A fatal lack of accountability

Proven lies show why official spokespeople should be named by journalists

By Heather Brooke - Share this article

Tweet

An excerpt from The Silent State: Secrets, Surveillance and the Myth of British Democracy, by Heather Brooke.

Official spokespeople, by the very definition of their role, have absolutely no reason to be anonymous. Yet one of the more dubious practices of the British press is the way reporters collude with officials by granting them anonymity.

Sources should be granted anonymity only in very limited circumstances where naming may cause specific harm (such as a whistleblower who could lose his job). There is no reason a Home Office spokesman, for example, should be granted anonymity, yet I’ve had many arguments with these people who insist on it as their ‘right’. Meanwhile, they demand to know all about me—my name, my publication, what my ‘angle’ is, etc. I usually do get their names from email correspondence and print them in the newspaper. So far the sky has not fallen and I’ve not been locked up for giving a name to the usually nameless mouthpieces.

Although they will tell you it’s because they are not speaking as an individual but in the place of someone else or an institution, the real reason spokespeople don’t want to be named is no different from that of the policeman who removes his badge before assaulting a protestor: deniability. Official spokespeople are powerful because they speak for the powerful; anonymity means they can exercise that power without being held individually accountable for it. They make pronouncements that impact the public directly and yet the public have no idea who has said what. It’s not good enough to say they are speaking for someone else.

We all know about Alastair Campbell, the king of spin, but did you know that for most of his career as Tony Blair’s spokesman he was anonymised by the press? The public simply had no idea he was the one saying the things that were said. Only after he was unmasked—a face and name put to the ‘official spokesman’—did he become individually accountable for what he said. And, perhaps not surprisingly, it was shortly afterwards that he resigned.

When a ‘spokesman’ makes an accusation or spreads a smear, what recourse is there for the target? Anonymising spokespeople suits some journalists because if every source is simply a ‘spokesman’ or ‘official’ then it’s easy to make up any old quote to suit your story. As a reader you should be sceptical of such quotes. The source of news (who said it) is just as important as what is said. It’s much trickier to put imagined words into a named individual’s mouth (and when that does happen there are sanctions that person can take against the reporter or source).

Reporters in the US are told always to fight against officials’ attempts to be anonymous. I believe this is a fundamental role of the journalist: to push officials to stand behind what they say. If they don’t agree, then don’t print it or give it airtime. It really is that simple. If journalists stuck together on just this one point, they could overnight force a change in the culture of Parliament, the Civil Service and many public services.

Why naming matters: the case of the Speakerʼs speaker

For reporters covering Parliament, December is a difficult month. The House of Commons is in recess and MPs are away for five weeks. To fill the gap, Simon Walters of the Mail on Sunday put in a freedom-of-information request for the details of the taxi claims made by the Speaker’s wife. The reply came (perhaps not coincidentally) over the Christmas break when Walters was away on holiday. Just to ensure he didn’t get the scoop he clearly wanted, the Commons posted the answer on the Web, which is where another reporter, Sam Coates of The Times, found it. The reply stated that the wife of Speaker Michael Martin had claimed £4,280.20 since May 2004 on 156 taxi journeys, mainly for shopping trips.

‘I called the Speaker’s office to ask about these claims,’ Sam Coates told me. ‘It was difficult because around Christmas the House isn’t sitting. But I do remember I was given this number for a guy called Mike Granatt who didn’t even work at the House of Commons. I seem to recall I woke him up and he was in some foreign country and I remember thinking “Isn’t it ridiculous that I have to call some guy halfway round the world to find out what the Speaker is doing just a few yards away from me?”’

Mike Granatt is an experienced communications consultant. He is a partner at the Luther Pendragon PR agency, and former director of the Government Information Service. In 2007/8 he was working as media adviser to the House of Commons Commission, the management committee chaired by Michael Martin (more on Martin in Chapter 8). The Speaker was at that time under heavy criticism both for his handling of the MPs’ expenses scandal but also his own very liberal expense claims. Plus he was using public money to employ a private PR firm.

Sam asked Mike Granatt about Mary Martin’s taxi bill as he’d found that even some MPs were critical of the amounts claimed, which were more generous than their own allowed taxi claims.

‘He came back saying the reason was that she was shopping for official functions. I thought this was absolutely ludicrous,’ Sam said. ‘The idea that Mary Martin was coming back from Waitrose with bags of food for official functions rather than hiring a caterer—well, it didn’t pass the most basic journalistic smell test. I asked him: “Are you sure?” He said: “Yes. That’s the explanation.” He got quite defensive when I pressed him further. I actually thought he was trying to pull the wool over my eyes. I felt he wasn’t trying hard enough to get to the bottom of things so I did something I don’t normally do, which is I named him.

‘It was a way of making him take personal responsibility for his quote because I didn’t believe it and I thought he hadn’t done enough to get to the bottom of what was actually going on.’

Most newspapers repeating Sam’s story followed the usual convention and gave the Speaker’s justification anonymously:

A spokesman for Mr Martin said: ‘She goes shopping for food for entertaining official visitors.’

A Commons spokesman said: ‘The burden on a Speaker’s family can be great at times.’

