In Baltimore Harbor, I board another submarine (it isn't yellow)

Today (Nov. 10, 2009), as a bonus on a visit to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, I boarded and took a brief self-guided tour of the World War II diesel-powered submarine, the USS Torsk.

In May 1993, while researching for the first book that I would write, I visited and boarded the USS Sunfish, a nuclear powered submarine built in 1963 (now decommissioned) at Norfolk Naval Base.

The Trosk seemed even more cramped that had the Sunfish. To go from one compartment to the next, one had to squeeze through like an octopus.


Of course, the cramped conditions on submarines are a “worst case scenario” for some of the debate over homosexuals in the military, with the “hot bunking” and lack of “privacy.” Nevertheless, midshipman Joseph Steffan had spent a summer cruise on a submarine, described in his 1992 book “Honor Bound”. Another apt observation is that very tall men (more numerous now than in the 1940s) could not fit on a submarine (or in some fighter jets – I don’t know what the height ranges are). And women were not allowed on submarines often until recently, until they were allowed on two subs according to an April 2008 New York Times story by Seymour Conch and James Boswell, link here.


Above, note the typewriter and teletype (1940s); no PC's yet.



Last picture: a Coast Guard cutter.


This picture: coelenterates (jellyfish), but not the notorious box jellyfish (cubozoa).

More cases of frivolous litigation against bloggers, other Internet users occur

Here’s an older story from May 21, 2009 from the Wall Street Journal about the increasing risk of litigation against bloggers, web url link here, by M.P. McQueen.

The story goes into litigation against Shellee Hale of Belevue, WA for postings about alleged hacker attacks on a company that makes software to track sales from “adult oriented” websites. And the problem here wasn’t COPA. The litigation appears to relate to comments made on a forum hosted by another site, not to a personal blog.

Some property casualty companies are offering coverage for blog postings, sometimes not including copyright or DMCA-related claims, however, for as little as $30 a year. But it’s not yet clear that they could always cover large volumes of postings or “controversial” material, a problem that the National Writers Union ran into in 2001 trying to offer media perils coverage.

The story also discusses Rogers Caddenhead, of the Drudge Retort, created in 1998.

The practical problem for bloggers may be defending against frivolous suits, which is one reason to press for federal anti-SLAPP legislation. Some companies aggressively scour the Internet for derogatory statements made against them or for what they perceive as copyright infringement or “piracy,” as the tools for such vigilance have grown more powerful. California has a fairly strong anti-SLAPP law but many states don’t. Tort reform is an issue with online liability just as it is with health insurance reform.

Is "too much knowledge" anti-faith? I say, see around those corners!

Today, Sunday afternoon, the Westover Market in Arlington VA held a “Be Brave and Shave: Heroes Against Cancer” benefit for the Children’s National Medical Center. Okay, these were head shaves, and I’m bald anyway. Frankly, because of some occurrences during my upbringing, I became very sensitive about my body as a boy, and rather unwilling to share even superficial (even non-living) “body parts” for charity. Some of these things are just too intimate. I play the “introvert advantage”, preferring to know what I’m doing before I jump in. If dropping by and snapping a picture seems voyeuristic, so be it. One can make the donation and not get shaved.

The media has had fun with this kind of thing, on reality shows. Let’s get beyond Allison Sweeney (“Samantha”) and “Biggest Loser” and recall Troy McClain who, in an early episode of Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” let his legs get waxed for the sake of “The Team”. But for me, the vestiges of 1950s style shame is real. Once, when substitute teaching, I was ambushed by a request to don swimming trunks (at age 61) in front of the kids and man the deep end of the pool. I refused.

Okay, you say to me, "get off your high horse," give up those expressive, self-indulgent psychological defenses, and go back to real life. And I just photograph the experience in my mind, ready to write it up later, maybe in a movie screenplay.

That brings me to something else – related to introversion, perhaps. I like the accumulation of knowledge, sometimes gratuitously, sometimes, it seems, for its own sake. That theme kept coming in my high school education in the late 50s (graduating in 1961), as I explained in a posting on Sept. 14, 2007 here. The history teacher taught us to see the way issues like segregation could affect our “karma”, an math teachers (especially in plane geometry, as I remember) taught the value of sophistry and learning for its own sake. Today, education helps people learn to see around corners (as Dr. Phil often points out , although biological brain maturity is part of this). Suze Orman and her smackdowns on personal finance provides a good example: nobody needs to fall for the “because everyone else does it” trap and get into financial trouble with unsustainable financial behavior (like taking out unsound mortgages). Education, particularly math, helps people see the cumulative effect of savings and debt, both. In other areas, the same ideas apply. Computer literacy helps parents as well as teens recognize scams and predators. That sort of learning is a little bit like learning to drive a car: realizing that some kinds of mistakes can have long-lasting, grave consequences.

A lot of knowledge on the Internet has been “self-published” for free or for relatively little compensation by “amateurs”. A lot is written these days about whether this development undermines conventional “professional” newspaper and broadcast journalism. But the quality of the volumes of material on sources like Wikipedia and many personal sites keeps improving (with only modest additional constraints, such as those implemented recently by Wikipedia). And, as I’ve pointed out, a lot more could be done to give individuals the ability to “connect the dots”, enough to change the whole flavor of political debate and change, taking it away from lobbyists paid by special interests and giving it back to ordinary people. Blogging and social networking has, in some measure, become a new tool for direct democracy.

But a knowledge-based society presumes that individuals will keep up with “knowledge” in order to take care of themselves, and, depending on their past choices, their own families. A lot of this knowledge will make the well-informed better prepared for changes that come (as it did before; “introverts” were often better prepared to deal with a more entrepreneurial job market as it started to evolved in the late 1980s). Some of it is novel and subtle, such as the awareness of the problems concerning “online reputation” that have evolved during the era of social media. Some knowledge that gets out there, however, seems gratuitous. I know, I make postings about the (hypothetical) dangers of an asymmetric EMP attack or of a huge East Coast tsunami from the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Atlantic. There’s not much the average citizen can do about this sort of “duck and cover” scare talk (remember the “Atomic Café”?) Or is there? Talk about H5N1 (as opposed to H1N1) or even Ebola virus is scary, but with determination we can really get our politicians and medical industries geared up to deal with it before it disrupts our whole way of life. Or how about careful calculation of just how much mileage we can get out of clean energy initiatives to forestall adverse climate change (which not everyone sees as catastrophic).

