure how Facebook would benefit from the findings – found that:

“[E]ven though people are more likely to consume and share information that comes from close contacts that they interact with frequently (like discussing a photo from last night’s party), the vast majority of information comes from contacts that they interact with infrequently.  These distant contacts are also more likely to share novel information, demonstrating that social networks can act as a powerful medium for sharing new ideas, highlighting new products and discussing current events.”

UPDATE [Jan 24 2012]: More research on serendipity in news consumption here.

‘Google are parasites’

This argues that Google’s profits are based on other people’s content. I’ve tackled the Google argument previously: in short, Google is more like a map than a publication, and its profits are based on selling advertising very effectively against searches, rather than against content (which is the publisher’s model). It’s also worth pointing out that news content only forms around 0.01% of indexed content, and that news-related searches don’t tend to attract much advertising anyway. (If it was, Google would try to monetise Google News).

It’s often worth looking at the discourses underlying much of the Google-parasite meme. Often these revolve around it being ‘not fair’ that Google makes so much money; around ‘the value of our content’ as if that is set by publishers rather than what the market is willing to pay; and around ‘taking our content’ despite the fact that publishers invite Google to do just that through a) deciding not to use the Robots Exclusion Protocol (ACAP appears to be an attempt to dictate terms, although it’s not technically capable of doing so yet) and b) employing SEO practices.

Another useful experiment with these complaints is to look at what result publishers are really aiming for. Painting Google as a parasite can, variously, be used as an argument to relax ownership rules; to change copyright law to exclude fair comment; or to gain public subsidy (for instance, via a tax on Google or other online operators). In a nutshell, this argument is used to try to re-acquire the monopoly over distribution that publishers had in the physical world, and the consequent ability to set the price of advertising.

‘Bloggers are parasites’

A different argument to the one above, this one seeks to play down the role of bloggers by saying they are reliant on content from mainstream media. This draws on discourses of ‘original’ and ‘authorship’ to assert authority.

Of course, you could equally point out that mainstream media is reliant on content from PR agencies, government departments, and, most of all, each other. The reliance of local broadcasters on local newspaper content is notorious; the lifting of quotes from other publications equally common. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that – journalists often lift quotes for the same reasons as bloggers – to contextualise and analyse. The difference is that bloggers tend to link to the source.

Calling bloggers ‘parasites’ also betrays a perception of bloggers as ‘publishers’. The blog platform, however, combines publication with conversation. The vast majority of bloggers do not see themselves as publishers but rather as simply having conversations, in public. You wouldn’t accuse readers who gather round the water cooler to discuss the latest report on Iraq of being “parasites”, and yet the water cooler analogy holds for a lot of blogging. The difference, of course, is that by holding those conversations in public you become a competitor, which is why people may draw on the ‘Bloggers as parasites’ argument. Of course, if a blogger’s analysis or contextualisation is better-informed than the mainstream version, you hold an even greater threat, particularly to those claims to ‘authority’ that people using these arguments wish to defend.

Another point to make along these lines is some blogs’ role as ‘Estate 4.5‘, monitoring the media in the same way that the media is supposed to monitor the powerful. “We can fact-check your ass!” (see comments on Ken Layne)

‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with’

Identity is a complex thing. While it’s easy to be anonymous online, the assertions that people make online are generally judged by their identities, just as in the real world.

However, an identity is more than just a name – online, more than anything, it is about reputation. And while names can be faked, reputations are built over time. Forum communities, for example, are notorious for having a particularly high threshold when it comes to buying into contributions from anyone who has not been an active part of that community for some time. (It’s also worth noting that there’s a rich history of anonymous/pseudonymous writing in newspapers).