However, Sam’s report in The Times stated:

Mike Granatt, a spokesman for Mr Martin, justified Mrs Martin’s claim. ‘She goes shopping for food and so on for entertaining official visitors. The Speaker entertains periodically. There is a budget that is held for the Speaker’s office and the money comes from that,’ he said. He confirmed that Mrs Martin was not employed by her husband in any capacity.

Granatt said the Speaker was justified in putting through his wife’s claims as the trips were ‘entirely in connection with household expenditure that supports the Speaker’s duties’, adding that Mrs Martin needed to take taxis to shop for food for official functions. To underline the official nature of the shopping trips, he said Mary Martin had always been accompanied by an ‘administrative official’.

Simon Walters came back from holiday and, suspicious of the line about the ‘administrative official’, set about to uncover who that person was. A few months later, he discovered the ‘official’ was none other than Mrs Martin’s housekeeper and friend, Gloria Hawkes, and, not surprisingly, it was questionable whether the shopping was for any official purpose. Some of it was clearly for the couple’s personal consumption—once a month Mrs Martin would do her shopping at a large supermarket and keep a taxi on a ‘wait and return’ basis, because (she later told a parliamentary investigator), they were ‘not easy to hail’.

‘We asked the Speaker’s office about Mrs Speaker’s shopping trips with Gloria Hawkes and they denied it,’ Simon Walters told me, ‘saying Mrs Speaker took an unnamed official to help get items for official receptions. It was a blatant fib. When Mike Granatt found out that it was Mrs Hawkes and the trips were personal, not official, he resigned. His statement on 23 February included a personal apology to me (a rare experience).’

The new reality directly contradicted the previous statement and because Mike Granatt was individually linked to what he’d told Sam Coates back in December he did not have deniability. And so:

I have stepped down from my post for ethical reasons, because I misled a journalist unwittingly. It is core to the ethical code by which I and my company operate that I tell the truth, and that I am given the truth to tell. However, I learned on Friday that I had been led to mislead journalists over material facts in a story concerning the Speaker’s household and the use of taxis. I have expressed my regrets to the journalist who brought this to my attention, and I offer them to anyone else who was similarly misled.

Asked by MPs on the Public Administration Committee to say who had misled him, Mr Granatt said he was ‘not prepared to go into details of names or places ... It wasn’t the Speaker and it wasn’t, as it was put to me, Mrs Martin.’

If Sam Coates hadn’t taken the unusual decision of breaking the convention in the British press of naming the Speaker’s speaker, would he have felt the same pressure to resign?

It begs the question—why are journalists colluding with officials by granting them anonymity and thus deniability? Most of the reporters covering Parliament don’t agree with my stance on naming. I find this depressing. If they don’t fight for the public’s right to know, who else will?

‘In practice the reason we don’t do it is that frankly people won’t talk to you again if you name them,’ Sam Coates said. ‘It would take a decision at editor level that we would do it en masse. If I was to do it unilaterally then the effect would be a huge amount of anger and a lot of people not talking to me unless I gave a guarantee that I wouldn’t do it again.’

This should make it clear just how important anonymity is to the bureaucrat. If it didn’t matter they wouldn’t fight so hard to preserve it. The reason they do is because very often statements given by a ‘spokesman’ don’t stand up to the slightest public scrutiny. It doesn’t happen every day but too often anonymous quotes turn out to be biased, misleading or just plain lies.

To smear in secrecy: the case of Guido Fawkes and Damian McBride

The year 2007 was meant to see the end of spin, yet you only had to read the newspapers to see how the ‘insider’, ‘senior source’ and ‘friend of the prime minister’ was using anonymity to spread rumours, innuendo and accusations without ever having to be accountable for what was said.

Here are some of the notable attack quotes and demolition jobs from that time (emphasis added):

10 September 2006 ‘Gordon Brown’s allies last night suggested that drink may have played a part in Charles Clarke’s extraordinary attack on the Chancellor when he accused him of being a deluded control freak with psychological problems. Friends of Mr Brown have seized on the former Home Secretary’s latest interview, in which he delivered a devastating assessment of the Labour leadership favourite, while clutching “a glass of red wine in his hand”.’

2 April 2006 ‘At one stage this weekend, sources close to Mr Brown referred to their counterparts in Mr Blair’s camp as madmen.’

21 March 2007 ‘Friends poured scorn on Lord Turnbull [the former Permanent Secretary who accused Brown of being like Stalin] as an embittered ex-official who was never highly rated and was kept out of the Chancellor’s inner circle.’

No one can match for sheer nastiness the mud-slingers in the Downing Street bunker. It’s only in a culture of anonymous sourcing that such smear tactics survive. So not surprisingly it took someone outside the parliamentary lobby to expose the chief smearer. Most lobby journalists knew all about Damian McBride but—crucially—the public did not because of the press convention of granting officials anonymity.

Damian McBride had been a member of the prime minister’s inner circle for nearly a decade. He was a career civil servant and played a lead role in the Treasury’s response to the fuel protests in 2000. He was spotted by Gordon Brown and became head of communications at the Treasury in 2003 and Brown’s special adviser in 2005. Reporters knew him as a fearsome spin doctor who ruthlessly promoted Brown. Those journalists who dared go against him received aggressive text messages about their stories.