Particularly since 9/11, followed by the global warming debate and financial crisis, we’ve come to understand that a lot of learning is really about “skills” – the Boy Scouts “be prepared” dictum, to be able to survive unpredictable externally imposed calamities. Of course, I say, we should be better prepared to prevent them (that goes for 9/11 and the neglect of the Bush administration). Here’s one of the critical points in the fulcrum of learning: realizing how a lot of what we have can depend on the unseen and involuntary sacrifices of others on the other side of our planet. A good comprehension of that by everyone (getting back to the high school history teacher) can help prevent these calamities in the first place.

Okay, we come town to another “Apprentice” dichotomy – “book smarts” vs. “street smarts”. As I found out with my own personal experience with the Vietnam era draft, military service, and deferments, a lot of people see social injustice as inherent with “too much education” (I remember a drill sergeant saying just that). People “in the masses” see “book learning” as a way to “get out of things.” The “class” resentment can run really deep. Pretty soon this runs into certain interpretations of Christianity (and similar beliefs in other faiths, including Islam). That is, the world is not about “you” (Rick Warren’s message), it’s about your whole community. Deep understanding of the outside world is not for us (it’s the Knowledge of Good and Evil); it keeps us away from Love and from needing salvation. And I come back and say, why can’t you have your cake and eat it too? How can it be wrong to have the wisdom to make sensible decisions and avoid foolish risks?

We can pose these conundrums in several ways. We can talk about “deep justice” – making sure everybody “does his part” and make that a fundamental moral issue as it was a few decades ago. Or we can, as Rick Warren would, pose it in terms of a community or family, not the individual. We can talk about changing the “rules of engagement”, and suddenly some people find out that it is their turn to become “second class citizens” – and face the religious idea that the political idea of “class” or “personal merit” is wrongheaded anyway (it is anti-Faith).

One of the biggest ways the rules change is that things are not just about making choices that avoid unwanted responsibility. If everyone is going to have to accept some intergenerational responsibility at a very personal level (because of sustainability problems), the way we think about “personal responsibility” and “family values” will turn on its head. But that won’t make the need for “the Knowledge of Good and Evil” to go away. If I did have my own kids, I’d want them to have that knowledge, so they could see around corners, all the way back to “passing Go”.

EFF to have panel forum on the future of DVD's

Although I’m still on the East Coast and cannot attend this, I’m paying more attention to goings on elsewhere, as my future could well hit the road again at some point.

Here’s an important event: Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Future of DVD Panel and Happy Hour” on Monday November 9 in San Francisco at the Varnish Gallery. The link for the press release is here. There will be a lot of discussion of ripping, personal backups, and the difficulties in playing DVD’s sold in one region of the world in another. There is a lot in the practice of DVD manufacture that contradicts normal concepts of “fair use” and “first sale” doctrines in the law.

Yet, Wall Street and others say that companies like Netflix will probably move from a DVD rental even more to an Internet watching model, raising even more questions about copy protection, network neutrality, bandwidth use, as well as the technical quality of the entertainment items themselves.
Wikipedia attribution link for NASA picture of San Francisco peninsula.

Fort Hood tragedy may raise issues about military personnel's "personal" Internet postings

Of course, the news on the incident at Fort Hood, Texas today keeps rolling in, but MSNBC has an important story, just posted a little before 9 PM EST on Nov 5, to the effect that Major Nidal Malik Hasan had attracted the attention of authorities with Internet postings of an “existential” nature about six months ago. The MSNBC story has web link here and was featured for Dell/MSN users this evening (often the default IE site for new Dell computers). The story describes more graphically the disturbing content allegedly included in the posts. Apparently investigators are still trying confirm that Hasan actually wrote the postings.

The MSNBC story had used information on the “blogging” issue on an AP story here. Curiously, the AP story would not load into IE without disabling popup blocker. The story indicates that Hasan had expressed opposition to American deployments overseas, had performance evaluation issues, and was, most curiously of all, single with no children.

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Blogging by military personnel from overseas, usually on military computers, has been controversial (even if a valuable source of battlefield journalism) and is prohibited or reviewed in some commands as a security matter. But stateside it is obviously done a lot (from personnel's own personal computers, usually). But blog content could come to the attention of military commanders. For example, it could be used as “credible evidence” to “enforce” the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy.

Here's a bit of a coincidence: the morning Washington Post today (Nov. 5) had covered a hard-hitting inside story about a Pentagon report about widespread concerns about unfitness of today's recruits (covered on my "Issues" blog earlier today; see Profile).

Curiously, MSNBC also greeted visitors tonight with a story about the rapid fall of Myspace (so often a favorite topic on Dr. Phil), to the point that its future is threatened; it has really lost ground to Facebook, Twitter, and other more upscale social media. The link for that story is here.

Wikipedia attribution link for p.d. picture of President George W. Bush visiting Fort Hood, not too far from Bush’s ranch. I was last in the general area in June 2005.

Later on Nov. 5

Here is an apparent link to Hasan's blog, this link on Scribd. Another blogger ("Director Blue" aka Doug Ross) offers an image of the post on his posting here, with some references to President Bush's "My Pet Goat" moment on 9/11. There will be a lot of discussion of Hasan's background in Islam. But I have personally met several people who, born in the Middle East, left Islam and came to the US.

Those Mommy Blogs -- they stay light on politics

WJLA, the local ABC affiliate in Washington (Arlington VA) talked about the way parents rapidly get computer literate because of their kids today, with 48% having learned texting from their kids. Actually, parents in their 30’s today were in high school when mainframe was in vogue and the switch to client-server and PC’s in the workplace was just starting, so none of that should be too surprising.

The report went on to discuss Mommy blogs. It seems that Heather Armstrong’s “dooce.com” has some competition. The station mentioned “21st Century Housewife” which is on Blogger here. But there is another site called “21st Century Housewife” ("The Life and Times of the 21st Century Housewife")which has its own blog but seems to be completely different. Sounds like a treatment for a documentary indie film, maybe good for AFI Silverdocs! I say, go for it.

