In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook
betabeat.com"Banks aren’t the problem, he said; the users tempting banks with their Twitter and Facebook postings are the problem.
As are reporters who write about privacy issues with social media without first closing their Facebook accounts."
You know he's right, don't you?
Well I can see how he's right about users tempting banks, but why would reporters who write about this need to close their Facebook accounts?
Did you read the article?
Because it would be like an American who complains for the violence of Mexico but buys illegal marijuana and cocaine. He is the cause; but all he does is hoping that others will stop the violence some other way rather than he quitting drugs.
But he's not complaining, just reporting. If I'm fat, is it immoral for me to say that obesity is a problem?
Frankly, I find his position ridiculous. He's essentially saying journalists have to be these beacons of virtue above everyone else if they want to report on bad things that are happening.
It's fine to say that obesity is a problem, but it's hypocritical to berate Burger King for contributing to obesity when you eat there three nights a week. It's even worse when you excuse it, saying that your circumstances are special somehow.
The reporter, similarly, is looking for fuel to blame the banks for their evil practices, when she herself is contributing to the flow of evil information.
But so what if it is hypocritical? Is it any less true? Why should her personal life be in any way relevant?
I can understand his point about users being the problem - although that doesn't in any way excuse the banks - but criticizing her specifically is completely ridiculous.
It reminds me of how I hear people in my country commenting to each other about how nice is that politician because he rides a scooter instead of a Mercedes, while he and his party continue to sell out the country to big companies.
It's an irrelevant, stupid detail that detract from his position and makes him seem like an unreasonable person.
He's making the point that she just doesn't GET it. He took a confrontational tone specifically to get her to spit out excuses for her continued use of Facebook.
His point is not just that users are contributing to the problem, but that users REFUSE to believe they're contributing to the problem. It's the whole "a little bit can't hurt" excuse, which is why he used littering as a metaphor.
In the end it doesn't matter what she writes about the evil banks. It's impossible to stop them from using information YOU PUBLISHED against you. If you don't publish it, it can't be used against you. His further rant is against your friends publishing information about you that can be used against you.
So yeah, she can write her story about banks denying loans based on photos of your frequent trips to Vegas, but it's not going to help anybody because people will focus on the evil banks, and will still fail to grasp the concept of NOT PUBLISHING PERSONAL INFORMATION.
That metaphor is wrong in an intriguing and illustrative way. The problem with drugs is that they're illegal, so criminals have a monopoly. If they were legal, that part of the problem would largely disappear. Granted, it would be replaced with other problems, and there are those who believe (I'm not one of them) that the resulting problems would be worse... but the fact remains.
How would I recast your metaphor to be more like what Moglen is saying? No idea, since I think he's a crackpot and he's quite wrong, but it was fun thinking about it.
i can't see the logic in your reasoning here.
just because legalisation would improve the situation doesn't mean that people who continue to buy drugs illegaly are not also responsible for the problems in mexico.
a problem can have multiple causes, and multiple solutions. but that does not mean that you can choose one solution as the "correct" one and discard all the others.
the typical american who buys drugs cannot change the law, but they can stop buying drugs and that would reduce the problems. so if they choose not to do so then they have some moral responsibility for the violence in mexico. that is not removed because there are other possible solutions.
I don't buy that line of argument at all. You're claiming that if you can establish some line of cause and effect then anyone in that chain must take moral responsibility for the outcome.
That's like saying an author who writes something that offends Islamists is responsible for any violence perpetrated on them, since they had the choice of not publishing.
The moral responsibility for acts of violence lies with those that commit them, or incite others to do so.
Criminals will be criminals. They are responsible for their own actions. But if you're contributing to their coffers, you're only encouraging them. You don't even have to frame this in terms of morality. They're doing something you don't like. Do you want to help them or hinder them? Sometimes hindering them involves denying yourself. This is how boycotts work.
Or like a reporter writing about global warming while owning an automobile... Wait a second...
So someone needs to become a vegan in order to write about animal cruelty?
Sometimes it's not so clear that things are so black and white. Just because I write about an issue doesn't mean I will first have to get on one side of it.
However, if you do say that you take sides, take sides.
You don't need to be a vegan to write about animal cruelty, but you'd better be one to complain about it. (Assuming for the sake of the argument that eating meat causes animal cruelty.)
So, while you don't have to quit Facebook to write about its effects on privacy, you'd better quit if you want to complain about those effects.
(EDIT: I retract: other comments point out that acknowledging you contribute to a problem you complain about is sufficient for not being a hypocrite. While it would be better to just stop contributing to that problem, unilaterally deciding that often exposes you to the No Network Effect. So, you can't really be expected to stop first. That first-mover disadvantage is sometimes a deal-breaker. We need some coordination to avoid it. But it is important to acknowledge you're part of the problem. For if you don't, there is no hope.)
Eben Moglen, libertarian. Amazing to hear him say something so clean and simple. The only regulation that works is people voting with their wallets.What you want to know is that somewhere there’s a regulator who might stop the bank. But you don’t want to hear that the regulator we really need to call upon is you, yourself.People need to take more responsibility for themselves and stop asking the Government to solve all their problems. They are only inviting trouble down the road as the Government gets bigger, more controlling and has more power over the population. All of that makes it harder to change the status quo, too.
You know your solution is garbage when it starts with "the first thing we need to do is change fundamental human behaviour"
You know he's right, don't you?
He's half right. Banks are also the problem.
Banks are only a problem because this opportunity is available to them. Of course, that doesn't absolve them of responsibility for their actions, but it wouldn't even be an issue if users weren't actively encouraging and tempting them with such juicy information that would help their bottom line in risk assessment.