Then in early 2009 the political blogger Guido Fawkes (aka Paul Staines) broke convention and named McBride on Andrew Neil’s Daily Politics show as the source of various smears. Things heated up even more when Staines came into possession of a series of emails sent by McBride to another Labour spin doctor, Derek Draper, in which they proposed a campaign of unfounded personal attacks against senior Conservatives, many of a sexual nature, that would help to ‘destabilise’ the opposition in the run-up to the general election. Charlie Whelan, Mr Brown’s former spin doctor, was also copied in.

In the emails, McBride detailed four possible stories to ensure that a new Labour website would start off with a bang. He described the first story, about a gay Tory MP promoting his companion’s business interests in the Commons, as a ‘solid investigative story’, suggesting that it ‘may be a good one to use early’. The other three, he admitted, were ‘gossipy and mainly intended to destabilise the Tories’. The mooted stories—all vehemently denied—were based on rumours about the personal lives of George Osborne, David Cameron and Nadine Dorries.

It’s important to remember, in light of what happened next, that if the emails hadn’t been leaked to Paul Staines then the smears would likely have gone into the public domain without any name attached. Official anonymity = total deniability.

No one should be surprised at the depths to which dirty politics can sink when people don’t have to stand behind what they say. Fortunately, however, these two spin doctors did have to stand behind what they said because Staines gave the emails he’d obtained to the Sunday Times and News of the World. Initially, the prime minister’s office tried to pass off the emails as juvenile banter, but with the smears attributed to Damian McBride by name his position was clearly untenable.

‘This is far beyond the usual rough and tumble of politics,’ Staines said, ‘these are sexual smears, some so obscene you could not print them. Damian McBride is the prime minister’s special adviser on press and politics, not some kind of juvenile in the background.’

McBride resigned soon after publication. Are these not lessons enough that all official spokespeople should be named?

A fatal lack of accountability

There are many other examples where the convention on official anonymity has dire consequences. After the 2002 train crash in Potters Bar which killed six people and injured many others, the first reports placed blame on engineering company Jarvis for shoddy maintenance. Then crisis management PR flunkeys waded in, putting it about through unattributed briefings, where they were quoted only as a ‘senior rail source’, that the crash was more likely a result of vandalism. It wasn’t until three years and an official inquiry later that the truth came out: vandalism was ‘highly unlikely’ and the probable cause was poor maintenance by Jarvis.

In June 2006, Scotland Yard raided a house in Forest Gate, east London, and shot an unarmed man. Senior officers gave unattributed statements to the press, saying the house was used for chemical terrorism (despite no evidence that this was true). They also smeared the residents, saying they had a suspiciously large amount of cash (they were Muslim and didn’t use banks), and that one had downloaded child pornography (charge dismissed for lack of evidence). All the allegations proved false but they served to distract the public from the real story—which was police incompetence. As long as the officer doing the smearing wasn’t named he could say what he liked with no comeback.

This strategy of anonymous allegations was seen earlier, when the Metropolitan Police mistakenly shot Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube in July 2005. He was variously described by ‘senior police sources’ as running away from the police, jumping a tube barrier, wearing unusually bulky clothes in hot weather, and ignoring shouted warnings from the police. All these proved completely untrue.

As long as secrecy and anonymity reign, public sector bureaucracies will be the hiding places for the incompetent, lazy and corrupt. Failures will be rewarded and successes stifled. It’s easier to lie when no one knows your name. It’s easier to do all sorts of unethical, if not criminal, things when you are promised anonymity. Only by acting as a named individual and relating to others as such can there be justice and integrity in bureaucracies.

Throughout public services there are professionals with all kinds of information and concerns about what is not working and ideas for improvement. But in the current system they have nowhere to go, no one who will listen. In the end the silent state doesn’t protect them, it slowly destroys their pride in their jobs and eventually their spirit to do good.

Public servants should be given the power over their own jobs and their accountability should be directly to the people, not to bureaucrats. Many currently have to sign confidentiality agreements, gagging them from speaking directly to the public in whose name and expense they are supposedly working. While they are silenced the top bureaucrats, such as Permanent Secretaries and deputy and undersecretaries, are not just implementing the decisions of ministers but taking the initiative in vast swathes of policymaking. Yet because of the quaint tradition of ministerial accountability and the convention on bureaucratic anonymity they are exempt from any kind of public accountability. Even at the lower level, there are important decisions being made and the public have a right to know who is making these decisions, particularly when they so directly affect their lives.

A system of named identification and direct accountability gives power back to the professionals. We don’t need more targets or more bureaucratic inspectorates. We need knowledge, the raw data held inside our public services, to be given back to us.

Heather's latest book, The Revolution will be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War, is now available.