It seems that blogs about blogging (meta-blogs) can be challenging, as are blogs about political and social thought. Many of us men are not very domesticated.

Does everyone need a "relationship" before speaking out?

One of the key concepts that I carried over from my involvement with the Rosenfels community (formerly the Ninth Street Center when I got to know it in the 1970s) was that of “balanced” and “unbalanced” personalities.

The latter, of which I am an example, tend to value their independence and “personal autonomy” (or “individual sovereignty”) and insist on being effective in following their own goals, as chosen specifically by them. In some cases, they like the recognition that comes from individual accomplishment, such as “getting published” or reaching some milestone in a career, whether that activity comes from public performance (acting, giving concerts) or from scientific research on novel problems (say, the ultimate problems of basic physics, for example). Personal recognition and self-driven accomplishment can become more important than having “a relationship” (even than getting married and/or having children). The freedom to work and express oneself while alone and without supervision becomes important. Some people (Phillip Longman, as in earlier postings) would see this as excessive self-absorption. Others see such internal focus in some people in a culture as essential to discovery and progress.

One particular problem occurs when “unattached” people express themselves: others are likely to become suspicious of their motives and purposes. Others may believe that the singletons want to step on their toes with “truth”, or may become untrustworthy in the future when circumstances change (as in the posting Sunday). We see this particularly with the Internet today. Indeed, most of the problems involving “online reputation” (especially the sundering of reputations of others) come from younger people who have not yet experienced marriage or making their own commitments to others. There is a feeling that someone who is clearly accountable to others (in some emotionally real sense) is more trustworthy. Jealousy, while usually seen as a pejorative, might be seen as a good thing in some people, evidence that one is committed to others somehow, and not just a dilettante. Family responsibility transcends making careful choices and gets (especially now with eldercare) gets into areas Dr. Phil hasn’t covered yet.

All of this can become legally significant, when we consider the “implicit content” problem, that is likely only to increase. Likewise, we know, as from experience in areas like auto insurance, that people with commitments are sometimes better risks. All of this was familiar “moral territory” in the past, most notably expressed in the 1970s and 1980s by some conservative authors, especially George Gilder (“Sexual Suicide” and “Men and Marriage”).

Of course, we all know that there are plenty of ways people do very bad things when they do have responsibilities to protect families. Look at war, racism, financial corruption, and particular forms of greed, and “conventional” jealousy . These are all older, pre-Internet sins, still played out in the soap operas.

All of this puts me on a hot seat, at least in these current strange days.

Facebook offers "Wisk" ap for "reputation cleansing" for "friends"

There is a new Facebook application, “Wisk-It” (sounds like a detergent, doesn’t it) that will allow “friends” to communicate “reputation cleansing” photo deletion requests. Your “friend” (that doesn’t mean the neighborhood cat trying to get let in to mew in front of your refrigerator), when she has Wisk, gets the delete requests from you the next time she logs on to her account.

It sounds as though a lot of the photos people take at parties really are wild. I see flashes flying all the time at discos, but I don’t think shirtlessness (for adult gay men, especially when confronted by performers at the Town DC) really creates a “reputation” problem. The underage drinking and all that, it seems that the job counselors really make a lot of it. (How can you tell that a drink held in a photo by a 20 year old on a youth night has alcohol, anyway? There’s imitation alcohol-less beer now, you know. I suppose that when Shia La Beouf first hosted SNL, they couldn’t serve alcohol at the after-show party. Later there would be plenty of time for those “grown up things to do.”)

The New York Times story by Stephanie Clifford is “An Application to Help Scrub Those Regrettable Photos from Facebook,” link here.

Surviving Halloween for All Saints' Day: Ponder the new "don't ask don't tell" society

Today, as I took in the hymn “For all the Saints” by Ralph Vaughn Williams, the “All Saints Day” after some people on Washington’s 17th Street didn’t quite survive Halloween, I remembered a vague argument made last week in the health care debate, about mandatory insurance – to the effect that people are likely to comply if they believe that doing so will follow a “social norm” – even if doing so doesn’t compute according to economic self interest.

But the “social norms” argument somewhat overlooks the role of individualism and the kind of thinking that has become the norm for our culture for the past few decades. True, there are new social norms, especially “speech codes” about what you can’t say – and as John Stossel showed last spring (“You can’t talk about that”), even these get very hard to pin down.

Back in the 50s, the family unit, as well as larger encapsulations of church and country, did provide people with mindset – of norms about where the right place for your head to be was. You learned to perform as an individual, as in school or on the athletic field, but you learned to be part of the group in order to continue on your family and your culture – the so called “hidden curriculum” that many of us did not get (partly because it invokes a gratuitous emotional space, rather familiar in soap operas). Marriage (and parenting within marriage) was put on a pedestal (enforced by familiar codes of Vatican sexual morality letting marriage monopolize sexuality) so that married couples had enough incentive to remain stable and active (and to get formed in the first place). It's important to realize that, in this view, "family values" works because of a common belief that everyone will honor the authority of the family, that everyone is a stakeholder in family regardless of individualized "choices".

But even as early as the late 50s, the time of both Sputnik and Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, the idea of the autonomy of the individual began to become more important. A great irony of modern democratic civilization is that a family-centered system was probably a necessary prerequisite for modern individualism to develop. (Yup, I’ve seen plenty of columnists in The Washington Times say things like this!)

There really is quite a clash of world views here, that reaches deeply into personal levels. Some people feel that true “freedom” only is possible when the family becomes an intermediary for people to learn compassion and caring; others feel that freedom requires absolute fidelity to the law of karma and “personal responsibility” -- and acceptance of the consequences of the application of Logic. Of course, you can "define" personal responsibility in terms of ability to provide for others beside the self (and including intergenerational responsibility within the family, whether "chosen" by procreation or not). “Love” and “Law” overlap but sometimes can contradict each other.

