Whistleblowing Is the New Civil Disobedience

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One of the things that has struck me most about Edward Snowden is how astute he seems to have been. Although he downloaded a lot of stuff, he seems to have been very discriminating in how he went about it. My reading of it is that he identified a number of practices that he thought/suspected were illegal/extra-legal/unconstitutional, then selected documents that would establish his case in each category, and downloaded those. And having done so, he seems to have been very canny in handling the subsequent media storm.

Now, more than six months on, people are beginning to see his modus operandi in a new light — as a template for new generations of whistleblowers. danah boyd has an interesting blog post about this, wondering whether whistleblowing might be the new Civil Disobedience.

People growing up with the internet understand that information is power. Those who’ve watched protests in recent years know that traditional physical civil disobedience doesn’t create the iconic narratives and images that it once did. And thus, not surprisingly, what it means to protest is changing. This is further complicated by an increased obsession with secrecy – secret courts, secret laws, secret practices – that make using the rule of law to serve as a check to power ineffective. Thus, questioning authority by leaking information that shows that power is being abused becomes a more valuable and notable form of civil disobedience. As with all forms of civil disobedience, there are significant consequences. But when secrecy is what’s being challenged, the biggest risk is not being beaten by a police officer for staging an event, but being disappeared or silenced by the institutions being challenged or embarrassed. And thus, as much as I hate to accept it, becoming a diplomatic incident is extraordinarily powerful not just for self-protection, but also as a way to make sure that the media doesn’t lose interest in the issues at play.

The ethics of Big Data

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The smartest phrase I’ve heard about big data and ethics comes from my friend Sunil Abraham of the Bangalore Center of Internet and Society, who was involved with those conversations at OSF. He offers this formulation: “The more powerful you are, the more surveillance you should be subject to. The less powerful you are, the more surveillance you should be protected from.” In other words, it’s reasonable to both demand transparency from elected officials and financial institutions, while working to protect ordinary consumers or, especially, the vulnerable poor. Kate Crawford echoed this concern, tweeting a story by Virginia Eubanks that makes the case that surveillance is currently separate and unequal, more focused on welfare recipients and the working poor than on more privileged Americans.

From a typically thoughtful post by Ethan Zuckerman about a panel discussion on “Data and its Discontents” at Microsoft Research’s Social Computing Symposium

Why your health secrets may no longer be safe with your GP

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Last Sunday’s Observer column about the NHS plan to create a national database of health records.

Those planning this healthcare data-grab are clearly hoping that citizen inertia will enable them to achieve their aim, which is to make our most intimate personal details available for data-mining by “approved researchers”. If they succeed, then, starting in March, the medical data of everyone who has not opted out will be uploaded to the repository controlled by the NHS information centre. And for the first time the medical history of the entire nation will have been stored in one place.

What’s wrong with this?

How long have you got?

The paranoia of the One Per Cent

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Wow! This Letter to the Editor appeared in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, which helpfully points out in a footnote that the correspondent is one of the founders of Silicon Valley’s most successful Venture Capital firm. He’s the Perkins in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Regarding your editorial “Censors on Campus” (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

Tom Perkins

San Francisco

LATER: This tweet from KPCB

WSJ_letter_tweet

More fallout from the NSA revelations

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From today’s New York Times

For years, Microsoft has let its customers in Europe, including businesses and organizations, keep their online data close to them. The company operates big data centers in Amsterdam and Dublin for that very purpose.

It now looks as if the company will deepen its commitment to letting those customers decide where their information is stored, at least partly because of concern about spying by the National Security Agency.

In an interview with The Financial Times, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said the company’s customers should be able to “make an informed choice of where their data resides.”

“Technology today requires that people have a high degree of trust in the services they are using ,” he told the paper. “ The events of the last year undermine some of that trust,” he said. “That is one of the reasons new steps are needed to address it.”

Interesting. In some ways, Microsoft is closer to the business community than are Google & Co. They may also be sensitive to the fact that some big European companies (e.g. Siemens) are offering European-based cloud services.

Inequality in Britain

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For example, as you travel on the London Underground just six miles (or 14 stops) east from the heart of government at Westminster to Canning Town, the life expectancy of the inhabitants at each successive stop falls by six months.

