We've been CISPA'd again.

For a second year the US House has passed the embarrassingly vague Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, a bill that could scatter your personal information like a tornado hitting a trailer park. Echoing last year, the Obama administration has threatened to veto CISPA if it fails to incorporate privacy controls, but we shouldn't have to rely on presidential intervention or the Senate's questionable wisdom to save us. Though Congress is gifted in the arts of incompetence and believes digital liberties only matter to basement-dwelling teens, we cannot entirely vilify the House, either. If there's one thing our representatives actually represent about us, it is our ignorance of technology.

Since you are reading Boing Boing, it is very likely that you live in the midst of the digital liberties conversation. You probably know why CISPA is a flawed bill, how it continues the tradition of other dangerously flawed bills like SOPA, and that there are truly insane examples of cyber-law on the books already. If I had to guess, I'd say you might be up to speed on lawsuits against NSA surveillance and follow the work of people like James Bamford and Laura Poitras. Maybe you have given money to groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Fight for the Future. Maybe you work for them. If you're here, you understand that digital liberties matter and have ramifications for everyone, everywhere. They are not a hobby issue for the tech community.

This is why I want to issue a friendly challenge to you: push digital liberties into the big conversation.

The status quo isn't good enough. Yes, we have an incredible array of talented organizations fighting for our digital liberties through the courts, political system, and public sphere. These groups helped unleash the widespread outrage that defeated SOPA and have brought unlikely allies together to resist congressional stupidity, but promising signs can lull us into missing a crucial point: digital liberties are a non-issue for most Americans. If we want to stop bills like CISPA from becoming annual events, we need to make digital liberties visible to people who don't read Boing Boing or Wired and have never heard of Demand Progress or the Center for Democracy and Technology. Website blackouts and hashtags won't reach this audience. Instead, we need to explain how digital liberties fit into the broader ecosystem of ideas.

I issue this challenge not as an expert in digital liberties, law, or technology, but as an audio producer. I spend my time interviewing Americans and following our intellectual trends for a project called The Conversation. The project is an odd mixture of documentary, oral history, philosophy seminar, and confession booth—essentially a series of long, unstructured, and interconnected conversations about the future. The Conversation's format has allowed me to ask interviewees about subjects outside of their specialties, see who is talking to whom, and learn what people are concerned about.

Equally interesting, I've learned what people are not concerned about. Of fifty-five interviewees, only James Bamford addressed digital liberties, and I had invited him to join The Conversation for exactly that reason. A few, like media theorist Douglas Rushkoff and biohacker Tim Cannon, were well-versed in questions of privacy and cyber-security but, because of time constraints or priorities, did not weave them into our conversations. Elsewhere, digital liberties were invisible, even when civil liberties or other aspects of the internet (like social networking) were on the table. The isolation of digital liberties was accentuated by the dense web of connections between other topics: environmentalists, economists, lawyers, scientists, artists, and theologians all seemed to have some working knowledge of each other's fields and concerns.

The Conversation isn't a perfect barometer of American thought, but all of the interviewees are thoughtful, curious, informed, and engaged in conversations about the future. In other words, they are the very sort of people who should be aware of digital liberties. But if a core-sample of our most versatile thinkers don't know about what is at stake, how much can we expect from the casually engaged citizen?

It is worth asking why digital liberties are invisible to so many Americans. Are they dauntingly hard to understand, the perfect combination of technical and legal esoterica? Or do they appear to lack the existential bite of climate change or an economic collapse? Are we so fearful of foreign hackers that we would trade our privacy for the promise of security? Perhaps we take digital liberties for granted or, worse, think they're a lost cause.

We know digital liberties are not a lost cause, but our situation is precarious and there are many legislative battles to come. CISPA could die in the Senate, but its successors will continue to stagger towards us like zombies. To stop these bills at their source and achieve a representative, fair, and genuinely secure future, we have to seek natural allies outside of the tech and civil liberties communities. Few issues could generate a more powerful coalition, but the burden falls upon us to show how digital liberties affect everyone, from the environmental activist to the apolitical suburbanite, the performance artist to the research scientist. Making these connections will be a challenge of language and framing, but it is a challenge we can meet—and if we want to push digital liberties into the big conversation, we need to start now. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/22/lets-bring-digital-liberties.html/feed 2 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/08/sloppy-statistics-do-50-of-a.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/08/sloppy-statistics-do-50-of-a.html#comments Fri, 08 Mar 2013 18:52:45 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=217505

Jill Filipovic wrote an opinion column for The Guardian yesterday, arguing against the practice of women taking their husbands' names when they get married. It ended up linked on Jezebel and found its way to my Facebook feed where one particular statistic caught my eye. Filipovic claimed that 50% of Americans think a women should be legally required to take her husband's name.