To him, the bank's position is obvious and unworthy of mention. The lack of PERSONAL responsibility is what leads to these kinds of disasters, and that's what people just don't get. Much like people don't want to feel responsible for the greed leading to and maintaining the crazy tort law system in the USA today.
Of course you got robbed, you left your doors unlocked!
"Of course you got robbed, you left your doors unlocked!"
Yes! Exactly that! Except in the case of Facebook your negligence hurts your neighbors.
You can use Facebook in a way that doesn't endanger your personal privacy, it can be primarily a consumption platform for the endangered privacy of all of your associates. :)
This is actually entirely untrue given the way that Facebook is set up.
The most insidious thing that Facebook has done, is litter the web with their "Like" buttons. Oh sure, they're not the ones who have put up "Like" buttons around the web, all they've done is insist that websites who do want a "Like" button have to use file assets & scripts from their webserver.
Well, by tracking where the "Like" button gets loaded, they can tell what you've been watching out on the web, even if you don't touch the "Like" button. Loading the button is enough. And on that basis, anyone who's set their pages up to use the "Like" button is informing on you. And in turn, your very use of the web becomes part of Facebook's surveillance.
This is why it is essential for people who are concerned about privacy to use run Firefox and install the RequestPolicy extension. I simply don't whitelist facebook's domains and thus couldn't be tracked even if I had a Facebook account.
This. The only regret I had about switching from Firefox to Chromium is the lack of RequestPolicy. Apparently the hooks aren't there, as with AdBlockPlus.
In fact, just thinking about it now ... why did I switch? I should try Firefox again.
Thanks for mentioning RequestPolicy. Exactly what I was looking for.
There are a variety of extensions that cut out "Like" buttons. This is part of "using Facebook" in a way that doesn't impede personal privacy.
The article author attempted to weasel himself out with that defence as well, but the nonsense of that argument was one of Moglen's main points. It's not just about you, it's about everyone in your network.
To quote it exactly: "You injure other people today also using social media. You’ve informed on them. You’ve created more records about them. You’ve added to the problems not of yourself but of other people. If it were as simple as just you’re only hurting yourself I wouldn’t bother pointing it out to you. See, that’s the difference, okay? The reason that this all works is that even when you know you’re hurting other people, you’re too selfish to stop. And there are hundreds of millions of people like you. That’s why it works."
As a point of view, fine.
As a qualification for reporting / thinking / writing on the issue -- no.
Moglen is saying that before Betabeat can report, they must agree with him. Which ignores the possibility, remote as it may be, that Eben Moglen could be wrong about something. And, the implications of the example he sets for others.
Respect for freedom of speech is more than insistence on a constitutional norm. It is an attitude of respect for the possibility that you might be wrong even in your strongest beliefs. Such respect is our surest protection against absolutism.
Moblen may think his intransigence adds urgency to his message, and it has gotten him a forum this time. But even so he's deteriorating the culture of free speech and thought, and free-riding on the maintenance of that culture by the maturity of others.
Right, but I disagree. "Everyone in my network" agrees to accept the "information" that I put out as them as a consumer, which is just making known that a relationship between us exists. If I'm not posting any personal information about anyone (including myself) and not tagging anyone in anything, this is the only information one gives to Facebook. I use an alias on Facebook so I am not even directly exposing my identity in their databases and the relationship they record is false, though clearly IP addresses could be used to link the alias to my real identity if a person were interested.
I have long been worried about the implications of friending everyone you know. If you have to go on the run, and everyone you've ever talked to for more than 15 minutes is listed on Facebook, you're not going to have many places to hide. I am "friends" with only a handful of people, mostly close family, which doesn't really expose any new relationships.
The people in your network and their habits might tell more about you than you think. http://www.google.nl/search?q=social+network+graph+analysis .
Not to forget the images tagged with your name ...
Well, reporters who write about privacy issues dont have to agree with mister moglens view, so you cant says it like that.
But unfortunatly I think he might be right... but well back to facebook for me, what's an socialmedia addict to do other than go find the next fix ;)
This article makes me angry, and the groupthink of most the replies I read here supporting Moglen make me angry too.
You know what causes a real ecological disaster?
Washing Machines.
Yes, FUCKING washing machines.
They use too much of one of the worlds rarest resources (clean water), contribute to global warming and pollute the waste water with phosphates.
On the other hand, they have freed up half the worlds workforce from backbreaking manual labor and contributed to society enough that no less than Hans Rosling calls them the greatest invention of the industrial revolution[1]
Facebook allows companies to sell advertising and allows law enforcement to track you.
On the other hand, it allows quicker and easier communication than ever before, and contributed to the Arab Spring to the point where the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are known as "the Facebook revolutions" [2][3]
Convenience has costs, but who is Moglen to judge if those costs are worthwhile for everyone?
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_... (watch this video - it's really good)
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/so-was...
[3] http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38379/
Edit: To all those claiming this is a strawman - it's not. Moglen failed to point out the benefits of social networking, and I'm using an analogy to show that most things have costs and benefits. Please don't get distracted into an argument about that.
I'd love to see people try and explain how Moglen is right about Twitter (which has much lower privacy costs than Facebook).
Wow, that's quite a straw man you have there.
Washing machines are tools. Facebook is a platform. If Mr. Moglen was attacking the postal service or mobile phones, you'd have a point. But he is talking about a centralized service that gives unprecedented power to the ones in control of the service and the jurisdictions it falls under.
I can stand in front of my washing machine and say, with total clarity, that I'm the only one in charge of it at that time. If I had a facebook account, there would be no such thing. And that doesn't even get to Mr. Moglens deeper point - that usage of facebook spreads the problem into your social graph.