The debate over homosexuals in the military in 1993 erupted as a microcosm of this dichotomy. “An Army of One” is, after all, the ultimate oxymoron. Now the same tension lives in society as a whole with the way we use the Internet. Is it for socialization, or is it for self-promotion and fame? Well, it’s both and there’s a rub. You can get famous by stepping on toes and avoiding the social mess of others – and they will eventually say the only point of your speech is to incite or entice them unless you take on the same responsibilities that they do. We’re now only beginning to grasp the nature of this kind of problem with social media. Ponder again, what a “don’t ask don’t tell” society really comprises. Bill Clinton, without quite understanding what he was doing, did open Pandora’s Box in 1993, but it would blow itself open anyway soon.

Indiana school disciplines students for off-campus Myspace pages

A high school in Indianapolis, Churubusco, banned two sophomore girls from extracurricular activities at school after they posted “racy” photos during the summer vacation on their Myspace pages. The girls maintain that the postings had nothing to do with the school, and have filed suit against the school district on First Amendment grounds.

The MSNBC and AP story says that the Supreme Court has ruled that schools can regulate off-campus online speech if there is a foreseeable risk that the speech will be found by other students (as with search engines) and disrupt the campus. This comment may refer to the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case in Alaska regarding a student named Joseph Frederick (now, as an adult, an English teacher himself, ironically).

The students were also asked to apologize to coaches (which makes one wonder if the original posts had nothing to do with the school) and undergo counseling.

Should "professional" news media have government subsidies? Then what about bloggers?

Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols have an important op-ed in the Washington Post this morning, Friday Oct. 30, p. A19, “Yes, journalists deserve subsidies, too”, link here.

They start out by quoting President Obama: “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.” I hope that my own material rises above that: I do try to put stories in context by the way they are organized and labeled in blogs, and I do check with reputable sources for things. This op-ed comes from a “reputable source” after all.

Indeed, it was “citizen journalism” (indeed the topic of the previous posting here on their not being included in the proposed shield laws) that became viewed as the counterweight to well-funded special interests in the past fifteen years, a point well made in the COPA trial to which I was a party. Yet, as the writers here point out, there can be a rebound effect: in the blogosphere, the shouters with the most money could still carry the day.

The columnists point out that the “fundamentals” of newspaper economics are forcing not only consolidation of the majors, but also the disappearance of small papers and the elimination of hundreds or thousands of newsroom jobs. They are that in the early days of the nation, the news business was subsidized, and it needs to be subsidized as a non-profit public good (rather like PBS) again.

Of course, what worries me is that once journalists accept public money, what they say can be regulated by politicians. That’s the entire point that the ACLU and EFF have battled in court for the past ten years, in cases including COPA.

Senate and House versions of shield bills limit protected journalists to "professionals" (who earn $$$ from outside parties)

The Senate and House are honing in on limiting the scope of journalistic shield laws to “professionals” – those who are paid salaries or contracting wages from third party news or media organizations. The Senate version seems to allow for the occasional professional journalist but the House requires that the journalist earn regular income or report for substantial financial gain. Both cut out self-proclaimed "citizen journalists", although one wonders how someone with a financial track record (like Heather Armstrong of dooce.com) would fare in this definition.

The Niemann Journalism Center at Harvard University has an article with URL here. The bills are S 448 and HR 985 (the Free Flow of Information Act of 2009, govtrack link here).

The bill reflects similar thinking in other areas, such as with the Authors Guild, which generally accepts for membership authors who have been published by third party trade publishers, generally for income, as with the link here. Associate memberships are availble for authors with contracts with third party publishers for works not yet published, and membership-at-large is available for literary agents who work with regular trade and university publishers. But note that the emphasis is on the idea that the author can earn a living from writing.

The government may well be aware that “amateur” bloggers sometimes “stumble”upon major tips (even regarding potential terrorism) and expects “amateurs” to fully share sources and information with law enforcement.

The “professional journalist” concept could become important some day in the area of media perils insurance.

See also the "Bill on Major Issues" blog (profile) Sept. 10, 2009.

Bloggers and "conflict of interest" -- the "implicit content" problem

Over the past few years, I, like many bloggers, have become increasingly concerned about the topic of “online reputation”, and particularly the issue of “implicit content”, the notion that an online posting, while acceptable use by ordinary reckoning (or terms of service provisions), might be misread by others (especially employers or clients or other personal stakeholders) as implying some kind of troubling future intention or propensity.

I haven’t really done this with my own blogs, but imagine tagging all the entries in the blogs with, when applicable, the following labels: (A) personally sensitive issue (B) contains personal narrative.

Examples of personally sensitive issues would be pretty clear: race, religion, political affiliation, disability status, sexual orientation, nationality, and certain items in debate that lend themselves to insensitive observations, such as in today’s health care debate. Future debates about eldercare are likely to fall into this area, such as “demographic winter”, filial responsibility, and means testing. Most likely bigtime international issues, especially those connected to terrorism, fall into this area.

Then it’s pretty clear what issues remain, the gradually “impersonal” problems. The best examples of these are probably Internet security and identity theft prevention, network neutrality, copyright law (including the DMCA), trademark law and patent law (including the prospective dilution concept), and censorship (like the COPA case). But the more technical areas of finance (including retirement financial issues such as social security and Medicare, 401(k)’s and defined benefit pension issues) and tax law (IRS rules) fall into this area, as do techniques for trading in securities markets. Environmental issues (global warming, strip mining) generally fall into this category.

Before Web 2.0 and social networking sites and social media came along (more or less by 2005), I had written that people who get paid to make decisions about others (generally that means people who have direct reports in a conventional workplace) should not blog in an unsupervised fashion (skipping the due diligence and financial results expectations that used to limit what “got published”) within the purview of search engines. One of the biggest concerns was the possibility of triggering a hostile workplace situation, posing an unbounded legal risk for the employer. I thought of it as a distribution issue; once you allowed use of the “free entry” mechanism to distribute original content, then you faced content censorship (and pre-publication review) if you wanted to contain the risk. “Matrix managers” (team leaders without direct reports or end user client company associates who supervise outside contractors only [and no internal employees]) did not present the same level of risk (that is, presumably much less!), and nor did individual contributors, although when staffing firms send consultants to clients, the staffing firms might become concerned if clients find controversial writings by the contractors online. Generally, companies have handled the “blogging policy” issue by saying that when people speak online on their own with their own resources, they must clearly identify their views as their own and not necessarily that of their employers. But that might not preclude serious risks of hostile workplace issues in some situations.