Donald Kaberuka, President of the African Development Bank

Source

Why whistleblowers are rare

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My Observer colleague, Nick Cohen, had a terrific column in yesterday’s paper about the Jimmy Savile affair and the BBC’s behaviour in relation to it.

For readers not in the UK I should explain that we now know that Savile was one of the most prolific sexual abusers ever to escape justice. The scale of his crimes, says Cohen, “stands comparison with emperors or tyrants, who engaged in the mass rape of captive subjects. But unlike a dictator, Savile did not require arbitrary power to protect him. All he needed was for society to believe that he was a celebrity: a ‘national treasure’ no one could touch”. (Among other things, Savile was knighted by the Queen for his “charitable” services. And after he died he was laid out in state in Leeds and thousands queued for hours to pay their respects to the deceased hero. Truly, you could not make this stuff up.)

There has been a big inquiry under way, led by a senior retired judge, which is about to issue its report. But we already know that Savile’s grisly predilections and behaviour were well known within the BBC when he was one of its most famous broadcasters. The Observer reported yesterday that the inquiry would reveal that he had abused over a thousand children and young people, many of them on BBC premises.

In the end, two BBC journalists — Liz MacKean, a reporter for the nightly Newsnight current affairs programme and her producer, Meirion Jones — found the evidence that Savile was a voracious paedophile. But their report was spiked by senior BBC management, possibly because, in another corner of the Corporation, there were plans in the works for a major celebratory documentary about Savile the ‘national treasure’.

Given that MacKean and Jones were the first journalists in the BBC to wish to tell the truth about Savile, you’d have thought that they would be regarded as heroines. After all, the BBC’s Royal Charter requires all BBC journalism to strive “to be impartial, accurate and independent”. But that’s not what happened. Here’s how Nick Cohen puts it:

The BBC has not treated its whistleblowers honourably or encouraged others to speak out in the future. Liz MacKean has had enough. Her managers did not fire her. They would not have dared and in any case the British establishment does not work like that.

Instead, they cold-shouldered her. MacKean was miserable. The atmosphere at work was dreadful. The BBC wouldn’t put her on air. She could have stayed, but she did not want to waste her time and talent and end up a bitter old hack. She chose the life of a free journalist instead and went off to work in independent – in all sense of that word – television.

She had been at the BBC for 24 years. Not a single manager came to her leaving party; even though the Pollard inquiry into the BBC’s handling of the Savile affair had vindicated her and Jones’s banned reports; even though every new revelation about Savile and every new celebrity arrest vindicated them further.

Jones, by contrast, stayed at the BBC. He has found a bolt hole at Panorama, which tried to save what was left of the BBC’s honour by producing an exposé of the Savile cover-up. But it is common knowledge that the BBC management will never promote him. His colleagues say he’s had offers to write a book about Savile or to work for independent television, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he took them.

At no point has Chris Patten, the chairman of the BBC Trust, offered Jones or MacKean his support or thanks. If the BBC had run their reports, it would have made all the difference. It could say now that at least it had the integrity to break the news about the crimes of one of its biggest stars. Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones acted in the best interests of the corporation. They were its true defenders. No good did it do them.

This is all par for the course. Moral courage is the scarcest commodity in our society. And whistleblowers are often the embodiment of it. The reason they are detested is partly because they sometimes undermine powerful commercial, organisational or political interests, but mainly because they highlight how compromised and cowardly the rest of us are.

And this is an old, old story. I first began to think about it as a student when I saw a production of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, a scarifying play on this theme. Here’s how Wikipedia summarises the plot:

Doctor Thomas Stockmann is a popular citizen of a small coastal town in Norway. The town has invested a large amount of public and private money towards the development of baths, a project led by Stockmann and his brother, Peter, the Mayor. The town is expecting a surge in tourism and prosperity from the new baths, which are said to be of great medicinal value, and as such, a source of great local pride. Just as the baths are proving successful, Stockmann discovers that waste products from the town’s tannery are contaminating the waters, causing serious illness amongst the tourists. He expects this important discovery to be his greatest achievement, and promptly sends a detailed report to the Mayor, which includes a proposed solution which would come at a considerable cost to the town.