As for the "facebook revolutions" you cite - that's quite a rosy picture you paint there. In reality, those services were used to track protesters and there have been coordinating handouts urging participants not to use social media for that reason. Furthermore, after these 'revolutions' have cooled down, it's still unclear what we will end up with. I would conclude that at most, those services served as catalysts and their convenience came at quite a cost indeed. But it's not Arab Youth + Facebook = Functioning Democracy.
My response is far from a strawman.
Moglen pointed out all the problems with Facebook (and Twitter) without showing the benefits.
So you say it's not a straw man. Maybe you have some more words left to explain yourself on that point?
He was asked for the problems. It's not his job to advertise social networking services.
One of the big figures of Software Freedom is asked about the drawbacks of social networking services and you start your argument with saying that he doesn't talk about the benefits. And then you compare the drawbacks to the ecological damage of washing machines (with the recent advances in efficiency, nobody is making as strong a point against them as you are trying to force). Nope, sorry, that's a straw man. And a very weak one at that.
I think if anything, having those three big issues out there (privacy violations, tracking by government, careless spreading of the two into the social graph), Mr. Moglen would be correct to say that the cost is already too great to be weighed against with any benefits.
A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.
I don't think I misrepresented Moglen's position in anyway. He only spoke about the negative aspects of social networking, but nothing about the conveniences. Argument by analogy isn't a strawman.
I agree that recent advances in washing machines have improved them, and that the environmental impact of them is far outweighed by the convenience.
Indeed, that is my point.
For me - and many others - the convenience and advantages of social networking outweighs the costs. I make that decision in full knowledge of those costs, and I think it is fair to point out that there are advantages as well as costs.
Mr. Moglen is well known to speak against and was asked to comment on the drawbacks of social networks. You are attacking a straw man if you complain that he isn't talking about the benefits.
You are picking a discussion that Mr. Moglen was not having.Person A: Sunny days are good. Person B: If all days were sunny, we'd never have rain, and without rain, we'd have famine and death. Therefore, you are wrong. Problem: B has misrepresented A's claim by falsely suggesting that A claimed that only sunny days are good, and then B refuted the misrepresented version of the claim, rather than refuting A's original assertion.The benefits of social networks are self evident - they enable communication in an unprecedented way. His argument is that the drawbacks he is talking about are unnecessary and dangerous and that some of the technology may seem useful, but is actually just thinly disguised non-social behavior ("keeping up" with somebody may border on "stalking"). You have not addressed any of his arguments while complaining that he didn't address points that nobody was discussing to begin with.
So yes, one more, final, time - your argument is a straw man.
Wait - so I'm not allowed to attack omissions in his arguments?
That's like saying when Rick Santorum points out what he sees as problems with gay marriage no one can point out the benefits because it is a strawman.
That's ridiculous!
Alright, this is moving quickly into troll territory. One final reply:
The premise of the article we are discussing was this:
"My editor wanted a quote from a privacy advocate, so I immediately thought of Eben “Spying for Free” Moglen, a militant digital privacy advocate, founder of the uber-secure personal server FreedomBox, and the inspiration for the decentralized social network Diaspora."
Eben Moglen was asked for his statement as a privacy advocate. There is nothing to be said about facebook in terms of being a privacy advocate. Except for maybe "sure wish they'd try some!". And that's the end of your argument right there.
Eben Moglen argues that facebook is bad because of the gross privacy violations it institutionalized. His argument is perfectly sound and coherent and doesn't need any forced "balancing" to be valid. He is not omitting any facts to make his argument.
You are welcome to argue against it, but you have instead chosen to act as though his argument is moot because he didn't make yours. That's not how arguments work.
Your 'Rick Santorum' point boggles the mind. Rick Santorum is not attacking a straw man, he is stating his honest, if misguided, beliefs. You could now attack a point completely unrelated or only superficially related to his rants about gay marriage and that would be a straw man. You could also, however, argue for or against his points with your own argument.
Rick Santorum is not attacking a straw man, he is stating his honest, if misguided, beliefs.
Moglen is not attacking a straw man, he is stating his honest, if misguided, beliefs.
You could now attack a point completely unrelated or only superficially related to his rants about gay marriage and that would be a straw man. You could also, however, argue for or against his points with your own argument.
This is true. Additionally, one could point out the good things about gay marriage. That's a perfectly reasonable approach.
Specific to the Moglen argument, it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to argue against his points because I agree with a lot of them. However, I think the benefits are more important and I won't sit still and let only one side of the argument be presented.
How would you suggest I should present benefits of social networking without you calling me a troll or saying my argument is a strawman?
Moglen is not attacking a straw man, he is stating his honest, if misguided, beliefs.
Seems like you finally got it! (Although I disagree that his beliefs are misguided.)
Moglen was stating his beliefs because he was asked for them. You created a straw man to argue against them.
You could have just said "I agree with Mr. Moglen on points X-Z, but I would like to weigh them against the benefits of social networks" - and then do that. That would clearly mark that you are opening your own line of reasoning instead of trying to forcibly claim them on the OP. Then, we could have that discussion together.
You must understand - I did not take exception to you trying to start that discussion, but it's a cheap shot to say that Mr. Moglen was the one who should have done so. It's perfectly reasonable to stand up for your own arguments without forcing them on another person. It was a particularly cheap shot because you did not offer anything in line with your argument except the washing machine argument which I found very weak for the reasons I mentioned earlier.
You could have just said "I agree with Mr. Moglen on points X-Z, but I would like to weigh them against the benefits of social networks" - and then do that. That would clearly mark that you are opening your own line of reasoning instead of trying to forcibly claim them on the OP. Then, we could have that discussion together.