Users of the web rely on a range of cues and signals to verify identity and reputation, just as they do in the physical world. There’s a literacy to this, of course, which not everyone has at the same levels. Judith Donath’s paper ‘Signals in Social Supernets‘ is a very good overview of how we use different signals in establishing trust online – and the levels of risk we take in judging those signals:

“When the costs of being deceived are low, people may not care if something is an exaggeration. However, when the costs are high, they may demand a more reliable signal…

“Trustworthiness itself is not directly perceivable (Bacharach & Gambetti, 2001). People trust new information and acquaintances that come to them via people they trust…

“SNSs can actually increase trustworthiness, by placing people within a context that can enforce social mores. SNSs make people aware that their friends and colleagues are looking at their self-presentation.”

You might argue that it is in some ways easier to establish the background of a writer online than it was for their print or broadcast counterparts. On the radio, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Rumour and hearsay ‘magically become gospel’

They say “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.” And it’s fair to say that there is more rumour and hearsay online for the simple reason that there is more content and communication online (and so there’s also more factual and accurate information online too). But of course myths aren’t restricted to one medium – think of the various ‘Winterval’ stories propagated by a range of newspapers that have gained such common currency. Or how about these classics:

The interactive nature of the web does make it easier for others to debunk hearsay through comments, responses on forums, linkbacks, hashtagged tweets and so on. But interactivity is a quality of use, not of the thing itself, so it depends on the critical and interactive nature of those browsing and publishing the content. Publishers who don’t read their comments, take note.

‘Unregulated’ lack of accountability

Accountability is a curious one. Often those making this assertion are used to particular, formal, forms of accountability: the Press Complaints Commission; Ofcom; the market; your boss. Online the forms of accountability are less formal, but can be quite savage. A ream of critical comments makes you accountable very quickly. Look at what happened to Robert Scoble when he posted something inaccurate; or to Jan Moir when she wrote something people felt was in bad taste. That accountability didn’t exist in the formal structures of mainstream media.

Related to this is the idea that the internet is ‘unregulated’. Of course it is regulated – you have (ironically, relatively unaccountable) organisations like the Internet Watch Foundation, and the law applies just as much online and in the physical world. Indeed, there is a particular problem with one country’s laws being used to pursue people abroad – see, for example, how Russian businessmen have sued American publishers in London for articles which were accessed a few times online. On the other hand, people can escape the attentions of lawyers by mirroring content in other jurisdictions, by simply being too small a target to be worth a lawyer’s time, or by being so many that it is impractical to pursue. These characteristics of the web can be used in the defence of freedoms (see Trafigura) as much as for attacks (hate literature).

UPDATE: More on a variant of this argument in  ‘Journalism is not a zero-sum game’.

Triviality

Trivial is defined as “of very little importance or value”. This is of course a subjective value judgement depending on what you feel is important or valuable. The objection to the perceived triviality of online content – particularly those of social networks and blogs – is another way to deprecate an upstart rival based on a normative ideal of the importance of journalism. And while there is plenty of ‘important’ information in the media, there is also plenty of ‘trivial’ material too, from the 3am girls to gift ideas and travel supplements.

The web has a similar mix. To focus on the trivial is to intentionally overlook the incredibly important. And it is also to ignore the importance of so much apparently ‘trivial’ information – what my friends are doing right now may be trivial to a journalist, but it’s useful ‘news’ or content to me. And in a conversational medium, the exchange of that information is important social glue, what Bonnie Nardi refers to (PDF) as “the work of connection”

To take journalists’ own news values: people within your social circle are ‘powerful’ within that circle, and therefore newsworthy, to those people, regardless of their power in the wider world.

The Cult of the Amateur

This argument has, for me, strange echoes of the arguments against universal suffrage at various points in history. Replace ‘bloggers’ with ‘women’ or ‘the masses’ and ‘professionals’ with ‘men’ or ‘the aristocracy’ in these arguments and you have some idea of the ideology underlying them. It’s the notion that only a select portion of the population are entitled to a voice in the exercise of power.