First, some quick clarification of my biases here. Although I write under a hyphenate, I never have legally changed my name. I've never had a desire to do so. In my private life, I'm just Maggie Koerth and always will be. That said, I personally take issue with the implication at the center of Filipovic's article — that women shouldn't change their names and that to do so makes you a bad feminist. For me, this is one of those personal decisions where I'm like, whatever. Make your own choice. Just because I don't get it doesn't mean you're wrong.

But just like I take objection to being all judgey about personal choices, I also take objection to legally mandating personal choices, and I was kind of blown away by the idea that 50% of my fellow Americans think my last name should be illegal.

So I looked into that statistic. And then I got really annoyed.

First off, Filipovic doesn't cite a source for that stat. Some of her other numbers — specifically, that 10% of Americans think that keeping your name means you aren't dedicated to your marriage — are cited, with a link to an Atlantic Wire article that links to a Livescience piece about a survey of a couple hundred students at a small Midwestern college. That study, itself, wasn't actually meant to tell you what the American public thinks as a whole. It was meant to compare changing attitudes between 1990 and 2006 in a place that was specifically chosen because it was likely to be fairly conservative. It was specifically meant to contrast with previous research that had overly focused on the choices and attitudes of upper-income East Coasters. In other words, the data doesn't say what Filipovic says it does.

The 50% statistic comes from a 2011 paper, published in the journal Gender & Society. The whole PDF is online, if you want to read it.

In that survey, 22.3% of respondents strongly agreed with the question, "In the past, some states legally required a woman to change her name to her husband’s name. Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree that this was a good idea?" Another 27.6% somewhat agreed. And that adds up to 49.9%.

But it doesn't tell the full story.

First off, this was a survey of a little more than 800 people, almost half of whom were from Indiana. They were randomly chosen — so that's better than, say, a survey of college students — but it's still a far cry from saying, "This is what half of all Americans believe."

Second, there's a difference between "strongly agree" and "somewhat agree". Just like there's a difference between "somewhat disagree" and "strongly disagree". If you've ever taken a survey where those were your only choices, you know that it's often difficult to fit your actual beliefs into the boxes. Although the authors did ask follow-up questions, the paper doesn't discuss them in this particular context, so it's hard to say exactly what the people answering "somewhat agree" actually meant to say. There is some evidence in the paper, though, that what was really being expressed here was a belief in the rightness of families sharing an identity. On another question, "It's okay for a man to take his wife's name when he marries," a full 53.5% either agreed or strongly agreed. (Although some of those people seemed to agree with the idea in a way that suggested they found it unlikely to actually happen.) And the authors of the paper even ended up connecting both these responses to strong "collectivist" or "individualist" ideas about marriage and family.

Finally, while there were certainly people surveyed who thought women should change their names because of religious ideology or what many of us would probably consider outdated notions of who in the relationship "belongs" to whom, what respondents thought about name changes didn't necessarily reflect what they thought about female equality. Sixty-seven percent of these people disagreed with the idea of strict "man as breadwinner, woman in the home" gender roles. Eighty-two percent thought that working mothers could have just as good of a relationship with their children as stay-at-home moms. And 80% disagreed with the idea that it was more important for a woman to support her husband's career and goals than her own.

Oh, and it's also worth noting that the answers on name-change questions split much more obviously along cultural lines — race, education level, income, where you live in the country — than did the answers to the questions on gender roles, which were much more uniform. Essentially, there's some evidence here that what you think about name changes has more to do with the cultural expectations you live with than it does with what you actually think about women.

All of that kind of serves to undermine, rather than support, Filipovic's position. The survey doesn't tell us what all Americans believe. But it does tell us that it's perfectly possible to feel uncomfortable with the idea of a woman not changing her name upon marriage and still feel pretty comfortable with the idea that women are people. As a feminist, it's that latter idea I actually care about.

So why does this bother me so much?

