A little bird told me

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Sharp piece in the Economist.

A PALTRY 140 characters can certainly stir up trouble. A BBC report earlier this month did not identify the Tory it wrongly suggested had molested a child, but Twitter users did. Some 1,000 individuals implicated Lord McAlpine, and a further 9,000 retweeted those messages to a wider audience. The former Conservative Party treasurer called it “trial by Twitter”. On November 20th lawyers for the peer informed people with fewer than 500 followers that they can make amends with a donation to charity (the BBC’s Children in Need). Tweeters with larger followings may face legal action.

Applying classic legal remedies to online information is hardly new. But threatening a libel claim against thousands of people at once is novel. Libel law has typically held to account large, centralised institutions that enjoy broad reach, like newspapers. It has not been used to check the discrete actions of a huge number of individuals, which together have a broad effect.

This invites a host of hard questions.

It does indeed.

Opening gambits

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Sitting in the shelter on Platform 7 this morning waiting for the London train when a young woman came in and sat next to me. “Excuse me”, she said, “but can I ask you a question? What do you think of when you think of Jesus?” She seemed like a nice person, so I replied politely that I didn’t think of him at all. “What about God, then?” “Ditto”, I replied. “Are you a scientist?” she asked. I replied that I was an engineer. “Same thing”, she said, knowledgeably, “and the same cop-out”. I said, mildly, that some people might regard a belief in God as a cop-out. She gave me a pitying smile and then my train arrived.

Strange what people believe. But it’s not the strangest conversational opener I’ve experienced. Once, many years ago, I was seated at a magazine lunch next to the late Russell Harty, a very camp but charming TV chat-show host. His opening gambit was to say “What’s the first thing you do in the morning? Do you pee or brush your teeth?” Slightly miffed, I replied that sometimes I did one and sometimes the other but generally I started the day by reading the works of St Thomas Aquinas”. “Oooooh!” He exclaimed delightedly. “An intellectual!”

(Full Disclosure: I’ve never read the works of the aforementioned Aquinas. But I thought Harty’s impertinence ought not to go unpunished.)

The data detectives

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This morning’s Observer column.

On Friday 20 July, Obama had 18 million followers, compared with Romney’s 690,000. But over the next few days @MittRomney mysteriously acquired 100,000 new followers.

This immediately attracted the attention of those who track these things. “Is Mitt Romney buying Twitter followers?” asked one prominent observer. Others noted that many of the new “followers” looked dodgy. Five of them shared the same profile photo, for example. Obama supporters gleefully pointed out that buying followers would be absolutely typical of a candidate who was fabulously rich but clueless about cyberspace. Sceptics wondered if the spike was actually orchestrated by Romney’s opponents as a way of discrediting him. Was the spike the product of a Twitter “spambot” – a software robot that creates fake accounts? And so on.

But this was all conjecture and speculation. Everybody was suspicious but nobody knew anything. Then a couple of students at the Oxford Internet Institute asked themselves a question: what’s the probability that Romney’s new followers are genuine? Their account of the research makes fascinating reading…

Quote of the Day

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“We all know what needs to be done. We just don’t know how to be re-elected when we’ve done it”.

Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxembourg and president of the Euro group of prime ministers, quoted in the Economist, Nov 17, 2012.

Sex and the National Security State

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Lovely NYTimes column by Roger Cohen.

What Obama did not say, of course not, is that Petraeus and Allen (and Kelley and Broadwell) are all in some measure victims of the Surveillance State the president inherited from George W. Bush and has spent the past four years consolidating and expanding. Among other things, Obama has tried to amend the Patriot Act to give the F.B.I. ever greater intrusive powers. In 2010, The Washington Post reported that every day the National Security Agency intercepts and stores “1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communication.”

Obama declared in 2009 that we “cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.” His success in fulfilling that pledge has been distinctly mixed. The drone-led battle against terrorism takes place in a world largely beyond due process and the rule of law. And the privacy of Americans is intruded upon daily in ways that flout the Fourth Amendment.

Now his top generals, older men drawn to younger women, have ended up caught in the invasive web. The irony of a security apparatus turning on its security chiefs is impossible to escape.