The discourse of ‘amateur’ is particularly curious. The implication is that amateur means poor quality, whereas it simply means not paid. The Olympics is built on amateurism, but you’d hardly question the quality of Olympic achievement throughout time. In the 19th century much scientific discovery was done by amateur scientists.

Professional, on the other hand, is equated with ‘good’. But professionalism has its own weaknesses: the pressures of deadlines, pressures of standardisation and efficiency, commercialism and market pressures, organisational culture.

That’s not to say that professionalism is bad, either, but that both amateurism and professionalism have different characteristics which can be positive or negative in different situations.

There’s an economic variant to this argument which suggests that people volunteering their efforts for nothing undermines the economic value of those who do the same as part of a paid job. This is superficially true, but some of the reasons for paying people to do work are because you can expect it to be finished within a particular timeframe to a particular quality – you cannot guarantee those with amateur labour (also, amateurs choose what they want to work on), so the threat is not so large as it is painted. The second point is that jobs may have to adapt to this supply of volunteer information. So instead of or as well as creating content the role is to verify it, contextualise it, link it, analyse it, filter it, or manage it. After all, we don’t complain about the ‘cult of the volunteer’ undermining charity work, do we?

UPDATE: I deal with a variant of this argument – the ‘Bad Experience view of UGC’, in the second part of this post.

UPDATE 2: Clay Shirky writes particularly eloquently about the dumbing down meme: “Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid. This fear dates back to at least the invention of movable type … Whenever media become more abundant, average quality falls quickly, while new institutional models for quality arise slowly. Today we have The World’s Funniest Home Videos running 24/7 on YouTube, while the potentially world-changing uses of cognitive surplus are still early and special cases.”

UPDATE: Cory Doctorow responds to 3 common groans about social media in this Guardian column.

UPDATE: Scott Rosenberg tackles both the ‘death of common culture’ and ‘echo chamber’ memes in the ‘Journalists vs Bloggers’ chapter of his excellent book on the history of blogging.

PHP Freelancer

Last week Jezebel blogger Tatiana outed herself. That isn’t particularly important, but it does give me an excuse to highlight what a fantastic job she did as a somewhat overlooked investigative blogger.

‘Going undercover’ has a rich history in investigative journalism – in fact, for investigative television journalism, it’s almost part of the genre toolkit. In print, German journalist Gunter Wallraff was a particularly successful exponent – his book The Lowest of The Low,  describing his experiences working undercover as a Turkish immigrant, was the most successful in German publishing history.

But it’s one thing to use a wig and contact lenses to disguise yourself as a Turkish immigrant. If you want to expose the fashion industry, most journalists don’t have the option to pass themselves off as a size zero, six foot model with razor sharp cheekbones.

And so we come to Tatiana – now known to be Jenna Sauers. These are the sorts of things she wrote:

 ”I learned early that the higher a job’s fashion quotient, the less money I would be offered. How, exactly, I was supposed to make a living as a model never became entirely clear; when I worked two months in Australia last year, after agency fees and the rent were deducted, nearly AU$5,000 worth of earnings became AU$690.90. Less than the cost of my airfare, certainly less than the cost of the food and subway passes I’d had to charge during the trip. I left Sydney in November. I didn’t get my $690.90 — $413.70, after wire transfer fees and currency conversion — until this April. “At least,” said the agency accountant, “you worked!”" [source]

“I can’t count the number of girls I meet in this industry who speak in regretful tones of that short-lived “relationship” they had with that older photographer or client; I can’t count the number of men I meet who radiate the unmistakable sense that they have literally been sleeping with 17-year-olds since they were that age themselves. Agency directors in the mold of Gérald Marie. Financial backers. Clients. Or any of the industry hangers-on, the restaurateurs and the importer/exporters and the gossip columnists who end up at the parties we go to (because, you soon learn, going to parties is sort of part of the job).” [source]