Here's the thing. I grew up in a fairly conservative and religious culture, listening to Christian radio and hearing all sorts of "outrageous" news about how liberals were oppressing people and trying to take away our ability to choose our own way of life.

As a teenager and young adult, I started looking into those claims more closely and found that the vast majority weren't true. These situations and statistics weren't ever just made up out of whole cloth, but they were deeply misrepresented and contorted in order to support a pre-determined thesis. The closer you looked at what actually happened, what had actually been said, how people surveyed had actually responded, the more the intended sense of outrage and oppression vanished in a puff of logic.

That experience made me a skeptic. It also made me feel pretty damn betrayed and used.

Today, I'd classify myself as fairly liberal. But it still makes me angry when people misuse, misconstrue, and misrepresent information in order to manipulate me into feeling oppressed and outraged. It still pisses me off when all I have to do is spend 15 minutes reading in order to easily figure out that "those people" are not actually out to get me. And I don't really care whether it's "my side" or "their side" doing it. Either way, it makes me angry.

Half the people I meet in my daily life do not want to take away my right to choose my own last name. (Or, at least, there's no evidence of that here.) Whether or not you change your last name — and whether or not you think married women should change their last name — is not the strongest predictor of what you think about women's equality. (At least, that doesn't seem to be the case according to this survey.)

If Jill Filipovic thinks women should keep their own last names, well, great. I enjoy keeping mine. But she should be able to make that point without trying to scare people and without trying to misrepresent what a name change does and doesn't mean about our personal beliefs.

Image: marriage license, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from sadsnaps's photostream

So, when I read opinion pieces last week criticizing both the man and the organization, I was annoyed to see pundits who do not have cancer slamming Livestrong for not spending money on "finding a cure," and alleging that the organization falsely claimed it was doing just that. Research for "the cure" matters, but it's not all that matters to those of us who may or may not live to see "the cure." I didn't get this before. Now I do. And I'm not just talking about "awareness," a term I loathe. It's this: Navigating the nightmare of treatment, medical bills, and the wreckage cancer makes of relationships and our professional lives—this is the stuff that actually matters more to us, in day-to-day terms. Fighting the disease on behalf of future victims is important. But so is helping the people who have the disease, right now.

Jody Schoger (blog) is a writer, cancer survivor, and advocate for people with cancer. I met her through Twitter, and she has become an important part of my personal cancer support circle.

Jody and I were trading emails about a recent Bob Lefsetz rant. That piece referenced an Outside Magazine article by Bill Gifford. Jody is a longtime supporter of Livestrong (her Twitter avatar reflects this!), so I invited her to share her views on the matter here on Boing Boing.

Jody writes:

It’s easy to take pot shots at cancer organizations when you’ve never worn the shoes of a cancer patient or walked alongside one.

It’s easy to criticize when you’ve never had chemo pumping into a vein in your chest or rushed a parent on oxygen into an emergency room for breakthrough pain.

Cancer survivors can read between the lines and read well they do. They know what counts and what to discount. There’s something about anthracylate-based chemotherapy that somehow amps up your internal bullshit detector.

Mine went off like clockwork yesterday when a friend shared an email attacking Lance Armstrong and the organization he founded, Livestrong. In cancer advocacy you can rarely, if ever, change anyone’s mind when an opinion is well entrenched. You can only grow the support of others who share your vision. This person believes what he does about Lance. That is that. But when the snarly-snark verbage extends to Livestrong, and cynicism starts to mar the foundation’s work, I start writing.

I want to be clear about Livestrong. The organization was never about cancer research, even though it did fund some testicular cancer projects when it was first established. Research into specific cancer treatments (potential cures) has never been its thrust. That has always, always been clear to me as a cancer survivor. No one at Livestrong, or anything in their material, ever suggested otherwise. Livestrong works to support those diagnosed with cancer and those who love them. This is a huge distinction.

Livestrong’s work is about survivorship, the science of survivorship (yes, there is one) and everything related to the topic. If reporters and prestigious news organizations, from Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” to the NYTimes, have chosen to use the phrase “cancer research” to describe Livestrong’s work then their paraphrasing is truly incorrect.

This happens in journalism. Sentences are cut. You must be brief. Sometimes accuracy suffers.