Read more:
Anodyne Anonymity, by Cory Doctorow
Screenwipe on anonymous sourcing
Everything tagged Journalism at Boing Boing

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/14/a-fatal-lack-of-accountability.html/feed 16 http://boingboing.net/2012/05/14/anodyne-anonymity.html http://boingboing.net/2012/05/14/anodyne-anonymity.html#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 14:02:08 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=160604 When we think of journalists' anonymous sources, we think of the proverbial whistleblower. Company insiders, or civil servants, ready to violate their nondisclosure agreements to expose some wrongdoing, or perhaps to settle some score. On the other, sleazier, end of the scale, we might think of tipsters: a cash-strapped waiter at a restaurant who sells the story of a celebrity food-fight to a tabloid, a blabby nurse at a plastic surgery clinic who spills the beans on some captain of industry's chin-augmentation.

But the most commonly cited anonymous sources in the news today are the official, on-the-record spokespeople for corporations. And the anonymous speech that is protected by the journalists who quote them is the most bland, anodyne stuff you can imagine.]]>

Anodyne Anonymity

Beware officials who hide behind the veil—and those who let them

By Cory Doctorow - Share this article

Tweet

When we think of journalists' anonymous sources, we think of the proverbial whistleblower. Company insiders, or civil servants, ready to violate their nondisclosure agreements to expose some wrongdoing, or perhaps to settle some score. On the other, sleazier, end of the scale, we might think of tipsters: a cash-strapped waiter at a restaurant who sells the story of a celebrity food-fight to a tabloid, a blabby nurse at a plastic surgery clinic who spills the beans on some captain of industry's chin-augmentation.

But the most commonly cited anonymous sources in the news today are the official, on-the-record spokespeople for corporations. And the anonymous speech that is protected by the journalists who quote them is the most bland, anodyne stuff you can imagine.

My first run-in with this was back in 1996 or 1997, when I wrote my first feature for Wired magazine, about a “dumpster diver” who harvested trash from high-tech companies' skips and resold it. After watching him make several thousand dollars out of a skip belonging to Acer America, I called them up and spoke to their head of security, who was on the line with a minder from Acer's PR company. He said something bland and reassuring about how it would cost more to sell this stuff themselves than they'd earn on it. I asked why they didn't give it to schools, and the PR minder said, “It’s something we’ll have to look into.”

I quoted both of them in the article and was shocked when Wired's fact-checker phoned me before it went to press to tell me that the PR person denied having said anything. I had her on tape and I stuck to my guns, and those perfectly innocuous words went into the article, much to her evident (and inexplicable) consternation.

PR people, both in-house and outside contractors, have adopted a gospel that holds that they themselves should never appear in an article. When I asked around about this practice, PR people defended it, saying that their success would be judged by the extent to which they were absent from the story. It's as though the odd doctrine that companies are people means that companies can't admit that they are made up of people. When a PR person says something innocuous, he is speaking ex cathedra, voice of the company embodied, which has possessed him and speaks through him, without interpretation or engagement by the person himself. He is the company's living embodiment, without name or identity.

This is a phenomenon that I run into again and again. Last year, I dug into the Times's paywall numbers, spending a week talking off and on with the senior spokesperson for the paper. At the end of our conversation, she revealed that she had only been speaking to me with the understanding that I not name her in the article. Surprised that the official, designated spokesperson for The Times would expect to remain unnamed in print, I asked if anything she'd told me was incriminating to her. No, she said, all the facts she'd relayed were “in the public domain,” and she had not violated any confidences in relaying them to me. Her job was to tell me these facts, and her job was to make sure that no one knew who had told me these facts.

More recently, I was chasing up a story BBC's insistence that Ofcom hold its report on adding DRM to high-definition digital TV in confidence. No one at the BBC's press relations office would return my phone messages, and when a press officer there responded in writing, he or she refused to disclose his or her identity. I don't even know if the emails I received came from one person or several people.

PR people are seemingly incapable of understanding why anyone would object to this. After I posted about a researcher's conclusion that T-Mobile UK was fiddling with the packets in its data network in a way that prevented secure connections, I was contacted by a representative from Nelson Bostock Communications. This person wrote on T-Mobile's behalf to ask for a phone call. Given the technical nature of the matter, I emailed back that I'd prefer a written exchange, and said that I would only communicate on the condition that it was all on the record, from a named person. The PR person replied with a fairly spin-laden answer and noted “Statement to be attributed to a T-Mobile spokesperson.” Either this person had poor reading comprehension or just couldn’t believe that someone would ask for a named person would have statements attributed to them. Indeed, when I asked about this, I got another reply with the same attribution instruction. I replied that we had nothing to say if I couldn't quote someone by name, and never heard back.

Then, when I got a lead on a story about a spot of corporate misbehavior. I asked the company for an on-the-record statement. I got one, which made it all seem rather a tempest in a teapot. Just as I was deciding not to write about this after all, I got an email from an in-house PR person at the company asking if she could talk to me “on background” about this. I replied that, as I’d stated, I was only interested in talking to named, on-the-record people, unless she or he was planning on telling me something that would get her or him fired or disciplined. That is, if she or he was going to relay official company statements in her or his capacity as a company spokesperson, I expected to be able to attribute them to her or him. She or he replied that she or he could talk if I could attribute this to “someone close to the company.” I reiterated that this wasn't something I'd do for official statements, and she or he thanked me politely and suggested some websites I could look to for clarity.