But knowledge, while “dot-connected” (as I have written in the past, when discussing the “opposing viewpoints” paradigm) is kind of like federalism. Some areas (like Internet security) are usually well-addressed separately (like issues that are “left to the states”). There is no reason why a manager, say in an ordinary financial institution’s IT department, could create problems if he or she blogged about Internet security products on personal computers (except that she would not be permitted to discuss her own employer’s confidential security practices).

Category (B) comes into play if a posting relates a personal incident (not previously published in “establishment media”), or even if it relates personal knowledge of a professional or previous workplace matter not otherwise known to the public. Typically people write blog postings describing wrongful things that they believe were done or that affected them personally and adversely in institutions or workplaces, or in families. Sometimes they relate only to legitimate “professional” workplace issues: for example, how a mainframe shop at a specific company, named in a blog, handled security or elevations ten years ago compared to how the same issues would be handled today. The problem is prospective: a stakeholder can become, with some legitimacy, concerned that the blogger has a “propensity” (a word known from the military “don’t ask don’t tell”) to disclose quasi-private information after believing that a particular workplace or other business arrangement has been closed or terminated. But one way to handle this sort of problem (as I wrote here on May 30) is to construct a “business privacy agreement” with stakeholders, promising to consult them before writing about them at some unspecified time in the future, and to honor all confidentiality requirements (trade secrets, HIPAA, etc.) as normally understood.

Under (B) it is possible for a blogger to post new material (not previously published and attributed with a link) that is not “personal”. For example, a blogger could report on oral arguments before the Supreme Court, or on an anti-war demonstration, without placing the posting in (B).

Remember, Web 2.0 services were devised with the notion that people could network with various levels of privacy settings, outside of the scope of search engines. The purpose was supposed to be directly social rather than to “get published.” Of all the services, Facebook may be the most flexible. Generally, these concerns would not affect “legitimate” social networking on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, as long as the person did not disclose business confidences (which can be repeated by others even when not accessible to search engines).

Generally speaking, book, movie or music reviews as on some of my other blogs do not contain personal or “sensitive” material, but sometimes I have added personal anecdotes to a few of them, and a few of them (especially documentaries) address touchy subjects.

Although I do not foresee employment that would throw me into this kind of “conflict of interest” problem in the immediate future, eventually I may have to segment my own content this way. For example, in preparing to agent my own screenplays in the future, I might find it necessary to behave differently on the web. Were I to wind up in a "professional" situation where I could no longer comment publicly on touchy issues (like "don't ask don't tell") in open and searchable public spaces, it would be difficult for me, for at least a while, to remain "politically active" with credibility, given my own history. Sometimes you really do need "organizations" and conventional politics.

Content labeling software (based on “semantic Web” architecture), developed largely for giving parents the ability to protect kids (with the cooperation of web publishers, with the ICRA) could be expanded to include “privacy and controversy tags” like those discussed here. But the use of these labels or categories could make it easier to provide liability or media perils insurance for bloggers in the future, if that insurance becomes mandatory some day.

Material published in books (even e-books) that must be purchased (and presumably produce auditable financial results), even self-published material, does not lead to this kind of risk when readers must pay a fair market price (rather than "free") to access the material; the pricing mechanism would presumably enforce some protective "due diligence" lacking in today's spontaneous blog posting process.


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EFF launchpads DMCA "Takedown Hall of Shame"

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has put up a “Takedown Hall of Shame” webpage, showing how free speech has been suppressed by various corporate or political interests with bogus copyright (and sometimes trademark) infringement claims, leading to DMCA takedown notices, later found to be legally unsustainable. Here is the URL link. One of the most curious comes from the “National Organization for Marriage”. NOM produced a video opposing same-sex marriage, but then Rachel Meadows at MSNBC played a humorous set of audition interviews of “actors” trying out to play in the NOM video. The “audition” was on YouTube here but was removed after the takedown. But MSNBC has another copy on its own website here.

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This is funny in my mind because one of my own screenplay scripts, “Make the A-List” (from 2003), starts with an audition scene, but not like this!

Other “guilty parties” include DeBeers, the diamond conglomerate (remember the Di Caprio movie “Blood Diamond”) that silenced a satirical newspaper treatment, and the Warner Music Group, which EFF says is involved in an ongoing feud with YouTube.

Somehow EFF's page reminds me of Gregory Smith's film "Kids in America" (back in 2005), about suppressing free speech in public school systems -- a film from a company called "Launchpad Releasing" (now also "Slowhand Releasing", ironically).

Curator journalism, the "rules of engagement", and "scoping others": why some people think marriage is mandatory

People question my “curator journalism” as to what’s in it for me, and who benefits from it. An underlying theme of all my posts is personal “karma”, and the underlying tension between a worldview based on individual rights (and equality of opportunity although not necessarily results), another view based on equality through “social rights”, and a conservative view based on the “family” as the appropriate source of individual identity in a world that is necessarily unstable and unequal (the supposedly Biblical view). I try to present all this from a historical perspective, from credible resrarch sources as amplified by my own unusual personal history. I think it is necessary to understand the history of these matters very deeply (a half century ago, “family” really was the granularity of society). For one person or a small group to develop such a repository of cultural history that is always “there” offers the opportunity to confound the traditional reliance on special interests to drive political change.

When someone like me can self-publish these in an unregulated matter, with no formal external due diligence, people sometimes get antsy. If they don’t see the big political perspective in an abstract sense, they may feel that my point is to make them feel uncomfortable personally, to step on their toes. (Merely bringing up some sensitive aspects of the “health care debate” can make some people perceive amateur discussions about it this way; the same would hold for discussions of “demographic winter” as well as the current debates over gay marriage and gays in the military.) Or they may feel that I demonstrate a “propensity” (language from “don’t ask don’t tell”) to talk about confidential matters at some time way down the pike in the future, when respect for current business privacy , as legally driven weakens. I can only offer good faith, good business relationships, and private anecdotes (of a specific nature) to back myself up.