“The industry has a way of reducing ideas with potential to well-intentioned sop. Madrid’s decision to only permit models with BMIs of 18 or over to work? When I worked in Spain, my booker actually told me, “Don’t think just because this is Spain you can eat whatever you want and get fat, Tatiana. You need to watch those hips.” Milan’s vaunted no-more-size-zero-girls solution — that thing they were going to do with having models’ BMIs be over 18 and models themselves be over 16? Last time I was in Milan, my model apartment roommate had just turned 15, and the only mention of health was this message, inscribed inside the back cover of my portfolio book:  Wellness and Beauty. Beautiful,bud Healthy above all. Ask a specialist for any diet program, or physical activity you intend to start. For any information, contact Associazione Servizi Moda or you Model Agency.” [source]

At the same time she mixed this up with pieces like this compilation of catwalk falls on YouTube, and this on her enjoyment of Fashion Week. That versatility may not win her any Pullitzers, but it is more likely to engage readers. Warts and all accounts read truer if they’re not just about the (Photoshopped out) warts. 

Sauer (Tatiana Twitter bio: “I make my living encouraging bulimia in teenaged girls.”) is a great writer who has done something rather brave. A journalism culture focused on hard news and political investigations often overlooks this sort of work. She has quit modelling, but plans to continue to write at the blog she gave up on 7 months ago, and judging by the comments on her return to it, plenty of other places too. If you get the chance to hire Jenna, take it. If you don’t, just enjoy reading her work.

PHP Freelancer

Last month I said in my post ‘7 ways to blog anonymously‘ that I was trying to find out how anonymous blogging platform Blogacause.com ensured anonymitu. I’ve now had a response, from owner Michael Groves. Here’s what he said – comments and further questions welcomed:

Blogacause uses the blojsom blogging platform to execute the blogs you see on our site. The home page and subpages, not including blogs, are
built on coldfusion code. Since I’m a web application programmer by trade, I’ve rewritten the code in blojsom such that any identifying
information that was previously stored about visitors or bloggers is no longer a part of the engine code.

With regard to comments on the site I did leave the code in place but as you will notice as a blogger on our site it always returns the same IP, that of the hosting server (we did this because we though we might need to track down some very specific spammers from the Asian countries so we can block them. However, a recent code page I developed will allow us to automatically ban spamming IPs and this is due for deploy 4th quarter 2009. So eventually the comment IP will be removed entirely.).

The coldfusion server port forwards seamlessly to a tomcat server which serves the blojsom powered blogs and the logs for the tomcat have been turned off.

I’m currently writing code which is a type of dead-man switch which will begin deleting logs and other things, after a specific period of time, which might compromise anonymity should I be unable to access the server or admin consoles in place.

I also am a full admin on the servers on which we host our site so I can assure that logs are turned off which track visitors’ and users’ IP addresses and other identifying information. Those that we are not able to turn off are deleted with regularity daily. I’m currently working with the owner of the host servers to programmatically scrub the logs of any info about blogacause visitors and users.

I won’t go into any details other than what I’ve given above, but suffice it to say that I’m quite serious about providing an anonymous platform for our bloggers to expose government misdeeds or to champion causes against large organisations with deep pockets.

I will say this about other blogging platforms. While they say they can offer anonymous blogging, it’s been my observation that this not only is not true, but that because of who owns them or invests in their continuance (either mainstream media or the big guys like Google or Microsoft – WordPress got a huge bankroll from the New York Times) they have a vested interest in actively collecting data that can personally identify users and visitors and/or add to their bottom line. We do not have such an interests.

We have been using analytics but that will change as we believe that Google, who received her seed monies from the CIA and the NSA, cannot be trusted. Instead we have written our own code which will be implemented last quarter of 2009 which again will not collect any personally identifiable informaton.

I and the others involved in this endeavor are just normal everyday citizens who believe in being able to fight back and even the playing field, and we are concerned by the sociopolitical and economic paths we see “civilized”, “progressive” and “super-power” statused countries taking and its effects on humans.

