No News Is Bad News

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I’m going to be a panelist on a conference in Boston a week from tomorrow (Saturday). The conference is:

No News Is Bad News

A freeand independent press is essential for democracy.  The press has aresponsibility to inform citizens about both the policies and theactions of the government and about credible challenges to thosepolicies and actions, to report on conditions that may require new ordifferent government initiatives, and to raise timely questions itselfabout debatable policies and the rationales presented for them.

Withthe recent controversies over the failure of the press to fully live upto its responsibilities in the runup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, therole of the media in the outing of a covert CIA agent, the rise of theblogosphere and so-called citizen journalism, and the impact ofincreasing financial pressures on newspapers and magazines, publicconfidence in the mainstream media is at an all-time low.  What are theimplications of this for our democracy?  How might our faith in thepress be restored?

The rest of the panelists (aside from Andy Sullivan) are journalists–many of the good ones, people like John Carroll. My panel–Political Reporting–had a conference call today which got me really excited about the conference. It should be worth attending.

There is (free) registration, Read more →

The Constitutional Right to a Press Pass

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I get asked about press passes a lot–I guess because I once had one. And the more I think about it, the more I’m raring for a constitutional challenge to the way many press passes are assigned in this country.

You see, historically, just about the only meaning of Freedom of the Press that would have made sense to our founders was freedom from having the government choose official reporters by licensing or fees or some other means. The whole reason we have Freedom of the Press is because stodgy countries in Europe were ensuring a tame press by either picking official printers, only giving licenses to their favorites, or charging a lot of money for the kind of press they didn’t like. And when those Dirty Fucking Hippie colonists rebelled against the Stamp Tax, they determined never to see something like it or the more onerous licensing on their watch.

Currently, many government agencies are discriminating against citizen-bloggers like me–or even plain old online reporters–because they don’t kill trees to circulate their work. This is changing (one of MI’s bloggers has a legislative press pass, apparently some DFH bloggers have been allowed into Federal courthouses). But not everywhere. For example, given Read more →

The United States of AT&T Wants Satellites Now, Too

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Well, here’s another reason AT&T is so desperate for retroactive immunity. It’d suck to have their bid to acquire a satellite TV company derailed as consumers realized AT&T is using that technology to spy on them, huh?

AT&T has been consulting lawyers in Washington about how long it would take to get government approval to purchase either EchoStar Communications Corp. or DirecTV GroupInc., people familiar with the matter said. If it does make a bid forone of the satellite providers, AT&T could unveil the offer beforeyear’s end in hopes of getting federal antitrust officials to approvethe combination before a new administration takes over, these peoplesay. [my emphasis]

Yeah, I’m sure AT&T would like to get such a move approved before the end of the year. You know, while they still had their former lawyer in charge of DOJ and still had one of their big lobbyists running the oval office?

The Kiddie Porn Excuse

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Remember when Alberto Gonzales called for Google to preserve all its search data to support potential child porn investigations? We crazy moonbats suggested that that sounded like an invitation for abuse, that once Google had preserved the records, such records would be accessed for other purposes.

Now Cannonfire points to one such case.

In brief: An incendiary comment appeared on a blog called the DeerfieldBeach Insider — which uses the Blogger service. (So do I.) Theanonymous "pundit" was upset about alleged corruption at the PublicWorks Department. "Nothing will be done until somebody brings in a gunand shoots up the whole place," he wrote.

Deerfield City ManagerMike Mahaney took these words as a threat, so he called the BrowardSherrif’s Office. The cops subpoenaed Google (owner of Blogger) andsoon found their man — a guy named Wayne Adams. He insists that he hasno violent intentions. As it happens, writer Bob Norman is acquaintedwith Adams and vouches for his character, although he does not defendhis atrocious choice of words.

So what makes this tale a matterof national interest? This: When the Broward Sherrif’s Office wantedinfo from Google, they used a disturbing strategy.

BSO turned to its child porn task force for help.

Thetask force, Law Enforcement Against Child Read more →

Trojan First Amendment

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In his book, Unequal Protection, Thom Hartman shows how corporations (specifically, railroads) used the 14th Amendment–which ostensibly guaranteed African Americans the same rights other citizens enjoyed–to enshrine the concept of corporate personhood in our legal system.

With the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the owners of the what werethen America’s largest and most powerful corporations – the railroads -figured they’d finally found a way to reverse Paine’s logic and no longerhave to answer to “we, the people.” They would claim that the corporation isa person. They would claim that for legal purposes, the certificate ofincorporation declares the legal birth of a new person, who should thereforehave the full protections the voters have under the Bill of Rights.

[snip]

Acting on behalf of the railroad barons, attorneys for the railroadsrepeatedly filed suits against local and state governments that had passed lawsregulating railroad corporations. They rebelled against restrictions, and mostof all they rebelled against being taxed.

The main tool the railroad’s lawyers tried to use was the fact thatcorporations had historically been referred to under law not as “corporations”but as “artificial persons.” Based on this, they argued, corporations shouldbe considered “persons” under the free-the-slaves Fourteenth Amendment andenjoy the protections of the constitution just like living, breathing, humanpersons.

It’s an important lesson in history–but also an important lesson in Trojan Horses. That is, when you’re passing legislation, you might want to think about the unintended consequences the most powerful entities in the State might make of that legislation.