What is essential to understand about Livestrong is some understanding of cancer and the role of nonprofits. Livestrong was the first organization to transform the word “survivorship” into an essential component of cancer care. Even though the word itself was was defined by the National Coalition on Cancer Survivorship in l986 it was Livestrong that brought the concept to life. Through the celebrity of Lance Armstrong, Livestrong itself, and the uncanny ability of its staff to understand the global reach of social media, an entirely new group of people “affected by cancer” have not only been helped by the organization but even have been transformed by the process. Livestrong understood community long before community was cool.

All anyone needs to do for a handle on the organization, and who it helps, is log on Twitter and search @livestrong #livestrong or @livestrongCEO.

I was not directly “helped” by Livestrong services, but there are something like 2.5 million who have been directly served, either through their call-in information line, survivorship planning tools, alliance of young adult cancer organizations, and now, and an on-site patient navigation service (walk-in, for underserved and those without insurance), information classes and webinars. Like many reputable cancer nonprofits, Livestrong frequently partners with other groups to bring essential news from the cancer arena directly to its stakeholders, from oncologists to survivors. You’ll see the organization at all important conferences ranging from reaching the medically underserved to NCI’s biannual survivorship research conference. If it’s about survivorship Livestrong will be there.

I encourage anyone traveling through Austin to stop at Livestrong headquarters to see what congruence actually looks like in real life. Nonprofit work is not well compensated and it’s frequently thankless, though it’s tough to find a place where the employees are as committed to mission as they are at Livestrong. There, hope, not cynicism, rules the day. The desire to empower another along the cancer continuum has always been at the heart of their mission, and that most human wish, making it better for someone else, guides them to this day. In a material world of bottom lines and dollar signs that matters. Big time.

Jody Schoger is a freelance writer and co-founder of #BCSM, the breast cancer social media chat which takes place Mondays at 6pm Pacific time on Twitter. People with breast cancer, and their caregivers and loved ones, can participate by following the #bcsm hashtag. Jody blogs at womenwcancer.blogspot.com and is a 14-year breast cancer survivor.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/28/jody-schoger-livestrong-arms.html/feed 22 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/28/a-message-for-the-media-from-a.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/28/a-message-for-the-media-from-a.html#comments Sat, 28 Jul 2012 16:22:55 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=173673

"Student, writer, and self-identifying geek" A.J. Focht, writing on a Suicide Girls blog, talks about the experience of surviving the recent mass shooting at "The Dark Knight Rises" premiere at an Aurora, CO movie theater— and, how a friend and fellow survivor was hounded by content-hungry television producers:

With only a small charge left in her phone one of the members of my group thought it best to send out a blanket distress beacon via Twitter so she could conserve her battery to call her parents and a ride home. Caitlin tweeted from her account @dingos8myTARDIS informing her family and friends of the chaos and that she was physically alright. Her tweets were some of the first online, and within the hour BBC, CNN, and others were broadcasting her messages on the news. The hundreds of media outlets that contacted her throughout the night were unexpected, but we could understand they were just trying to do their jobs. Once we had been released, Caitlin, not wanting the mass media attention, released these tweets:

dingos8myTARDIS: To the media: I was tweeting earlier because my phone was on 10%batt & I needed to let people know I was okay. I am (in) no shape for interviews.

dingos8myTARDIS: To rephrase: I have no interest in interviews at this time. I was merely sending an emergency beacon.

Despite her requesting to be left alone, she was perpetually bombarded by yet more media requests via Twitter from outlets including FOX News and The Huffington Post. As if the mass attention on Twitter was not enough, other news networks took it upon themselves to get her phone number and start calling her.

While we all sat anxiously awaiting information on the MIA member of our group, phones and email notifications continued go off till all our phones had died. Before even our families and friends had a chance to check in, the overzealous reporters were all but knocking on our doors. Right after our group finally learned our missing member didn't make it, Caitlin's phone began to ring; It was the Today Show on the other end requesting an interview about him. She told them off and asked them not to contact her again. However, her pleas didn't stop them from calling again the next morning, still trying to get an interview.

Focht is among those who wish that media would "stop showing" images of the suspected killer. There's a balance for news outlets to strike in cases like this; there's informing, and there's exploitation. For the record, we at Boing Boing have refrained from publishing the image, because there's no real need for us to.

Read the rest: "Back Row Perspective Part 1: An Aurora Theater Survivor’s Message to the Media."

There's a second piece, well worth reading, with words for the politicians who seek to capitalize on the massacre.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/28/a-message-for-the-media-from-a.html/feed 20