There are an infinite number of ways I could have responded, but I deliberately chose to use an analogy, and to express my anger about how Moglen presented a 100% negative view. I understand why you say that he didn't need to express anything positive about social networking, and I disagree. To me, one should always attempt to give an honest view on any subject. Moglen's 100% negative views are either wrong or dishonest. That make me angry.
Show me where I misrepresented Moglen's views in anyway. That's the definition of a strawman, and I object most strongly to your claim that I used one. Nor do I troll, take cheap shots or resort to personal attacks.
Eben Moglen was asked "What's so bad about Social Networks?". Then he talked about what he thinks is bad about social networks.
You say: "His argument isn't valid because he isn't talking about what is good about social networks".
Instead of addressing what he did talk about, you chose to talk about something he did not. And that's the definition of a straw man:
to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition
"What is bad about social networks?" != "Can you provide a balanced picture of social networks?"
The fact that you have not given a single word to actually discussing his statements (Oh, because you agree? Hmm...), except defending your initial argument (based on the olde and extremely valuable "because!"), actually not even responding to my critique of that argument, shows that you are not interested in the discussion, you are only interested in being right. You've made a mistake in your understanding of the article and made a bad argument against it that I and others clearly saw for what it is. Get over it.
Actually, I don't know why I bother anymore. If what I (and a couple other commenters) have said before doesn't convince you, I reckon nothing will.
Probably under an article talking about some specific benefit of social networking. Hopefully no one will be enraged by your only analyzing the truth of that benefit there, rather than recounting everything terrible about social networking that went unmentioned.
When you respond to a Santorum argument about the terrible things about gay marriage with a list of good things about gay marriage, you have accepted his arguments as true, and started a new discussion.
Except that Moglen is effectively saying that it would be good if every day was a sunny day. He's taking the absolutist position that social networks are always bad and anyone who uses them is a part of the problem.
'effectively' being the key word here. You are estimating this to be his position, but it is not.
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1349229 "Diaspora team takes on Eben Moglen as informal advisor"
A nuanced position is exactly my point.
In this article he only presents the negatives.
> Maybe you have some more words left to explain yourself on that point?
You could make the same point more civilly.
I apologize for being slightly uncivil (although I saw it as stating my question deliberately terse), but "it's not a straw man" isn't really a good response against a claim that your argument is a straw man, don't you think?
Apology accepted. I do agree that "it's not a straw man" is a weak rebuttal, but that's more reason to keep the tone civil-- so that people will argue with you sensibly.
I agree that washing machines are great. I've lived in places without them for years at a time. It's doable but hand washing is time consuming and not fun. Phosphates are a separate issue. There is phosphate free detergent. There are low water use machines. It's being solved.
Let's look at another example of convenience that isn't being solved very well: my car.
My car is incredibly convenient. Often I'd rather drive than take the bus. And you can't beat it for hauling stuff around. Better than my bike, for sure.
Cars have freed up the world's pedestrians from footwrecking walking!
But there's a lot going on here. Cars, roads, the death of public transport (cf trolly cars in LA http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/la/historic/redcars/ ). America, at least, was sold on the car by businesses that had a vested interest in seeing the car succeed. Cities dismantled public transport systems at the behest of these same powerful lobbies.
And today our cities are outgrowths of the personal motor vehicle. (Electric cars don't solve anything here, it's still energy being produced).
While I think that you make a point worth considering, I believe that we should error on the side of suspicion when utility, or less nobly, convenience, comes at an initially small cost and is heavily promoted by... whom, exactly?
I worked in advertising long enough to look squarely to the data-finance industrial complex (tongue only partially in cheek when using that phrase) whenever personal information is involved.
Convenience has costs. Moglen may not have the right to judge but we need noisy people that remind us there is a problem.
Moglen may not have the right to judge but we need noisy people that remind us there is a problem
On HN we sometime need people to remind us there are benefits, too.
Firstly, strawman.
Secondly, the idea of wasting the "worlds rarest resources" is completely dependent on where you live. I, for example, live in a part of the world with a huge excess of clean water, and there is absolutely no sustainable way to export our water to those parts of the world that have a shortage of clean water. Building pipe lines to those parts of the world would be ridiculous expensive. Transporting it by truck would pollute excessively.
So if we didn't use this clean water all of it would just be transported by nature to ground water reservoirs, out in the ocean and get mixed with the salt water or evaporate into the atmosphere.
I won't go into the points about washing machines adding to global warming and pollution of the water, that could very well be true.
Facebook [...] contributed to the Arab Spring to the point where the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are known as "the Facebook revolutions"
They're certainly known as "Facebook revolutions" (or "Twitter uprisings" or whatever) by foreign media organisations looking for a gimmicky hook to hang a story on, but I honestly doubt that regular Tunisians and Egyptians really use that phrase themselves other than as talking heads when dealing with said media organisations.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that most people just call it "last year."
I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him [...] I'm talking on behalf of Egypt. [...] This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook. This revolution started [...] in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I've always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet.
Wael Ghonim: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/11/egypt-facebook-revo...
I don't dispute that Facebook played some part in the revolution, just whether the people whose revolution it was actually call it a Facebook Revolution.
Related anecdatum: I live in an ex-Soviet Republic. It is rare for someone here to actually say "The Foo Revolution"; instead people talk about "the early 90s" or "after independence".
(Also: your quote is taken from an interview with one of those foreign media organisations who had already decided that Facebook was the hook they were going to hang the story on.)