Case in point is the reporter shield bill just passed 398-21 in the House. The bill gives several acceptable reasons why the government can force a reporter to reveal her sources in a criminal investigation (after exhausting all other means of learning the source and proving the public interest in disclosing the source outweighs the public interest in the free flow of information). Those reasons are:

If You’re In Western Mass

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I’ll be giving a talk at my old stomping grounds on Thursday evening, 8PM, in Fayerweather. If you might show up, let me know in the comments–I’d love to touch base with readers.

And until then … I’m off to solve US auto woes.

Six Months

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Six months. That’s how long Comcast keeps its records that allow it to track the activity of a Comcast Internet subscriber. At least that’s what Comcast’s Cable Law Enforcement Manual, which somebody liberated and got into the hands of Secrecy News, says.

  • Because Comcast’s system of allocating IP addresses uses Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), its subscribers are not assigned a single, constant or static IP address. Instead, a dynamic IP address is assigned and has the potential to change several times throughout the course of a month. As a result, it is necessary to include in all requests for information the specific date and time of incident when an IP address was alleged to have been used.
  • Comcast currently maintains its IP log files for a period of 180 days. If asked to make an identification based upon an IP address that was used more than 180 days prior to receipt of the request, Comcast will not have information to provide.

I’m still waiting to see a copy of Amway’s complaint against 30 bloggers, but I wonder if they’ve missed their opportunity to find out their identities?

And if it’s phone call data the snoops want, they can get it up to two years after the phone call.

Ensuring Quality

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Like Susie, I think this is a really cool idea.

Paul E. Steiger, who was the top editor of The Wall Street Journalfor 16 years, and a pair of wealthy Californians are assembling a groupof investigative journalists who will give away their work to mediaoutlets.

The nonprofit group, called Pro Publica, will pitcheach project to a newspaper or magazine (and occasionally to othermedia) where the group hopes the work will make the strongestimpression. The plan is to do long-term projects, uncovering misdeedsin government, business and organizations.

But I’m just as interested by the dilemma it will present traditional media: how will they assess this content? Cue Bill Keller making a typically idiotic comment that demonstrates what I mean:

Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, said The Timeswould be open to using work from an outside source, “assuming we wereconfident of its quality,” but that “we’ll always have a preference forwork we can vouch for ourselves.”

How is it that an entire industry of people paid to write and think critically cannot imagine how they would go about assessing the quality of a text they didn’t write themselves? How is it that Bill Keller, with a lifetime career in journalism, couldn’t look at an investigative article and assess whether it was great or was crap? How is that Bill Keller, who presided over Judy Miller’s demise and has been saddled with Michael Gordon’s credulous reporting of late, puts so much stock in the NYT’s ability to vouch for themselves the quality of journalistic work.

Dick DeVos and KayBee Hutchison Go After Bloggers

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That’s a way to make you feel good about blogging, huh? To be attacked by both Dick DeVos and KayBee Hutchison?

DeVos is suing 30 anonymous bloggers and YouTube users because he believes they are among a group for former distributors who sued Amway and were put under a gag order by the judge in the suit.

In the lawsuit filed this past week in Ottawa County Circuit Court,Quixtar seeks an injunction and damages of more than $25,000 againstthe posters, identified only as John Does.

[snip]

Quixtar believes the videos and other postings are part of anorganized effort by former distributors who unsuccessfully sued Alticorand are under court order not to disparage the company or discloseproprietary information, according to the lawsuit.

Quixtar plans to ask for permission to subpoena various onlinecompanies to figure out who posted the materials, spokesman Rob Zeigersaid.

According to the Grand Rapids Press, an Alticor representative saidthe court action was merely to identify anyone who might be associatingwith those under court order, rather than expressing their own personalopinions.

Zeiger told the paper that his company was not interested inpursuing people not associated with the former employees, and wouldeven reimburse their legal fees if there was no connection. "Anindividual who is expressing their own opinion, we don’t have a problemwith that," he said. "They’re not doing anything wrong."

I thought at first this might be an attempt to neutralize the power of anti-DeVos blogs, which had been really effective against him in the last governor’s election in MI. I need to see the complaint here, because I’m not sure the allegations made in the YouTubes actually relate to the failed lawsuit against Amway. So DeVos risks amplifying the blog material which appears like it may be factually correct: that is, that Amway’s online division Quixtar, sucks. (Full disclosure, I have a family member who was a Quixtar believer before he became a Southern Baptist.) That’d be nice, huh? If in pursuit of a bunch of people who tried to bust the pyramid scheme, DeVos actually informed more people that Amway is a big hoax?

KayBee Hutchison, for her part, is complaining about bloggersbecause–wait for it–they don’t follow the esteemed principles ofjournalistic ethics.

Senate Minority Leader Fuels the Flames

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ThinkProgress got the email that Mitch McConnell’s staffer claimed he had not sent out.

Seen the latest blogswarm? Apparently, there’s more to the story on thekid (Graeme Frost) that did the Dems’ radio response on SCHIP. Bloggershave done a little digging and turned up that the Dad owns his ownbusiness (and the building it’s in), seems to have some commercialrental income and Graeme and a sister go to a private school that,according to its website, costs about $20k a year ‹for each kid‹despite the news profiles reporting a family income of only $45k forthe Frosts. Could the Dems really have done that bad of a job vettingthis family?

Gosh. You think maybe the mainstream press, which claims to pride itself on its accuracy, will admit that this smear was not solely blog-driven?

Don’t answer that.