I went back to the BBC and asked if someone in the press department could speak to me, on the record, as a named person, about why no one there would speak as a named person on the record. A person who asked not to be named said, “it’s absolutely standard practice to request a quote is attributed to a spokesperson for an organisation rather than in an individual’s name. This is because it demonstrates the statement is being officially given on behalf of the organisation, as opposed to by an individual employee offering what might be their private opinion. This approach is routinely adopted by most communications teams, be they broadcasters, public sector organisations or private companies.”

When I asked if I could attribute this to the person who'd replied to my email, she or he said, “I’ve clearly articulated the BBC’s position to you, and in line with this I’ve asked that you attribute it to a BBC spokesperson.” Of course, I’d started the conversation by asking that a named person go on-the-record, but again, this seems to be an impossible request in the world of PR.

I asked whether the BBC's newsgathering guidelines had anything to say on the subject, and the anonymous person pointed me to the BBC Editorial Guidelines on Anonymity. As a set of principles for protecting the identities of whistleblowers, dissidents, and witnesses and victims of crimes, these are without flaw.

But I can't understand why they'd apply to corporate spokespeople.

News, as we all know, is governed by the Ws: Who, what, where, when and why. When you are writing up a factual, detailed account of an event, who matters every bit as much as what and the rest of it. The identity of a person who makes a statement is newsworthy and relevant. Without this fact, we are deprived of a key metric for determining credibility: identity. If a PR person says something at company “A” that turns out to have been a knowing lie, then we should be very skeptical of everything she says for companies B, C and on, throughout her employment history, unto Z.

Many people in PR start out in journalism school. When I taught at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, the students intending to work in PR went to the same classes as the students who intended to become working journalists. They heard all about the importance of establishing the key facts when reporting on a story. The shock on display when a journalist asks for statements to be attributed to human beings, rather than the companies that employ them, is unconvincing and unbecoming.

Let's be clear here. I'm not talking about sticking a pad under someone’s nose at the site of an industrial accident and saying, “You work here then? Can you tell me what happened? What’s your name?” and getting that poor shocked person fired.

I'm talking about attending the press conference and asking the official spokesperson, making prepared statements on behalf of the company, what his name is. This is relevant. The reason that human beings deliver these statements is so that we'll believe them and report on them, because statements attached to people are more convincing than anonymous, unsigned missives on the company website. If we are going to give statements credence because they originate with humans, then we should know who those humans are.

Read more:
A fatal lack of accountability, by Heather Brooke
Screenwipe on anonymous sourcing
Everything tagged Journalism at Boing Boing

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/14/anodyne-anonymity.html/feed 38 http://boingboing.net/2012/05/14/anonymous-sourcing-avoids-acco.html http://boingboing.net/2012/05/14/anonymous-sourcing-avoids-acco.html#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 14:01:02 +0000 Rob Beschizza http://boingboing.net/?p=160610

In this segment from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, Heather Brooke highlights the problems of anonymous sources in the UK media, where police spokespersons frequently mislead the public about suspects and investigations. [Video Link]

Read more:
Anodyne Anonymity, by Cory Doctorow
A fatal lack of accounting, by Heather Brooke
Everything tagged Journalism at Boing Boing

]]>

In this segment from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, Heather Brooke highlights the problems of anonymous sources in the UK media, where police spokespersons frequently mislead the public about suspects and investigations. [Video Link]

Read more:
Anodyne Anonymity, by Cory Doctorow
A fatal lack of accounting, by Heather Brooke
Everything tagged Journalism at Boing Boing]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/14/anonymous-sourcing-avoids-acco.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2012/04/11/fox-news-whistleblower-begins.html http://boingboing.net/2012/04/11/fox-news-whistleblower-begins.html#comments Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:50:04 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=154048 Gawker has launched a new column written by an anonymous Fox News employee who posts under "The Fox Mole." S/he claims to have been with Fox for "years," and claims that s/he can't find work elsewhere because other news organizations view Fox alumni with suspicion.

]]> Gawker has launched a new column written by an anonymous Fox News employee who posts under "The Fox Mole." S/he claims to have been with Fox for "years," and claims that s/he can't find work elsewhere because other news organizations view Fox alumni with suspicion. The Mole's first column describes a particularly nasty piece of work by Fox -- the notorious "Obama's Hip Hop BBQ Didn't Create Jobs" story -- as the breaking point that got her/him interested in exposing wrongdoing at the organization.

The post neatly summed up everything that had been troubling me about my employer: Non sequitur, ad hominem attacks on the president; gleeful race baiting; a willful disregard for facts; and so on. It came close on the heels of the Common controversy, which exhibited a lot of the same ugly traits. (See also: terrorist fist jabs; Fox & Friends madrassa accusations; etc.)

The worst thing about the Hip Hop BBQ incident is that we didn't back away from it. Bill Shine, who is a rather important guy—sort of Roger Ailes' main hatchet man, and the go-between for Ailes and most of the top talent—bafflingly doubled down and defended it. The story still exists on the Fox Nation site, headline and photo montage intact, to this very day.

That was it for me. It wasn't that the one incident was so bad, in and of itself. But it was so galvanizing, and on top of so many other little incidents, that I guess it just finally pushed me over the edge.