Clean water is not fundamentally a scarce resource. Almost nothing is. The only actually scarce resource, and the one everything depends on, is energy. Given enough energy, we can clean all the water we want and distribute it anywhere we want. Given enough energy, we could recycle everything down to the smallest granule of rare earth metals. We would only get into trouble once we would be using all of the stuff at the same time, but then, given enough energy, we could mine the moon, asteroids, other planets. Given enough energy, everyone would be warm and fed, without any ecological problems, because we could clean all waste and recycle everything.
In the end, it all comes down to energy. If some countries would spend even a fraction of their defense budgets on solar, water, wind or fusion power research, we would be there in a jiffy. We could have had more energy than we could ever use by now. Our progress is much slower than it could be, because energy is kept scarce.
Um, no. You might as well say that scarcity of energy is the only thing between us and free ponies for everyone.
Even if energy were free, there'd still be the question of paying for the facilities to purify the water. The kinds of places where clean water is scarce now tend not to have much money, or much clout, with which to get such facilities built. More likely you'd get wealthy people wasting vaster quantities of clean water, while the poor remained without clean water despite the theoretically easy availability of the required water purification equipment.
That's exactly what I'm saying, with the caveat that it will take time to get to the situation where everyone can turn the energy into free ponies. As you rightly point out, there is infrastructure required to make use of the free energy. However, if you would have free energy, that infrastructure will get much cheaper. The richer will sponsor infrastructure for the poorer, as has started happening more and more. We are slowly but surely succeeding in improving the living conditions of the poorest. The component cost of energy in everything is not to be underestimated. If you could eliminate that, things would drastically change.You might as well say that scarcity of energy is the only thing between us and free ponies for everyone.The energy is there for the picking, but no country or company is trying hard enough. And why should they? What would they gain? That's the problem.
"On the other hand, it allows quicker and easier communication than ever before, and contributed to the Arab Spring to the point where the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are known as "the Facebook revolutions""
From an interview by an 17 year old Tunisian protester when asked how did social media influence the protesters actions:
"Only after we organized and burned down a third of the police stations in less than a day, foreign media asked us about these social media networks. By then it was already to late to use them, they where shut down. We kept burning the remaining police stations."
I'm kind of amazed at some of the completely unsympathetic responses on here and on the original article. There are two distinct issues I see here: 1) whether or not Moglen's tone/attitude was appropriate, and 2) if his arguments were valid. Personally I think he was a bit harsh on her and could have at least expressed his feelings in a more diplomatic manner. She's a journalist calling about a story, not someone on trial. The moralist scolding seemed a bit much.
I also think his premise is a bit extreme... Social Media can be used recklessly, but so can many things. Suddenly people are saying that if your friends are on Facebook then you should get new friends... I must admit this sentiment sounds extremely reactionary and way over the top. We seem to be operating under the assumption that all information shared about another human being is potentially dangerous... Really? I'm pretty sure that most of what gets shared on Facebook is fairly innocuous, if not utterly mundane.
He was harsh. But reporters should have thick skins. And his harsh attitude delivered...
• for her and her site, a full-length story of the call, garnering inlinks and traffic
• for him, a detailed description of his views, totally beyond the original 'quote in a box' form-journalism role they wanted him to play
• for us, a discussion thread seeded by an interesting, strong, contrarian opinion
Why be diplomatic if that would result in none of the above?
I think you're missing his point about privacy, that "everything they share is held by someone who is no friend of theirs… whose goal it is to make a profit selling the ability to control human beings by knowing more about themselves than they know." And, "You injure other people today also using social media. You’ve informed on them. You’ve created more records about them. You’ve added to the problems not of yourself but of other people. If it were as simple as just you’re only hurting yourself I wouldn’t bother pointing it out to you."
The collectors would like you to think the data you're sharing is 'innocuous' and 'mundane' but they have algorithms and statistical confidences that say it isn't.
On the other hand, I think Moglen is hopelessly standing athwart history yelling 'stop' on this issue. Technology would make these behaviors trivial to monitor even if most people opted out (instead of cheerfully opting in). So I tend more towards the David Brin/'Transparent Society' view, that the only workable adaptation will be transparency/accountability and new social mores, because privacy is on its deathbed.
most of what gets shared on Facebook is fairly innocuous, if not utterly mundane.
It usually is, until it isn't. By then, it's too late.
Do you have any examples to back up this statement, other than people getting fired from their jobs for foolishly posting incriminating information online? It seems to me that most of the alarmist reactions to social media are based on completely theoretical "slippery slope" arguments that assume we're heading straight for an Orwellian future. That may be true, but so far I haven't had any of my friends scooped up by the secret police for Facebook-related thought-crimes.
>> Me: I think that’s totally relevant and will definitely put it in. (N.B.: In the end, I did not put this in the story for several reasons, not the least of it was the fact that it was late and over word limit.)
So what ARE the reasons?!?!
I'd like to hear why Adrianne Jeffries didn't include any of Moglen's points in the final article.
Does Adrianne Jeffries really think Moglen's ideas are "totally relevant"? The tone of her article suggests otherwise. She introduces him as a "militant" professor, and the title of her post appears to mock the entire situation.
The telephone exchange is certainly entertaining, but Moglen's points are relevant and I'm disappointed the author didn't include her reasons for omitting them from her article.
The author is referring to another article in her N.B. It's linked in the first paragraph: http://www.betabeat.com/2011/12/13/as-banks-start-nosing-aro...
Her reasons, I think, are as Moglen suggests. She has a false concern for social networking privacy issues that only exists to the extent to which she will not be inconvenienced in any way. She's not willing to indict herself in an article, because her chosen journalistic posture is to present real debates as interesting abstractions rather than as actual moral questions that should have implications on your daily behavior.
You really couldn't be both against apartheid and play Sun City, no matter how much you said you sympathized.