As to being compelled in a court of law to provide info about a blogger or commenter, we can honestly tell a court that it’s not possible. And should the court try to compel us to turn on logging we will simply turn off the site and start it again somewhere else. We can always retool the site for other uses.

If police seize your servers is there a chance that there will be ghost residues of ‘deleted’ data? I’m assuming that is why they seized IndyMedia’s servers in the UK and US even though they delete user data.

That is most certainly why they seized the servers… for forensic analysis. There is always the chance of deleted data being available in ghost form on a disk.

Keep in mind this is a live webserver with probably close to a 1000 websites hosted on it. In as much as we keep the drives lean and mean, I’m sure that the drive’s deleted data doesn’t stay ghosted for long what with the 100′s of thousands of writes to the disk daily. If the site continues to grow eventually we will host on a standalone server and be able to implement even more strenuous privacy measures. At this time its just a matter of money.

Responses to further questions will be published here and in the comments.

PHP Freelancer

Following today’s landmark judgement on one blogger’s right (or not) to anonymity, I thought it might be useful to post the following tips on maintaining anonymity online.

1. Use an anonymous email account to register your blog. Hushmail is one free service that provides encrypted accounts; RiseUp is aimed at activists; MintEmail gives you a 3 hour temporary email address and FilzMail gives you one that expires after 24 hours. You could also use these to post to your blog via email. Posterous is a great blogging service that allows you to do this.

2. Make sure your IP address isn’t logged when you register or post to the blog. You could use something like Anonymizer or Tor or Psiphon. Other services that mask your IP are listed on this forum.

3. Or you could use an anonymous blogging platform. Invisiblog was one but no longer exists. BlogACause claims to be “anonymous” but I’m trying to find out exactly how UPDATE: here’s how, apparently. In the meantime, this post recommends WordPress and something like Tor.

4. Use a pseudonym that you don’t use anywhere else. If you use a pseudonym, don’t use it on other services as well, as this will make it easier to trace you. If you’re struggling, this Random Name Generator will create one for you.

5. If you’re going to register a domain name do so anonymously with a service like The Online Policy Group.

6. Be careful what information you include. Although police blogger NightJack changed or did not include names in cases he was involved in, the details were specific enough for a journalist to track him down.

7. Don’t win awards. Or book deals. It’s safe to say that a major newspaper would not have been interested in the identities of NightJack or Girl With A One Track Mind if both had remained cult underground heroes. So just pretend you’re sub-literate, OK?

For more information, the following guides go into much more detail:

• How to blog safely by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Anonymous blogging with WordPress and Tor by Ethan Zuckerman – and also by Ethan: A Technical guide to anonymous blogging
• Hints and tips for whistleblowers – covers everything online and offline
• How to communicate securely in repressive environments by iRevolution (thanks Lisa Lynch)
• How to hide emails from government snooping by Jack Schofield

More links and tips welcome. My Delicious bookmarks on anonymity are at http://delicious.com/paulb/anonymity

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Widely lauded anonymous police blogger NightJack has had his identity revealed after The Times took the affair to court.

It’s a cloudy affair. The Times’ angle is that media correspondent Patrick Foster wanted to ‘out’ someone he felt “was revealing confidential details about cases, some involving sex offences against children, that could be traced back to genuine prosecutions” as well as offering “advice to people who found themselves the subject of a police investigation.”

NightJack’s case for preventing the publication of his name was that he would be (and indeed has already been) punished by his superiors.

Mr Justice Eady didn’t buy that, saying: “I do not accept that it is part of the court’s function to protect police officers who are, or think they may be, acting in breach of police discipline regulations from coming to the attention of their superiors.”

The Times also reports him as saying “that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds.”

Hugh Tomlinson, QC, for the blogger, had argued that “thousands of regular bloggers who communicate nowadays via the internet under a cloak of anonymity would be horrified to think that the law would do nothing to protect their anonymity of someone carried out the necessary detective work and sought to unmask them”.