Announcing Our Newest Hire: A Current Fox News Channel Employee (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/04/11/fox-news-whistleblower-begins.html/feed 63 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/21/scalable-stylometry-can-we-de.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/21/scalable-stylometry-can-we-de.html#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:00:20 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=144832 One of the most interesting technical presentations I attended in 2012 was the talk on "adversarial stylometry" given by a Drexel College research team at the 28C3 conference in Berlin. "Stylometry" is the practice of trying to ascribe authorship to an anonymous text by analyzing its writing style; "adversarial stylometry" is the practice of resisting stylometric de-anonymization by using software to remove distinctive characteristics and voice from a text.

]]> One of the most interesting technical presentations I attended in 2012 was the talk on "adversarial stylometry" given by a Drexel College research team at the 28C3 conference in Berlin. "Stylometry" is the practice of trying to ascribe authorship to an anonymous text by analyzing its writing style; "adversarial stylometry" is the practice of resisting stylometric de-anonymization by using software to remove distinctive characteristics and voice from a text.

Stanford's Arvind Narayanan describes a paper he co-authored on stylometry that has been accepted for the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2012. In On the Feasibility of Internet-Scale Author Identification (PDF) Narayanan and co-authors show that they can use stylometry to improve the reliability of de-anonymizing blog posts drawn from a large and diverse data-set, using a method that scales well. However, the experimental set was not "adversarial" -- that is, the authors took no countermeasures to disguise their authorship. It would be interesting to see how the approach described in the paper performs against texts that are deliberately anonymized, with and without computer assistance. The summary cites another paper by someone who found that even unaided efforts to disguise one's style makes stylometric analysis much less effective.

We made several innovations that allowed us to achieve the accuracy levels that we did. First, contrary to some previous authors who hypothesized that only relatively straightforward “lazy” classifiers work for this type of problem, we were able to avoid various pitfalls and use more high-powered machinery. Second, we developed new techniques for confidence estimation, including a measure very similar to “eccentricity” used in the Netflix paper. Third, we developed techniques to improve the performance (speed) of our classifiers, detailed in the paper. This is a research contribution by itself, but it also enabled us to rapidly iterate the development of our algorithms and optimize them.

In an earlier article, I noted that we don’t yet have as rigorous an understanding of deanonymization algorithms as we would like. I see this paper as a significant step in that direction. In my series on fingerprinting, I pointed out that in numerous domains, researchers have considered classification/deanonymization problems with tens of classes, with implications for forensics and security-enhancing applications, but that to explore the privacy-infringing/surveillance applications the methods need to be tweaked to be able to deal with a much larger number of classes. Our work shows how to do that, and we believe that insights from our paper will be generally applicable to numerous problems in the privacy space.

Is Writing Style Sufficient to Deanonymize Material Posted Online? (via Hack the Planet) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/21/scalable-stylometry-can-we-de.html/feed 16 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/02/fbi-tells-the-public-that-tor.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/02/fbi-tells-the-public-that-tor.html#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:28:17 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=142052 probably a terrorist according to the FBI.]]> probably a terrorist according to the FBI. These are just some of the activities that are suggested indicators of terrorism according to a flyer being distributed entitled 'Communities Against Terrorism' You can find a PDF version here entitled 'Internet Cafes'" ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/02/fbi-tells-the-public-that-tor.html/feed 54 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/31/judge-to-ask-for-anonymity-in.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/31/judge-to-ask-for-anonymity-in.html#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:24:13 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=141536 Hard Drive Productions is a pornographer that has switched business models, shifting its focus from making dirty movies to making sleazy lawsuits. It collected IP addresses of people who were supposedly downloading its movies over BitTorrent, then sent their ISPS legal demands to reveal their names.

]]> Hard Drive Productions is a pornographer that has switched business models, shifting its focus from making dirty movies to making sleazy lawsuits. It collected IP addresses of people who were supposedly downloading its movies over BitTorrent, then sent their ISPS legal demands to reveal their names. The next step would be demanding cash settlements from the named persons, threatening to name them in embarrassing lawsuits if they didn't pay up. Many of the victims of the sloppy data-gathering methodology have protested their innocence, but would like to remain anonymous in the court record, rather than having their names associated in a public document about pornography consumption.

Unfortunately the federal court judge in the case has ruled that in order to request anonymity, the 1495 defendants will have to have their names entered into the public record. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has asked the judge to reconsider.

The case is one of a growing number of mass copyright lawsuits that do not appear to be filed with any intention of litigating them. Instead, once identities of suspected infringers are obtained from ISPs, the plaintiffs send settlement letters offering to make the lawsuit go away for a few thousand dollars. A ruling on whether a film company may obtain identities of anonymous Internet users may be the last chance for defendants to be heard by the court.

EFF's brief explains both the speech implications of the ruling and the importance of the court rules that protect defendants, given the numerous ways these mass lawsuits violate due process.

"All that the plaintiffs need here to pursue their settlement shake-down scheme is the identity of the anonymous defendants," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. "These defendants have a First Amendment right to argue for their anonymity without the court forcing them to moot that argument from the start. We're asking for these motions to quash to go forward without requiring them to be unsealed, and we're also asking the court to throw this case out given the basic due process flaws."