Particularly testy is the way I present the history of my own realization of homosexuality, as related in part to the inability to compete with other boys during my youth, as if that was an indirect biological influence, but denying oversimplified (but convenient) ideas that sexual preference is by itself mostly genetic or biological. That can lead to the idea that the main point of my saying so is existential: to warn heterosexuals that I am their “scorekeeper” through my scoping. However guaranteed by modern ideas of free speech and the First Amendment, this motive would seem to encourage less “competitive” heterosexuals to give up on committed marriage, seemingly a sadistic goal. No wonder, then, that some people would prod me to take up their causes rather than my own, and specifically to show some kind of prior commitment to family responsibility myself before speaking out (eg, “the privilege of being listened to”). Hence, we turn the debate on “family responsibility” inside out, making it a mandatory prerequisite for everyone, not just a consequence of a particular choice (like having a child). But then I can come back with this: the point is to say that people should “do better” on their own before just running to politicians and claiming to be members of victimized groups. Sure, I can say that people should “do better” without undermining the idea that we really do need some deep social reforms, ranging from solving the pre-existing conditions problem in the health care debate to encouraging some sort of national service and revisiting our own personal obligation to care for our parents.

Against all of this, I ponder the problems in social media and self-publishing that I would like to tackle as a second career: how to manage “online reputation” and systemic risk of publishing without the previously expected steps of due diligence, and how to understand the relationship between the “social” and “expressive” (publication-oriented) aspects of all social media. And all of this reflects back on our “rules of engagement” as individuals and as members of families and social groups.

False accusations against teachers are still a "big problem"

This morning (Oct. 22), ABC “Good Morning America” ran an important story about a 26 year old female high school teacher (in Kentucky) who was acquitted of charges of improper contact with a 16 year old male student in her apartment. The teacher and student had traded hundreds of text messages, but the teacher insists that a high volume of texts is common in her own use, and the telecommunications company had deleted the messages (mysteriously). Apparently the student had “stolen” the cell phone at one point, but was never disciplined by the school system. The detailed story by Lee Farran and Sarah Netter appears here. Despite the acquittal, the teacher’s career as a teacher may be over because of the (possibly unfounded) accusations, and the teacher now works in banking; the headline says that the teacher's life was "ruined". The prosecutor had offered a plea bargain without s.o. registry, but the teacher insisted on a fair trial and “won.”

In 2003, LionsGate and Lifetime made a film called “Student Seduction” in which a female chemistry teacher is accused after a high school student uses force on her, although in the film the teacher has unwisely socialized with the student before the incident. In 2004 I wrote and (in early 2005) posted a fictitious screenplay short called “The Sub” in which a gay male substitute teacher is set up and “somewhat falsely” accused and sent to prison (to die there) by a precocious male music student (after the student had saved the sub’s life by using a defibrillator). The publication of the screenplay would eventually provoke an “incident” in October 2005, which I detail in a posting here on July 27, 2007.

Media reports of improper behavior by teachers seems to have increased markedly since 2005, perhaps because of Chris Hansen’s notorious series on NBC Dateline. It is quite likely that some or many of them are unfounded. On occasion, a student (perhaps because of bad grades. Most likely a female) will try to set up a teacher (most likely a male; most of these incidents are heterosexual); this is something that definitely happens somewhere in the U.S. occasionally. This seems to become a serious practical risk of entering teaching.

AP develops ap to look for infringing uses of its stories

The Associated Press claims to be about ready to deploy an application that will prune the Web for illegal uses of its content. An Ars Technica article by Matthew Lasar (June 1, 2009) reports Lasar’s interview with the AP news editor Ted Birds, link here. Birds steadfastly claims that the AP’s main concern is wholesale copying of stories without commentary. But there is also a vague concept of “hot news” misappropriation. And many AP stories or stories on some television station channels warn against “redistribution” or “rewriting” (paraphrasing) of stories. But I always thought that news facts, once published once, were not themselves copyrightable.

The "social contract" and its neo-modern instantiation

I’ve often written here about the culture war between “personal autonomy” vs. “public morality”, which sifts down to the idea that a social unit (normally the traditional nuclear family) should become the central bargaining unit in society, rather than the individual. Such a view accepts as “reality” that people are naturally “unequal” and that parents have not only the duty to raise children but to mediate the emotional lives of all members of the family under then. Such an arrangement is obviously open to abuse from those in power.

The opposite of this is hyper-individualism, which regards each individual as having a “station in life” that is “earned” by the individuals intrinsic merit and then hard work. In such a society, “weaker” members, whatever their familial origin, drop out. The comparison of these two poles is like a comparison of lions and tigers.

And these models can themselves degenerate into political “isms” like communism (with its process of expropriation) or fascism (with its process of elimination). Sometimes the notion of “grace” in Christianity is used to justify expropriation.

There is a way to reconcile these models, with what some writers (like Phillip Longman) call a new “social contract,” where common obligations are allocated to the measure of the individual. Wikipedia describes the notion as a class of rules by which a society maintains social order. But I think a more apt interpretation today is a set of rules, laid down (perhaps in statute, perhaps in equity) for individuals to share some of the intangible risks and uncertainties faced by a society, beyond the control of usual market economic forces.

The most recent example of the call for “social contract” is the concern over “demographic winter.” People of certain temperaments find more personal fulfillment in individually driven cultural activities than in social intimacies, and come to perceive having families and children as too risky or taxing. Therefore, in some affluent cultures, birth rates drop way below replacement. This naturally leads to discussion of measures, requiring sacrifices from individuals, to those who have “chosen” to have children.

Another interpretation of this view of “social contract” is the older idea of gender norms: that men make themselves fungible to protect women and children, and find meaning only when they become husbands and fathers themselves. Or, artistic or career accomplishment is meaningful only in the context of meeting “real needs” or “real people” in “real life”. The end point of this kind of (“soap opera”) thinking is that sometimes jealousy is good, and relationships, family formation, and procreation are practically mandatory.

This sort of notion did form the basis of the “moral thinking” of a couple decades ago; a marriage maintained its passion by the social control it could exert over others, quite frankly.