When privacy advocates are as honest as Moglen, they recognize that the biggest problem facing them is not governments or Facebook but those damn, stupid people who keep letting their privacy be invaded. Sure, people will say they want privacy, when you ask them using that loaded word, but time and again when faced with the choice between revealing information and getting some small thing of value, they reveal the information. But underneath the Moglen viewpoint is a huge disconnect: If privacy is about individuals exercising power over one's own information, and the vast majority of people consistently decline to exercise that power, then what the hell are privacy advocates advocating for?
I have to side with Moglen here. First the journalist decides to call somebody he describes as "a militant privacy advocate" (emphasis mine). Then he says things like "It just doesn’t seem like the consequences are that bad."
What did he ever expect? I think Moglen is right in his expectations that any article resulting from that will be bullshit. And really: "N.B.: In the end, I did not put this in the story for several reasons, not the least of it was the fact that it was late and over word limit". Really, the word limit is his excuse? Sorry, but I think the journalist is the jerk here.
Changing Threats To Privacy From Tia To Google (Blackhat 2010) by Moxie Marlinspike http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084
How many people here would be excited about a law that required everyone to carry a government mandated tracking device with them at all times? Probably very few people right, no-one's really excited about that. How many people here have a cell phone? Right, probably everybody in this room has a mobile phone. And so what is the difference really? A mobile phone is a tracking device that reports its position over an insecure protocol to a few telecommunications companies that are required by law to reveal that information to eavesdroppers and governments worldwide. So what's the difference? Choice. This is the difference. You choose to carry a cell phone, whereas you would be forced to carry a tracking device.
Well I have a mobile phone. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would have a mobile phone, why would I want one: it's a mobile tracking device, it communicates over an insecure protocol, it's potentially a mobile bug. And yet I have one. So did I choose to have a mobile phone? Maybe.
I think if you look at the way that people tend to organise in groups and communities, there are often informal communications networks that bind them together, that allow them to communicate, make plans, coordinate activities. If you introduce something like the GSM cellular network to this group, and if I start using it, I am subject to something that is very well known called the No Network Effect. If I am the only one with a cell phone it's really not worth very much. The value of the network is in the number of people that are connected to it and that if I'm the only one I can't really communicate with anyone.
However if I somehow manage to get everyone to start using my communications network it becomes very effective and very valuable. But there is an interesting side effect, which is that the old informal mechanisms people use to communicate and to collaborate disappear, that they are destroyed by the introduction of technology. The technology actually changes the social fabric of how people communicate and coordinate. Mobile phones, there are many obvious examples. People used to make plans, they would say: "I'll meet you on this street corner at this time on this day and, you know, we'll do something" and now people say "I'll call you when I'm getting off work" or "I'll text you" and if you don't have a mobile phone you can't really participate in this type of organisation and you begin to find yourself kind of alone. Because if I now make a choice not to be a part of this cellular network, there is sort of an interesting thing where once again I am subject to the no network effect. The network that used to exist, the informal communications channels, has been destroyed.
So yes, I made a choice to have a mobile phone, but what kind of choice did I make? I think this is sort of an interesting phenomenon. What happens is a choice is introduced; it starts as a very simple choice: the choice of whether or not to have a mobile phone, a simple piece of technology. But slowly things happen to expand the scope of that choice until eventually it's so big as to encompass not just whether you have a mobile phone or not but whether you want to be a part of society. In some ways the choice to have a mobile phone today has become not necessarily just whether you have a piece of consumer electronics in your pocket but whether or not you are even a part of society, and that's a much bigger choice. Maybe not one that we should have to make, or at least maybe one that isn't really a choice at all.
So yes, I made a choice to have a mobile phone, but what kind of choice did I make? I think this is sort of an interesting phenomenon. What happens is a choice is introduced; it starts as a very simple choice: the choice of whether or not to have a mobile phone, a simple piece of technology. But slowly things happen to expand the scope of that choice until eventually it's so big as to encompass not just whether you have a mobile phone or not but whether you want to be a part of society.
That is it right there.
The only answer is the same technology without the bad side of it.
Mobile phones that do not track you, that governments can not track.
A Facebook alternative like Diaspora, except much better and as popular as Facebook.
We are not going to quit mobile phones and social media, but we have to strip their bad side from them. That may involve non-profit mobile phone manufactures, open source social media, who knows exactly what. But I know that technologically it is possible, now we have implement it and use it.
> Mobile phones that do not track you,
> that governments can not track.
The pragmatist in me wants to call that a pipe dream. Phones that work on the cell system that don't track you are an oxymoron. It would require a ground up reimplementation of phones. The best case I can see is burner sim cards for smartphones with all the data encrypted and some non-skype popular voip platform. Even if someone built all this you'd still be tracked while you used the phone.
You could start talking about mesh networks or public free wifi to improve some of those problems but any technically realistic solution relies on government supporting things they inherently dislike and popular support for "terrorist helping" technology (which the public doesn't care about until a local power group starts using surveillance to kill/torture a lot of them)
This post breaks line-wrapping for the whole page.
I suspect that long string of italicized text is to blame. Please remove the italics (which also make the words hard to read).
Ah, sorry about that. The post is too old for me to edit now.
Moglen is of course correct about the problems of privacy and corporate ownership of social networks -- but then goes on to take an absolutist position which is both strategically indefensible and ethically bankrupt.
First, a key concept: there is no such thing as absolute freedom. Freedom can exist at many different levels, some of which are mutually exclusive; sometimes abrogations of lower-order freedoms are required to create higher-order freedoms. The archetypal example of this is the law which arbitrarily restricts you from driving on one side of the road. This is a small loss of freedom, but when applied universally, it creates the far greater freedom to drive for long distances without substantial risk of a head-on collision.