EFF Asks Judge to Prevent ‘Catch-22’ in Porn-Downloading Lawsuit ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/31/judge-to-ask-for-anonymity-in.html/feed 16 http://boingboing.net/2011/12/29/state-of-adversarial-stylometr.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/29/state-of-adversarial-stylometr.html#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:01:14 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=136380 Today at the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin (28C3), Sadia Afroz and Michael Brennan presented a talk called "Deceiving Authorship Detection," about research from Drexel College on "Adversarial Stylometry," the practice of identifying the authors of texts who don't want to be identified, and the process of evading detection.

]]> Today at the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin (28C3), Sadia Afroz and Michael Brennan presented a talk called "Deceiving Authorship Detection," about research from Drexel College on "Adversarial Stylometry," the practice of identifying the authors of texts who don't want to be identified, and the process of evading detection. Stylometry has made great and well-publicized advances in recent years (and it made the news with scandals like "Gay Girl in Damascus"), but typically this has been against authors who have not taken active, computer-assisted countermeasures at disguising their distinctive "voice" in prose.

As part of the presentation, the Drexel Team released Anonymouth, a free/open tool that partially automates the process of evading authorship detection. The tool is still a rough alpha, and it requires human intervention to oversee the texts it produces, but it is still an exciting move in adversarial stylometry tools. Accompanying the release are large corpuses of test data of deceptive and non-deceptive texts.

Stylometry has been cited by knowledgeable critics as proof of the pointlessness of the Nym Wars: why argue for the right to be anonymous or pseudonymous on Google Plus or Facebook when stylometry will de-anonymize you anyway? I've been suspect of these critiques because they assume that only de-anonymizers will have access to computer-assisted tools, but as Anonymouth shows, there are many opportunities to use automation tools to improve anonymity.

Stylometry matters in many ways: its state of the art changes the balance of power between trolls and moderators, between dissidents and dictators, between employers and whistleblowers, between astroturfers and commenters, and between spammers and filters.

During the Q&A, a questioner asked whether Anonymouth's methods could be used by, say, fanfic authors to make their writing style match the author whose universe they're dabbling in; the researchers thought this would be so. I instantly wondered if avid fans might make a JK-Rowlingifier that could be used by dissidents to anonymize their speech, homogenizing it to pitch-perfect Potterian English so that stylometry fails. And of course, this makes me wonder whether stylometry could be used to falsely identify a block of prose with a third party (making a terrorist rant stylometrically match an innocent's prose-style) -- the researchers doubt this, and suggest that when deception is a possibility, prose-style shouldn't be considered as identifying evidence.

As an aside, the Anonymouth team is part of a lab at Drexel seeking grad-students and postdocs.

Privacy, Security and Automation Lab ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/12/29/state-of-adversarial-stylometr.html/feed 17 http://boingboing.net/2011/11/15/howto-be-more-anonymous-in-you.html http://boingboing.net/2011/11/15/howto-be-more-anonymous-in-you.html#comments Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:19:29 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=129232 Andy Baio explains how he tracked down a trolling "anonymous" blogger who revealed his identity by using a Google Analytics ID that was incremented one up from his public blog. He uses this as a springboard for offering practical advice to people who want to blog "anonymously" (or, at least, as anonymously as possible):

1.

]]> Andy Baio explains how he tracked down a trolling "anonymous" blogger who revealed his identity by using a Google Analytics ID that was incremented one up from his public blog. He uses this as a springboard for offering practical advice to people who want to blog "anonymously" (or, at least, as anonymously as possible):

1. Don’t use Google Analytics or any other third-party embed system. If you have to, create a new account with an anonymous email. At the very least, create a separate Analytics account to track the new domain. (From the “My Analytics Accounts” dropdown, select “Create New Account.”)

2. Turn on domain privacy with your registrar. Better, use a hosted service to avoid domain payments entirely.

3. If you’re hosting your own blog, don’t share IP addresses with any of your existing websites. Ideally, use a completely different host; it’s easy to discover sites on neighboring IPs.

4. Watch your history. Sites like Whois Source track your history of domain and nameserver changes permanently, and Archive.org may archive old versions of your site. Being the first person to follow your anonymous Twitter account or promote the link could also be a giveaway.

5. Is your anonymity a life-or-death situation? Be aware that any service you use, including your own ISP, could be forced to reveal your IP address and account details under a court order. Use shared computers and an anonymous proxy or Tor when blogging to mask your IP address.

Andy Baio: Think You Can Hide, Anonymous Blogger? Two Words: Google Analytics]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/15/howto-be-more-anonymous-in-you.html/feed 8 http://boingboing.net/2011/10/27/google-rejects-jwzs-2-step-plan-to-end-the-nym-wars.html http://boingboing.net/2011/10/27/google-rejects-jwzs-2-step-plan-to-end-the-nym-wars.html#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:54:40 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=126475 JWZ proposed a two-step plan to help Google realize its stated goal of allowing pseudonyms on Google+:

1. Stop deleting peoples' accounts when you suspect that the name they are using is not their legal name.
2. There is no step 2.