A modern “social contract” might be summed up as “pay your dues” as well as “pay your bills”. It does sound anti-libertarian. Some of its “rules” have been covered here before, like on the Oct. 9, 2007 blog entry here. Modern “social contract” theorists talk about bringing back the “family wage,” policy changes to favor large families, and policies to penalize singles or the childless, as well as ideas like mandatory national service, and enforcing filial responsibility laws. Learning to deal with the "intimacies" of "intergenerational responsibility" would be expected of all, including the childless; and individual "accomplishmet", outside of family commitment, would be viewed as "mental masturbation." These all address “natural obligations” that go beyond the use of choice and tend to require a measure of faith to accept the continuing inequities that follow. There is even the idea of “the privilege of being listened to” to throw into its crock pot.

Never take your rights for granted. Never overlook the hidden sacrifices of others.

Colleges deal with sexuality and privacy issues for roommates (remember DADT?)

I’ve talked about college roommate issues here before (particularly on a posting Nov. 28, 2006 on this blog), so it was interesting to me today to see, in the Metro Section of the Washington Post today, Sunday Oct. 18, the article by Daniel de Vise, “Colleges speaking up to protect shy ‘sexiles’”, link here. David Moreton's 1999 gay flick "Edge of 17" has a college campus dorm scene in which this happens, as I recall.

I was not aware it is socially acceptable now on many campuses for someone to ask a roommate to vacate the room for the sake of having a tryst (straight or gay, but the straight experiences are facilitated by co-ed living). But I found it particularly interesting, given my own history, that the College of William and Mary (in Williamsburg, VA) is discussed as having implemented some sensible roommate policies. Like on many older campuses, some of the dorm rooms are small.

In the aftermath of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” (as debated and legislated in 1993), Northwestern University sociology professor Charles Moskos sometimes talked about gay issues on campus, and said that many universities did well to make sure that gay students had gay roommates (that is, that straight men did not have gay roommates). But since 1993, the thinking on this sort of thing, as to “privacy”, has changed, both in and outside the military, and on campuses, thankfully.

GWU Hospital fires rabbi counselor for violating patient privacy rules on blog posting: another example for bloggers to heed!

A female rabbi at George Washington University Hospital in Washington DC was suspended and then fired a few weeks after she wrote about her interaction with a victim of the Holocaust Museum shooting in Washington DC. The rabbi, Tamara Miller (Director of Spiritual Care, George Washington University Hospital), had comforted the family of security guard Stephen T. Johns as he died from the wounds.

The main story by Jacqueline L. Salmon appears in the Washington Post today Oct. 16, link here.

Here comments had been posted in the Washington Post’s blog called “Guest Voices: Other views on faith and its impact on the news” with a title of “Holocaust comes to the ER”, with the article linked in the news story above.

Some of Tamara’s blog entry is quite personal. “I am a first-generation American Jew whose parents and grandparents left Europe before the war that destroyed six million from my historical and biological family tree,” she writes. And the comments about the patient were very general indeed.

Miller, in fact, says that she did not disclose anything that had not been already published widely in the media. But the hospital says she violated HIPAA and hospital policy by saying anything at all.

Some of the charges made by the hospital include “talking to the media” without permission. Hers was not a personal blog. So the punishment is something like what could follow an “improper” letter to an editor of a newspaper; this could have happened in the days before the Internet.

But the incident backs up what was said at Potomac Tech Wire Wednesday: hospital or medical employees (as with employees in other fields like finance and the military) must be very careful about what they say in blogs and should never identify people, even indirectly, without permission.

FTC issues formal rule regarding blogger "endorsements"

The Federal Trade Commission, on Oct. 5, 2009, published its rule regarding “endorsements” of products or services by bloggers. The title of the press release is "FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials: Changes Affect Testimonial Advertisements, Bloggers, Celebrity Endorsements."

The link is here. And the most important paragraph seems to be this one (quoted as public domain):

“The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.”

Let me reiterate that I do not get paid by anyone for the reviews of movies, books, television shows, or commentary on other matters on any of these blogs. In July 2007, I did receive an unsolicited free DVD from Shell and reviewed its short film “Eureka” and that fact is disclosed on that blog posting (Movie blog, July 10, 2007). In the future, I will be willing and happy to review sample products, books or films sent to me free; but if I do so, I must disclose in the blog review that I received the material "in kind" for free.

The “Mashable Social Media Guide” has an article on the matter by Adam Ostrow, Oct. 5, 2009, “FTC to Fine Bloggers Up to $11000 for Not Disclosing Payments”.

Potomac Tech Wire holds Social Media Outlook breakfast at Tysons Corner VA today

Potomac Tech Wire (link) held its Social Media Outlook breakfast seminar this morning, Oct. 14, 2009, at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Tysons Corner, VA.


First, however, there was an amusing sideshow. The huge ballroom was partitioned, and next door there was a “5th Annual Federal M&A Outlook”. Somehow I and a few others got directed into there, where there was only a continental breakfast, but the discussions, about acquiring tech companies, sounded like they belonged in our seminar. It wasn’t until the discussions moved to the credit markets, TARP, bailouts, etc. that I looked at the brochure and realized, well, I had the wrong breakfast. So I had a freebie on the Ritz. I found the right room.

The panelists included Robit Bhargava, founder of the 360 Digital Group at Oglivy; Shonali Burke, Adam Lehman, at Lotame; Goeff Livingston, at SVT and author of “Now Is Gone”; and Jake Mass, at Living Sherman; and Paul Sherman of Potomac Tech Wire.

Early discussion were upbeat. There was description of SusTech (link “Every answer has a problem”) and its professional social networking on SharePoint (link) as giving the ability to automate postings on multiple sites .

Conversely, the idea of using Facebook apps as a way to manage one’s experience with other major sites was discussed, as many commercial sites now have handles with Facebook and Twitter (not so much Myspace). But some celebrities have major presence on both Myspace and Facebook. (Look at Ashton Kutcher’s blog on volunteerism here).

The recent controversy, often mentioned by the President, over the relatively poor performance of the US in bandwidth capacity compared to Japan and South Korea, was mentioned as a cause for the slow development of virtual reality on the Web. (Remember those complete bodysuits for VR shown in Omni Magazine in the 1990s?)