The judge said … the blogger needed to show that he had a legally enforceable right to maintain anonymity in the absence of a genuine breach of confidence, by suppressing the fruits of detective work such as that carried out by Mr Foster.

But Mr Justice Eady said that the mere fact that the blogger wanted to remain anonymous did not mean that he had a “reasonable expectation” of doing so; or that The Times was under an enforceable obligation to him to maintain that anonymity.

There are so many elements to this case it’s difficult to pick them apart.

• On the one hand we have a blog which is potentially, in some circumstances, in contempt of court, written by a policeman who is, strictly speaking, breaking his obligations under the “statutory code governing police behaviour and general public law duty”. That’s The Times’ ‘public interest’, or at least the case that they made (The Times have history here – it would have been interesting to have seen the public interest argument for publishing the name of Girl With A One Track Mind).
• On the other we have someone’s privacy.
• But the 3rd point – and it’s interesting that this doesn’t seem to have been used as a defence – is that this is a ruling that has enormous implications for whistleblowers and people blogging ‘on the ground’. That’s someone else’s ‘public interest’.

And that last element is the saddest for me.

With the disappearance of NightJack (his blog has already been deleted*), we lose one more ‘voice on the ground’. While The Times focused on the letter of the law that was being broken, the broader public interest of letting public servants voice their…

“frustrations with … attempts at the reform of policing which, he says, has turned officers from “approachable neighbourhood figures into neon-clad stormtroopers.”"

…has been ignored.

It is difficult enough to get soldiers to blog, for people to get a genuine feel for the experiences of NHS workers, civil servants and teachers.

And it just got harder.

UPDATE: Curiously, The Times appear to have prevented their reporter from speaking about the issue on Radio 5.

UPDATE 2: A couple of Times journalists have gone on the record with their feelings about the affair.

UPDATE 3: NightJack himself has written a piece in The Times on the story behind the case. Anonymong describes it as “reminiscent of a communist show trial where the accused is allowed to publicly confess their sins and misdemeanors.” But the comments tell a very different story of support.

UPDATE 4: I’ve written a guide to anonymity for bloggers.

UPDATE 5: Via Anonymong:  ”as noted by Anna Raccoon there is now some precedent for investigating and publishing identifying material relating to a serving police office as prohibited by the counter terrorism act 2008.”

UPDATE 6: As you’d expect, someone has dug into Patrick Foster’s past and come up with some dirt of their own.

UPDATE 7: Fellow public service blogger and ambulance driver Tom Reynolds gives his views on the case. Chicken Yoghurt gives his on the media’s use of anonymous sources. David MacLean responds: “Of course journalists rely on anonymous sources, but if a rival national newspaper found out who was tipping off a competitor, they’d more than likely expose them if the resulting story would be of interest to the public.”. Emily Bell highlights the raft of furious comments on The Times’ Crime Central blog. Gary Andrews gives his take. And Journalism.co.uk round up some more besides.

UPDATE 8 [Jan 24 2012] It seems that Nightjack’s email was hacked in order to get that story.

(h/t Girlonetrack) *Thanks to Martin in the comments: if you type “site:nightjack.wordpress.com” into Google, the pages appear to be cached. Don’t know how long that will last though.

PHP Freelancer

In the UK the leaking of a list of the members of far right party BNP online has created a classic new media problem for journalists: anyone can find the information, but no one in the mainstream media dare publish it for legal reasons… or can they? From Ewan McIntosh (via Stuart on the 38minutes blog):

“To republish the list would be illegal, so newspapers such as the Guardian printed the numerical stats on line-art maps. Far from breaking the law, it was crowdsourcing that came up with a better solution, both allowing us to see how many BNP-ers are on our doorstep without revealing their names and exact locations. Cue the anonymous, but powerful, BNP member Google Heatmap, which has since allowed our Government ministers to realise the pockets where local politics lets people down.”

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