The president says national security has not been compromised in any way. So what, pray, is the issue here? Allen’s flirtatious banter with Kelley? The ultimate failure of Petraeus the perfectionist to meet his own impossibly high standards? Or rather the deeply troubling fact that this F.B.I. inquiry digging into in-boxes was possible in the first place?

Yep.

The real scandal of the Petraeus affair

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Glenn Greenwald is right.

So all based on a handful of rather unremarkable emails sent to a woman fortunate enough to have a friend at the FBI, the FBI traced all of Broadwell’s physical locations, learned of all the accounts she uses, ended up reading all of her emails, investigated the identity of her anonymous lover (who turned out to be Petraeus), and then possibly read his emails as well. They dug around in all of this without any evidence of any real crime – at most, they had a case of “cyber-harassment” more benign than what regularly appears in my email inbox and that of countless of other people – and, in large part, without the need for any warrant from a court.

[…]

So not only did the FBI – again, all without any real evidence of a crime – trace the locations and identity of Broadwell and Petreaus, and read through Broadwell’s emails (and possibly Petraeus’), but they also got their hands on and read through 20,000-30,000 pages of emails between Gen. Allen and Kelley.

This is a surveillance state run amok. It also highlights how any remnants of internet anonymity have been all but obliterated by the union between the state and technology companies.

Yep. The only consolation is that the National Security State in this case ate its own tail, by bringing down its Chief Spook. The Law of Unintended Consequences is still in business, it seems.

Where Samsung’s revenues come from

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Chart shows Samsung’s revenues heading for twice those of Google.

What’s funny about this? Answer: most of Samsung’s revenues come from Android, which is provided by Google. Interesting case of symbiosis in action, eh? Or is it just parasitism?

The Last Post

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The Washington Post has a new Editor, Martin Baron, formerly editor of the Boston Globe. Jack Shafer has an interesting column about what has happened to the Post — which in a way is just a more dramatic example of what has happened to the old city-monopoly newspapers.

Baron arrives at a paper much diminished from its salad days under Bradlee and Downie, when the Post was the leading mass-advertising vehicle in Washington and corpulent with profit. Under Bradlee’s and much of Downie’s tenures, the paper’s biggest problem was finding something to spend all that money on. It established domestic bureaus in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, Denver, and Miami. It expanded its business pages into a freestanding section in the early 1990s. It created local bureaus to serve the suburbs that circle Washington, filled them with reporters and produced zoned editions. It experimented with new weekly sections covering consumer tech and lifestyle.

Today the domestic bureaus are gone, as are the suburban ones, and business coverage has been reduced to a couple of pages running in the A section. The tech and lifestyle weeklies are long gone. The $130 million College Park, Maryland, printing facility the Post built in 1999 was closed by 2009. It lost its free-standing book review. It killed comics, the chess and poker columns, and one crossword puzzle. In 2000 the paper had 800 print journalists and 100 in its digital newsroom. Last summer the total number of full-time journalists was down to about 600. (In hindsight, the journalistic innovation the Post should have pursued was the building out of a politics website, which Posties John Harris and Jim VandeHei proposed to the paper but ended up launching as Politico with a local TV station owner.) The Post has so wound down local coverage that ombudsman Patrick B. Pexton published a column last Sunday complaining about the paper’s skimpiness.

How to get a life

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Lovely blog post by Sean French who — like me — spent far too much time thinking about the US Presidential election.

I’ve spent way too much of the last year checking up on the latest Ohio polls, debating inside my own head whether Florida has decisively switched into the Romney camp, whether Obama’s decisive victory in the foreign policy debate will have any effect in the battleground states. 

I sometimes wonder what I would think if I heard of someone roughly like me sitting in somewhere like New Zealand, constantly checking the UK opinion polls for the swing seats, wondering whether Ed Miliband was a plausible leadership candidate and what the effect of the improved employment figures was. I know what I’d think: that he should get a life.

Does anyone read Dr Johnson’s wonderful novel Rasselas any more? There’s a character, an early meteorologist, who has been observing the weather for so long that he believes he controls it. I suppose I’m a bit like that, except that I’m not even observing my own weather, I’m observing American weather.

Ouch! Just when I had decided that I must read this, I will have to postpone it to read Rasselas. Sigh. That’s the trouble with blogs: they give you ideas.