The practice of "curator journalism" was mentioned. That term sometimes refers to news aggregation on sites like Mixx, or on blogs like mine, where many stories are presented with the writer adding commentary to "connect the dots."

The recent implementation of FTC rules to require bloggers receiving "payola" payments from companies to disclose these payments or face bank audits and fines was mentioned; in the UK, bloggers violating this rule can actually go to jail.

But the “nebulosity” of privacy was mentioned as a future major problem for the Web. There is a concern that the legal environment (such as pressures to weaken Section 230 protections) could undermine the business models of all but the largest social media and publishing services, giving the companies that remain arbitrary power over users (with the way they administer anti-spam policies, for example). Privacy was discussed as a growing concern in certain blog areas like medicine or nursing, and finance. For example, blogs about medical cases should never mention individual patients by name (or identifiable traits) without permission, and HIPAA rules might come into play. Amateurs blogging about these areas might unwittingly mention or refer to other patients, violating privacy law. The risks to privacy become existential and prospective, as discussed on the floor after I asked a question (which also mentioned "reputation defense").

One speaker downplayed the importance of search engines in looking at this issue, and said that you should never put anything on the Internet even under privacy settings that would invade privacy or be libelous, because so much "cutting and pasting" occurs. I think we need a new term besides "publication" (which means communication to at least one person who understands the communication, as in e-mails) to "open publication" (which means any one in the general public can see it without identification, a concept which includes most material available to search engines.

In the private networking after the presentations, there was mention of the way the Internet had made the military's "don't ask don't tell" regarding gays unworkable. Nobody understood the public search engine in 1993.

As the cars piled up to exit the Ritz Carlton parking garage, I could hear WETA's playing Schubert's "Little C Major" (Symohony 6,, not so "little") on some car radios; a bumpkin-like, festive conclusion to the event.



At the end of the session, the hotel brought me the “right”, stick-to-the-ribs bacon and eggs breakfast.

Visitors can check out the “Final Blog Potomac” event here.

Family Circle article hits online reputation problem on head: kids can hurt their parents' reputations without realizing it

The October 17, 2009 issue of Family Circle has an excellent article by Pamela Kramer, “Share Tactics”, on p. 74. I’m not able to find the article online yet.

The article discusses the practical dangers that families can face because of kids’ disclosures online, particularly on social networking sites and now through Twitter. The article does mention the role of search engines in the issue, along as the possibility of submitting deletions of search results (through submitting deletion requests) such as is done by services like Reputation Defender.

But the most important point is that information spreads by happenstance acquaintance or “coincidence” much more often than people realize. Therefore, it can be dangerous for a kid, in good faith, to disclose that one of his parents is looking for another job. Even when names and addresses are not identified, circumstances identify a person or family more easily than one thinks; and there are plenty of databrokers willing to sell supposedly unlisted information about families or people tentatively identified.

Kramer hits the nail on the head with this core explanation. Kids “have grown up with a culture of online sharing…Sound counterintuitive? Not to them: opening up to others—even if it’s not through face-to-face interaction—creates a feeling of closeness. But what kids don’t consider is your standard of privacy.” Got it. Parents are likely to live in a world that is more sensitive to family-centered or group-centered “reputation” than kids do; many jobs, especially in sales, for example, are very “reputation sensitive.” Yet, the software companies that run these sites were often designed by older teens and young adults who happened to live in an individualistic culture not as sensitive to “accidental reputation” as “the real world” is. I suspect that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is surprised, in retrospect, how much social controversy (as with employer “background checks”) his innovation created.

Social culture, and the varying perceptions of the “meaning” of family responsibility, as noted on previous posts, seems to live at the existential heart of this problem. Posts seen as political irony by a speaker might be taken as contempt or troublemaking by readers in more "collective" cultures.

For now, I have to recommend going out an purchasing a hardcopy of this Family Circle issue, which belongs to Parents Mag.

VideoJug publishes a survey of bloggers and their "business models"

I came across a survey run by Videojug of bloggers, analyzing how much bloggers spend, how many accept ads and how much they make if they do, the topics covered, and the reasons they started blogging, as well as the length of time they have blogged. The survey description and results (including a link to a PDF of the survey questions and bar graphs of the results [sorry, no pie charts to please Jake Gyllenhaal!]) is here.

The website Videojug has videos on many topics, such as this one on how to play the piano. It mentions the idea that the pianist can see the keys (in a concert, not really), compare to the inability of wind players to see their notes.

Piano:
Piano Basics

FTC primed to investigate "mainstream" bloggers for hidden payola; a call for "supervision"?

The Washington Times ran an important editorial Friday Oct. 9, “America’s Internet Police: The FTC gets ready to investigate bloggers”, link here. The editorial focuses on the announced intention of the Federal Trade Commission to investigate bloggers who receive hidden payments to promote products or services. The editorial points out that, the more “mainstream” a blogger is (whatever that itself means!), the more likely the FTC will “investigate”, rather like a friendly neighborhood cat looking around a house’s foundation for mice. That sounds more like the corporate-like blogs, but it seems that users of Blogger and Wordpress (who do include corporations and even movie distributors) and even Twitter are not “immune”. (Okay, everybody knows that Ashton Kutcher’s tweets are strictly his own.)

I can imagine another economic artifact of the "payola" issue, in reverse. That is, a blogger might, for commentary purposes only, discuss a product and give it "free" publicity, something that the company would have to pay for with established media companies. In a sense, the little guy could lowball the advertising of the big guys, raising business model questions. I wrote (on my net neutrality blog (Aug. 9, 2009, link) about Jupiter Jack and actually got a call from a consumer who thought it was endorsement; it was not, it was just commentary of my own.

The Times editorial speaks in the subjunctive about the idea that (some) bloggers might need (federal) “supervision”. True, that takes on a laughably unmanageable order, but it raises another red flag in my own mind: how you deal with the “systemic risk” that the lack of third-party supervision supposedly entails. Think how this idea already plays out in the health care and financial regulation debates. That’s why I’ve wondered about the possibility of mandatory insurance for bloggers at some point in the future.