Now, with social networks and the like, freedoms are created and freedoms are taken away. The problem which Moglen identifies -- and is absolutely correct to call out -- is that there is absolutely no legitimate reason to abrogate the freedoms that are being abrogated. Where he goes wrong is in denying the reality of the freedoms that are being created: namely the most powerful one-to-many communications platforms in history. The citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are categorically not less free because they used Facebook to organise their revolutions. Whatever freedoms they lose on account of Facebook, pale in significance to the freedoms Facebook has allowed them to create.
Whether this calculation holds true in other societies is a perfectly legitimate subject for debate; where Moglen goes wrong is in denying that it's a debatable subject whatsoever.
I had the same problem with Richard Stallman, when I recently attended one of his boilerplate talks. While I greatly respect what he has accomplished and agree with the majority of his opinions, he had absolutely no concept that there could possibly be greater freedoms outside of his narrow domain. It was all too easy to picture him castigating, say, Syrian activists for distributing videos of atrocities using non-free codecs, captured by camera phones with non-free firmware. Stallman's position would seem to be that if you can't document an atrocity with fully free software and hardware, then you shouldn't document it at all. This is where he -- and Moglen -- take a swan dive from the moral high ground into the swamp of ethical bankruptcy in which all true zealots swim.
The bottom line is that there are greater freedoms and lessor freedoms. The world has collectively decided that the freedoms created by one-to-many communications networks are greater than the freedoms that are (unnecessarily) being lost in the process. Sometimes this decision is clearly correct (Tunisia, Egypt, etc.); other times it probably isn't. What's certain is that asking people to forego what they (often correctly) perceive as the greater freedom, in order to fix an unnecessary abrogation of the lesser freedom, is not an ethically defensible position to take.
Please don't get me wrong: unlike road-direction restrictions, there's no reason why social networks need to be compromising our freedoms the way that they are. I'd much rather see social networks created by open-standard distributed protocols rather than centralised corporate systems, just as I'd much rather see mobile phones with fully free firmware that encode video with free codecs. I think it's absolutely worth trying to create all of those things. But simply ignoring the genuine freedoms that are created despite the faults of these platforms is not ethically legitimate.
Ethics aside, it's also bad strategy, and just won't work. If you're obligated to give up your car before writing about global warming, or obligated to become a vegan before writing about animal cruelty, or obligated to take monastic vows before writing about conflict in domestic relationships -- then you'll probably never write about any of these issues. And that won't help anybody, will it?
>> Ethics aside, it's also bad strategy, and just won't work. If you're obligated to give up your car before writing about global warming, or obligated to become a vegan before writing about animal cruelty, or obligated to take monastic vows before writing about conflict in domestic relationships -- then you'll probably never write about any of these issues. And that won't help anybody, will it?
I find Moglen's absolutist point of view on this issue refreshing.
You're not obligated to give up your car or go vegan to write about certain issues, but you're a hypocrite if you don't acknowledge your own contribution to a problem.
Two examples:
Al Gore did a great job spreading the word about global warming, but he still has a larger carbon footprint than most Americans (it's well-documented).
Jonathan Safran Foer became vegan when he researched and wrote his book "Eating Animals" about animal cruelty.
We need more people like Foer, do we not?
I find that point to be orthogonal.
That's like saying that everyone at Occupy Wall Street had forswear all material goods in order to be considered "valid" protesters.
Discarding someone's argument due to a lack of complete purity is just plain facile.
>> That's like saying that everyone at Occupy Wall Street had forswear all material goods in order to be considered "valid" protesters.
No, it isn't.
Occupy Wall Street isn't about giving up all material goods. A better analogy is a OWS protester who is a manager at one of the banks that got bailed out.
>> Discarding someone's argument due to a lack of complete purity is just plain facile.
I never said the arguments should be discarded. I acknowledged that Al Gore did a good job spreading the word about global warming.
I'm just saying it's refreshing when someone actually stands behind their argument by making a personal change or sacrifice.
So what if he is an hypocrite? Since when do we expect journalists to be virtuous? They're simply reporting the facts. Their life is completely irrelevant.
Jonathan Safran Foer became vegan when he researched and wrote his book "Eating Animals" about animal cruelty.
We need more people like Foer, do we not?
Sure, people doing what they preach is great, if you choose a value we agree with. But I'm sure you'd prefer if Breivik had been an hypocrite and not done what he believed to be right.
Thank you for a clear explanation of the same problems I had with Moglen's position, and an equally clear explanation of the problem I have with Stallman's positions on what I feel is his limited view of "freedom."
I've read many people, particularly on HN, say they are glad such extremes exist as a counter-balance. I disagree. I think that they muddy the discourse by presenting yet more things to argue with. I would rather see people advocating for privacy and software freedoms while advocating stances that I also think are reasonable and defensible. The difficulty with that, though, is that people who hold such views tend not to be professional advocates.
I think you are putting too much faith in the ability of facebook-like services to do useful things like the organization and communication that happened in the arab spring protests.
It's entirely possible this was a one time event. I wouldn't trust these services (especially facebook) not to cooperate fully with whoever is in power for censorship/identification purposes. If they don't cooperate they'll just be blocked anyway.
Surely the newness of this type of communication created these one-to-many communication freedoms, but I doubt it's accurate that these freedoms were/are anything but temporary.
That's not even counting the disagreement over how much of the communication was actually done on american social platforms vs existing text message infrastructure.