]]> JWZ proposed a two-step plan to help Google realize its stated goal of allowing pseudonyms on Google+:

1. Stop deleting peoples' accounts when you suspect that the name they are using is not their legal name.
2. There is no step 2.

Googlers voted up the question "can we do this?" for a response at this week's company meeting. According to JWZ's source, "To nobody's great surprise, [Larry Page's] answer was a very long-winded 'no'."

Google Nymwars, redux ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/10/27/google-rejects-jwzs-2-step-plan-to-end-the-nym-wars.html/feed 41 http://boingboing.net/2011/10/01/hacker-prom-tonight-at-san-franciscos-noisebridge-hackerspace.html http://boingboing.net/2011/10/01/hacker-prom-tonight-at-san-franciscos-noisebridge-hackerspace.html#comments Sat, 01 Oct 2011 17:03:25 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=121288 NoiseBridge, the celebrated hackerspace in San Francisco's Mission district, is celebrating its third anniversary tonight with a Hacker Prom. There's a makeout room (featuring Makerbots), pre-spiked punch, and awkward prom photos. You're encouraged to bring a robot date. Oh, this does look fun!

]]> NoiseBridge, the celebrated hackerspace in San Francisco's Mission district, is celebrating its third anniversary tonight with a Hacker Prom. There's a makeout room (featuring Makerbots), pre-spiked punch, and awkward prom photos. You're encouraged to bring a robot date. Oh, this does look fun!

The whole event is a fundraiser for NoiseTor, a part of the TOR anonymizing proxy system, which creates and manages Tor nodes for those without the time to set one up themselves.

(Thanks, Danny!)

Noisebridge 3 Year Anniversary – Hacker Prom! [blog.noisebridge.net]]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/10/01/hacker-prom-tonight-at-san-franciscos-noisebridge-hackerspace.html/feed 0 http://boingboing.net/2011/08/20/understanding-the-nym-wars.html http://boingboing.net/2011/08/20/understanding-the-nym-wars.html#comments Sat, 20 Aug 2011 13:55:09 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=114521 great (JWZ) posts (Kevin Marks) on the Nym Wars, in which Googlers, net users, and sensible people try to convince the G+ team that it's insane to tell people that they must socialize using their "real names," and to then try to adjudicate what a "real name" is.]]> great (JWZ) posts (Kevin Marks) on the Nym Wars, in which Googlers, net users, and sensible people try to convince the G+ team that it's insane to tell people that they must socialize using their "real names," and to then try to adjudicate what a "real name" is. Both link out to the canonical essays produced to date on the subject, such as EFF and boyd, and add a lot of good context. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/08/20/understanding-the-nym-wars.html/feed 26 http://boingboing.net/2011/08/04/google-pluss-real-name-policy-is-abusive-facebook-is-not-a-real-name-success-story.html http://boingboing.net/2011/08/04/google-pluss-real-name-policy-is-abusive-facebook-is-not-a-real-name-success-story.html#comments Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:17:10 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=112172 insanely naive one that Randi Zuckerberg would like to foist on the entire Internet) are an abuse of power:

Over and over again, people keep pointing to Facebook as an example where “real names” policies work.

]]> insanely naive one that Randi Zuckerberg would like to foist on the entire Internet) are an abuse of power:

Over and over again, people keep pointing to Facebook as an example where “real names” policies work. This makes me laugh hysterically. One of the things that became patently clear to me in my fieldwork is that countless teens who signed up to Facebook late into the game chose to use pseudonyms or nicknames. What’s even more noticeable in my data is that an extremely high percentage of people of color used pseudonyms as compared to the white teens that I interviewed. Of course, this would make sense…

The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people. These ideas and issues aren’t new (and I’ve even talked about this before), but what is new is that marginalized people are banding together and speaking out loudly. And thank goodness.

What’s funny to me is that people also don’t seem to understand the history of Facebook’s “real names” culture. When early adopters (first the elite college students…) embraced Facebook, it was a trusted community. They gave the name that they used in the context of college or high school or the corporation that they were a part of. They used the name that fit into the network that they joined Facebook with. The names they used weren’t necessarily their legal names; plenty of people chose Bill instead of William. But they were, for all intents and purposes, “real.” As the site grew larger, people had to grapple with new crowds being present and discomfort emerged over the norms. But the norms were set and people kept signing up and giving the name that they were most commonly known by. By the time celebrities kicked in, Facebook wasn’t demanding that Lady Gaga call herself Stefani Germanotta, but of course, she had a “fan page” and was separate in the eyes of the crowd. Meanwhile, what many folks failed to notice is that countless black and Latino youth signed up to Facebook using handles. Most people don’t notice what black and Latino youth do online. Likewise, people from outside of the US started signing up to Facebook and using alternate names. Again, no one noticed because names transliterated from Arabic or Malaysian or containing phrases in Portuguese weren’t particularly visible to the real name enforcers. Real names are by no means universal on Facebook, but it’s the importance of real names is a myth that Facebook likes to shill out. And, for the most part, privileged white Americans use their real name on Facebook. So it “looks” right.

“Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/08/04/google-pluss-real-name-policy-is-abusive-facebook-is-not-a-real-name-success-story.html/feed 264