To his surprise, Stockmann finds it difficult to get through to the authorities. They seem unable to appreciate the seriousness of the issue and unwilling to publicly acknowledge and address the problem because it could mean financial ruin for the town. As the conflict develops, the Mayor warns his brother that he should “acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community.” Stockmann refuses to accept this, and holds a town meeting at Captain Horster’s house in order to persuade people that the baths must be closed.

The townspeople — eagerly anticipating the prosperity that the baths will bring — refuse to accept Stockmann’s claims, and his friends and allies, who had explicitly given support for his campaign, turn against him en masse. He is taunted and denounced as a lunatic, an “Enemy of the People.” In a scathing rebuttal of both the Victorian notion of community and the principles of democracy, Stockmann proclaims that, in matters of right and wrong, the individual is superior to the multitude, which is easily led by self-advancing demagogues. Stockmann sums up Ibsen’s denunciation of the masses with the memorable quote “…the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone.” He also says: “A minority may be right; a majority is always wrong.”

Right on.

Obama: relaxed about the NSA

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Here’s Obama, on Air Force One, talking to David Remnick, the Editor of the New Yorker who was writing a pretty friendly piece. Excerpts include these:

After a while, one of the aides led me to the front cabin to talk with the President some more. The week before, Obama had given out the annual Presidential Medals of Freedom. One went to Benjamin C. Bradlee, the editor who built the Washington Post by joining the Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers, in 1971, and who stood behind Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they began publishing the Watergate exposés that led to the fall of the Nixon Presidency. I asked Obama how he could reconcile such an award with his Administration’s aggressive leak investigations, which have ensnared journalists and sources, and its hostility to Edward Snowden’s exposure of the N.S.A.’s blanket surveillance of American and foreign communications.

After a long pause, Obama began to speak of how his first awareness of politics came when, as an eleven-year-old, he went on a cross-country bus trip with his mother and grandmother and, at the end of each day, watched the Watergate hearings on television. “I remember being fascinated by these figures and what was at stake, and the notion that even the President of the United States isn’t above the law,” he said. “And Sam Ervin with his eyebrows, and Inouye, this guy from Hawaii—it left a powerful impression on me. And so, as I got older, when I saw ‘All the President’s Men,’ that was the iconic vision of journalism telling truth to power, and making sure our democracy worked. And I still believe that. And so a lot of the tensions that have existed between my White House and the press are inherent in the institution. The press always wants more, and every White House, including ours, is trying to make sure that the things that we care most about are what’s being reported on, and that we’re not on any given day chasing after fifteen story lines.”

Then Obama insisted that what Snowden did was “not akin to Watergate or some scandal in which there were coverups involved.” The leaks, he said, had “put people at risk” but revealed nothing illegal. And though the leaks raised “legitimate policy questions” about N.S.A. operations, “the issue then is: Is the only way to do that by giving some twenty-nine-year-old free rein to basically dump a mountain of information, much of which is definitely legal, definitely necessary for national security, and should properly be classified?” In Obama’s view, “the benefit of the debate he generated was not worth the damage done, because there was another way of doing it.” Once again, it was the President as Professor-in-Chief, assessing all sides, and observing the tilt of the scales. (The day before his speech last week on reforming the N.S.A., he told me, “I do not have a yes/no answer on clemency for Edward Snowden. This is an active case, where charges have been brought.”)

The coverage of the leaks, Obama complained, paints “a picture of a rogue agency out there running around and breaking a whole bunch of laws and engaging in a ‘domestic spying program’ that isn’t accurate. But what that does is it synchs up with a public imagination that sees Big Brother looming everywhere.” The greater damage, in his view, was the way the leaks heightened suspicions among foreign leaders. Obama enjoyed a good relationship with Angela Merkel, but he admitted that it was undermined by reports alleging that the U.S. tapped her cell phone. This, he said, felt “like a breach of trust and I can’t argue with her being aggravated about that.”

[…]

Obama admitted that the N.S.A. has had “too much leeway to do whatever it wanted or could.” But he didn’t feel “any ambivalence” about the decisions he has made. “I actually feel confident that the way the N.S.A. operates does not threaten the privacy and constitutional rights of Americans and that the laws that are in place are sound, and, because we’ve got three branches of government involved and a culture that has internalized that domestic spying is against the law, it actually works pretty well,” he said. “Over all, five years from now, when I’m a private citizen, I’m going to feel pretty confident that my government is not spying on me.”

So that’s all right then. Steady as we go.