I agree that Moglen at least gets close to a absolutist position on this kind of thing (and Stallman is a good example of a similar position) but I don't accept that the positives of any contribution to Arab Spring style protests outweigh the negatives of literally informing on yourself and your friends to a private commercial surveillance network (which is indeed the literal truth even if I used Moglen's inflammatory language).
Best quote: "The problem is caused by people who would like a little help spying on their friends. And in a genteel way, that’s what the social media offers. They get to surveil other people. In return for a little bit of the product, they assist the growth of these immense commercial spying operations."
This has become the crux of my objection to social networks: they exist to gather data on you. Whatever benefit you get from it, their purpose of existence is data mining.
As the Pinboard Blog puts it, that's ANTI-social.
"We're used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it's worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?"
http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/
Too bad we can't exchange that for a system where social networks let you own the data and charge a monthly subscription fee.
Diaspora lets you own the data, and it's free. If you wanted to run your own node on a dedicated server rented at a hosting company, you could do that too.
Even if you don't buy his whole argument – and especially that the journalist has a partisan duty to abstain from, rather than research, these systems – it's awesome that Moglen is making this point, and this ecological/privacy-littering analogy.
Facebook now acknowledges what we said for a long time and they didnt acknowledge, that every single photograph uploaded to Facebook is put through facial recognition software they call PhotoDNA which is used to find people for whom any law enforcement agency in the world is looking.
How true is this?
I don't think it's very true at all. From what I've read, PhotoDNA is used to detect child pornography by comparing a photograph's "hash" against a database of hashes for known pornographic images. There's no facial recognition involved.
More here:
Mr. Moglen: Thanks for the warm up. I'm having lunch with Stallman in un poco minutos. Bye!
Reporter: Like, bye?
Dr. Moglen: Well you called me, you know what the problem is. People lost their homes. People lose their money. People lose their freedom. (??? -ed.)
Could someone elaborate upon these? I am not aware of these incidents. (In particular, the first two.)
There have to be hundreds of social media-related incidents that came up in the middle east during the Arab Spring uprisings. This one came up first on a search:
"Man gets three years in prison for insulting Islam on Facebook"
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/10/arab-spring-in-egypt-man-g...
And the same result would likely have occurred had he said the same thing on a street corner, or in a pamphlet he handed out at a bus station.
The problem here isn't Facebook, it's the government that he lives under. But Facebook did give him a much larger audience than he might otherwise have had.
"People lost their homes." makes me think he's talking about he housing market collapse, which was partly caused by unscrupulous banks lending to people they shouldn't have. The topic was banks digging up info on Facebook about borrowers... it's not a parallel but it certainly could be discussed in the same breath.
I agree it's a bit obtuse.
Somewhat unrelated but I've always wondered how many passwords you could crack by making a word dictionary attack out of a user's status updates and comments. The assumption being that most users have a narrow vocabulary and would naturally pull from it to choose their passwords.
None the less it seems like every time you publish on the net with an association to your identity in any form you do willingly degrade some aspect of your own privacy. Truthfully just from analyzing a couple sentences you probably have a pretty good shot at guessing all kinds of things about the person.
Isn't this a little bit like saying "You can't claim to be against governments spying on their own citizens if you ever go outside. By going outside they can trace where you are, and who you visit."
I don't want to live in a world where I have to not do things to avoid privacy invasion, I want to live in one which doesn't allow privacy invasion.
Obviously it's not a simple issue, you can't just sign up to twitter and tick the "no privacy invasion please" checkbox, but if we're going to aim for something, how about we reach for the stars not the dogshit.
No. Going outside is an act that happens on common grounds. Using facebook happens on commercial grounds. You can choose not to use facebook and eliminate the problem right there. You cannot choose not to use roads.
You are right to say that we need better rules to regulate the second, or to go with Moglen - the people should know better than to even ask for such rules instead of staying away from the problem. But that doesn't mean that the same logic must suddenly apply to civil society, no matter how paranoid (and, at times, rightfully paranoid) you may be about the tracking that happens there.
It's interesting to me that the impetus for this post is seemingly motivated by the reporter's reaction to Mr. Moglen's tone over the substance of what he said.
I know it's "just" betabeat, a blog, etc, but imagine if Leslie Stahl or even Katie Couric made the emphasis of a story how they were "legit yelled at" by an expert source who gave some thought provoking ideas on a silver platter that could have been developed into much more.
Moglen's argument fits in an idealist world, but having governing laws for Social engineering sites will help in regulating centralized power of corporations. This can be handled outside software too. But somewhat aggressive political behavior of Moglen worries me.
How comparable are sites like HN to FaceBook and Twitter? I'm genuinely curious what others, here, think about that. I don't use the mainstream social sites, but I do use and like HN. Would professor Moglen think HN users were part of the problem too?
Well there are no ads being served on HN, so while it's possible that pg and YC are collecting tons of interesting data on people from analyzing their comments and votes, I think it's easier to imagine that they are not, since there's no clear motive.
Eh. If it's not Facebook, it'll be some dork from Anonymous releasing a bunch of data, including yours, that they hacked from ThinkGeek, because they're offended by the plush bonsai kitten.
Did anyone else have the experience of reading this, starting out thinking "Moglen has gone over the edge" and ending in a defeatist "it's actually as bad as he says and there's no stopping it"?
Awesome.
I just cant describe how awesome Moglen is.
A "journalist" wants a story, a complete article, so she doesnt have to think - get this she says " I was hoping you might be ableto help me think about this particular" - she wants him to think for her! She could as well have told him to please write the article for her in full, but she will take the credit and money. Then he still serves her an idea and a very fruitful thesis which she could write several articles about if she would pull her finger out of her ass for once.
As an exchange, that was awesome and hilarious. The substance, however, is neither.