New Orleans

The Judge’s decision is chilling to all of us, as reported in the Times:

“Judge Liam O’Grady, from the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., wrote in his opinion that “the information sought was clearly material to establishing key facts related to an ongoing investigation and would have assisted a grand jury in conducting an inquiry into the particular matters under investigation.”

The judge said that because Twitter users “voluntarily” turned over the Internet protocol addresses when they signed up for an account, they relinquished an expectation of privacy.

“Petitioners knew or should have known that their I.P. information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy,” Judge O’Grady wrote.”

Needless to say, I added the emphasis above.  I would love to see a survey determine how many people thought when they signed up for Twitter that they were “voluntarily” surrendering all future privacy or protection from investigation of any of their speech and electronic communication via email.  I bet we could squeeze them all in a phone booth.  It would probably be easier to find a working phone booth in fact than these few folks!   They “knew or should have known…they had a lessen expectation of privacy….”  What can you say, but “WOW!”

Add that to the news in the same edition that Facebook is now following Google in submitting to 20 years of FCC inspection (though I’m not sure that means much these days?) for breaches of privacy rules and lax privacy controls as they troll and mine our data, and you start to realize that essentially everything we do – at least electronically – is open season for governmental and commercial interests.

Wikileaks may have failed in achieving its goal of more transparency in government, but as an indirect result, we as citizens may now be virtually translucent and 100% transparent!

Lafayette

Police and government officials in the UK asked Twitter if they could eliminate this nuisance of using Twitter names that were not real name, so that it would be easier for them to bust people  Twitter luckily in this case demurred.

The Blackberry people with Research in Motion in Waterloo, Canada seemed from these reports to be read to fold as easily as a cheap suit to virtually any government request, which was disconcerting since so many of us are (were?) hanging on as Blackberry users and fans.  Luckily, I don’t use whatever Blackberry Messenger is, but I found myself reaching out to colleagues in Toronto with ACORN Canada pretty damned quickly after reading about their weak knees to make sure that was the case.

The Iranian government is having a bit of fun with this and offered to send a human rights delegation to London to investigate abuses, since the UK had offered to do much the same when they shut down Twitter and Facebook during protests a couple of years ago.  Ha-ha-not!

In San Francisco reputedly a bastion of both freedom and certainly speech, the BART rapid transit system has been stubbornly defending their willingness to cut off all access to the internet to block protests.  There are now reports on stalking based on pejorative tweets within the Buddhist community in the USA.

Do we really want this?  I don’t think so, and I say this as someone who has gotten a good share of flaming, threatening, and violently abusive messages over the internet transom at different times.  I worry less about those crazies than the ones hiding behind doors, if you know what I mean.  As long as there is a Delete button, I’m able to weather all of those storms with“sticks and stones” vigilance while letting the “words” roll off, like water off a duck’s back.

We have to have the ability to organize and associate, even when others go over the line.  It’s easier to say we’re sorry in such circumstances, than to imagine the lack of freedom involved in having to ask permission to be able to speak to ourselves much less our governments about our interests and issues.

New Orleans

Factoids include:

• Verizon reported to Congress in 2007 that it received 90,000 such requests per year. [Note to self:  thank god I don’t have a Verizon service on a phone!]
• Google has an accessible tool for all countries that shows it received 4200 requests in the first half of 2010.
• Facebook told Newsweek they get 10 to 20 requests per day, so let’s say 5000 per year or so.
• “Last year … the Justice Department argued in court that cellphone users had given up the expectation of privacy about their location by voluntarily giving that information to carriers.”  [Of course there is no way to obtain a cellphone without giving your address that I know of!]
• “In April, it [DOJ] argued in a federal court in Colorado that it ought to have access to some e-mails without a search warrant.”  [April 2010 under AG Eric Holder and the Obama Administration]
• “…the government does not notify people that they are searching their online information or prove probable cause, and if the government violates the law in obtaining information, defendants are generally unable to exclude that evidence from a trial…”  This information is courtesy of Professor Susan Freiwald, an expert in electronic surveillance law from the University of San Francisco School of Law!
• “…law enforcement officials do not need a warrant to read e-mail messages that are more than 180 days old.”  [OMG! WTF!!!]
• There have been no amendments to privacy laws on communications since 1986 before the dominance of the internet.

From reading the paper everyone makes sure that they say that DOJ and others are just “doing their jobs” trying to catch criminals and stuff.  The companies (other than our Twitter heroes of the day!) were silent other than saying that their privacy rules in the fine print say that they respond to proper legal requests.  It’s very clear nobody out there is doing anything to protect the freedom of speech and privacy protections of your run-of-the-mill Americans, who are the ones most likely to not use protected accounts or servers, but instead rely on the free systems provided by Google and the like.

This is scary stuff.  When the requests start coming in the tens of thousands and the totals start breaking hundreds of thousands who can be sure anymore that you are not in that number?

If you want to know my opinion on this, call me or send me a letter!

Hamilton

Let me share just one piece of the richness of the exchange initiated by a caution and comment by one participant, Jesse Hirsh, when we wandered into the area of whether or not new social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter might play a role in popular education for members and leadership development in mass-based organizations.  Hirsh had seen a poster for the discussion and popped in to see what it was all about, but after introducing himself as someone who worried and thought about these issues, as many of us do, indicated his skepticism about the tools.  He started making his point by noting how difficult it had been for organizations and activists to get access to the modern flashpoints of concentration like malls.  We laughed at the times we had all tried, been turned away, arrested, and what not.  He then observed sharply that “Twitter is a mall!”

Without explaining he had made his point.  Twitter is a huge mass of blurbs and belches of words and information streamed along a vast aisle where we walk and run or turn away in dismay unable to figure out whether to go in and shop or keep walking and gawking.  Learning to use such a tool to actually organize poses challenges and even more so figuring out a way to jump into the torrent and vastness of this mall-like world is something that none of us have grasped successfully.

Worse, we have not even really figured out how to make it a two-way or multiple communication tool.  Comments on Facebook at least are a sign of life in the universe.  The twitter-verse is still mainly small shouts without much recognition of what is being heard much less how to move forward and participate.

Note to self:  much work to be done!

In New Orleans we have another phenomenon that has relaxed a city that is frankly known for being laid back and relaxed.  Mayor C. Ray Nagin is in his 2^nd or 3^rd day of swine flu quarantine in Shanghai, China, and the proud citizens of New Orleans are pretty comfortable in not feeling we are missing much of anything.  Sympathy cards are being sent, but it turns out that they are going to the city officials in Shanghai.  There’s talk about a prisoner exchange.  We will have to follow this, but at a distance of course.

A report from BBC news on a Harvard study finds that despite the huge recent growth on Twitter, most tweet-peeps are sending out one message and then letting it go at that.  Their stats say that 10% of the peeps are pushing out 90% of the tweets.  Turns out those other social networking sites, like Facebook, have 10% putting out 30% of the content.  The study believes that Twitter is more of a “communications” tool than a social networking tool.  Men are less likely to following women, than the other way around even though more than half of tweet-peeps are women, they say because there are no pictures and stuff.  10M is now the tweet-peep number.  I find this all very interesting, though right this minute I might have trouble convincing you, so I’m going to just put this out there and be back at you later on this.