January 15, 2012
Yelling it like it is
Adrianne Jeffries is a journalist on the tech beat who just published a pretty hot story in The Observer detailing how banks are mining social networking data to calculate credit scores. The article, As Banks Start Nosing Around Facebook and Twitter, the Wrong Friends Might Just Sink Your Credit, describes how startups like Credit Karma and Lenddo are convinced that deadbeats flock together, and are harvesting our data-exhaust and feeding it into FICO scores. Having friends who default on their loans may soon negatively impact your credit worthiness.
Following standard journalistic convention, Jeffries contacted privacy experts for their take on the issue. She reached out to Eben Moglen, a Columbia Law professor, social justice advocate, and director of the Software Freedom Law Center. Although Moglen is a vocal defender of personal privacy and liberty, he refused to provide her with the ease-to digest soundbite she came looking for. Instead, he takes Jeffreies to task for her hypocrisy, accuses her of contributing to the problem she claims she wants to fix, and for failing to fulfill her responsibilities as a professional journalist. Jeffries is stunned by this reaction, and published the complete transcript of her interview with Moglen, even though she did not use any quotes from him in her story.
As I read the transcript of Moglen eviscerating professional journalism, I initially cringed in empathy for the journalist on the receiving end of Moglen’s brilliant tirade. Why would Moglen treat a journalist this way instead of giving her the harmless pull-quote she came looking for?
The easy answer is that Moglen had a bad day, is a fool, or a jerk. However, in my experience, Moglen’s communications are usually purposeful and deliberate (although ‘tender’ is not the first adjective I would associate with him 🙂 ). I think it is worth giving him the benefit of the doubt, and speculating on possible deliberate motivations for this response. Was Moglen trying out a new media strategy? Was this a calculated publicity stunt? A performative critique of journalistic conventions? How effective was it, for both Jefferie’s career and Moglen’s message?
I think this incident deserves a close study, as it raises and reveals many important meta-questions about the shifting roles of journalism and activism, in addition to exposing the sad disarray of the nascent privacy movement.
On the substantive issues covered in the story, Jeffries did a pretty good job researching the specifics and the underlying issues, and the piece is smart, witty, and provocative — with decent odds of capturing the attention of a few passing of eyeballs. The story conforms to the standards of the genre, and she quotes CEOs, venture capitalists, and a activist/public intellectual, Doug Rushkoff.
The trouble is that over the years there have been countless stories detailing the pressing dangers of corporate surveillance, and the public does not seem to care (many have been covered on this blog, including a story about medication compliance factoring into FICO scores). After decades of trying to educate and advocate journalists and the public about these issues, I can easily imagine Moglen losing patience for the ineffectual conventions of mainstream journalism.
U.S. journalists continue to water down their responsibility for truth-telling, speaking truth to power, and taking responsibility for being agents of change. The stilted genre of fair-and-balanced soundbites is even more absurd in the digital age when stories can be supported by providing long-form context and elaboration. Instead of pandering to the decontextualized soundbite, Moglen responded in a manner that demands all-or-nothing coverage.
Similar to Emily Bell’s analysis of #occupywallstreet’s success, where the protester’s refusal to conform to soundbites and slogans helped them gain mainstream media cycles, Moglen’s response to Jeffries rejected the soundbite and resulted in her publication of their complete interview. For all we know Moglen has responded this way to other journalists, and this is just the first time the interview has been published. But, I think that activists should consider this response and weigh its relative benefits.
Would the privacy movement have gained more any more credibility if Moglen had produced an easily digestible soundbite? Perhaps, although privacy has proven itself to be such a complex issue that another round of he-said/she-said warnings/reassurances are unlikely to truly educate or persuade.
I think the real challenge posed my Moglen’s response speaks to journalism’s failure to embrace the possibilities of hypertext, and grow beyond the conventions that dead-tree publishing imposed. Why don’t stories regularly include links to the expert interviews, in their entirety? Or, if the interview is sloppy or inaccurate, links to the experts relevant work. Moglen has spoken on numerous occasions warning about the dangers of corporate surveillance, an Jeffries easily could have quoted Molgen in her article, and referred readers to talks like Freedom in the Cloud or Navigating the Age of Democratized Media. Her interviews with him should have started with these talks as a baseline, not require him to rehash privacy 101 for the umpteenth time.
The comments to the interview are also rich with perspectives on the responsibilities of journalists, though not many commentators engage in the critique of journalism that Moglen advances. Jeffries herself often engages, defending her response on the grounds that “The reporter’s responsibility is to report the truth. I’m not an activist or an advocate”, and branding Moglen a “digital vegan”.
The polar extremes portrayed in this exchange indicate just how desperately the privacy movement needs to develop more nuanced models of strategic agency, as “going off the grid”, or giving up and “promiscuously broadcasting” are the only choices most people think are available to them. My research on the The End of Forgetting outlines alternatives that expand our range of choices and might help advance the terms of this debate beyond – unplugging vs. sticking our heads in the sand.
Filed by Jonah at 8:00 pm under ethics,fire,fourthestate
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In the end, it resulted in a really good story partially precisely because of her will and ability to go beyond the conventions of dead tree publishing, didn’t it? Her story plus the transcript makes for really interesting reading. The thing then is that the time and effort invested in just that marginal extra step, the transcription and publishing of the interview, is her free labor.
It’s not accurate to say that Jeffries brands Moglen as a “digital vegan”. She is clearly responding to a commenter who says Moglen’s arguments “sound like veganism” and she replies, “digital veganism”, to the commenter – at no point calling Moglen a “digital vegan”.
“Promiscuous broadcasting” is no more inherently problematic that leaving one’s home and being seen in public on the street. The problem is that there are no laws enumerating and enforcing what corporations and governments can and cannot do with publicly available information. If there were enforced regulations that said lenders could not discriminate against people based on their publicly known friend’s credit activities, it would not be an issue to have a “known associate” who’s a credit fraud.
@rasmus – I agree that this resulted in a really good story, and the transcript, and the dialogue it precipitated, greatly enhanced it. As for the additional labor… aren’t most journlists on the hook for multiple blog/social media updates regularly now? You are presuming this blog post was extra work. Satisfying an obligation to blog with an interview transcript may take some people less time than an original post (or teaser), and in many cases may add more value – at least to the long tail or readers interested in an elaboration on the quotes.
@Mike – you are correct that Adrianne did not actually call Moglen a ‘digital vegan’, but just described his position as digital veganism.
As for the inherent risk of promiscuous broadcasting, read the supreme court’s latest arguments on GPS tracking. Your public activity, _saved and indexed_ is very different than the ephemeral privacy compromise of walking around in public.
But, more crucially, the question of who can access and control these records is at the heart of the power redistribution we are transitioning though.
Your point that this can all be fixed with legislation begs Mogen’s retort. If we care about these issues, the change will have to start from within. Legislation can’t fix this without our understanding of the problem and taking control and responsibility for our information flows.
She says that she could have gone to Mr. Doctorow, and it sounds like that might be the result. As someone who is more in-the-media, He would give something more usable I’m guessing. I’m sure the digital privacy-aware can understand his ideas but making a demand of the reporter to change her habits is not a useful approach. She is going to write an article with a certain subject and Mr. Moglen seemed to want her to abandon that. She suggest that she was shaken by his tone and missed getting a chance to get a more relevant understanding of her article’s subject. It was only because the article is on a website that she got the chance to include Mr. Moglen’s interview, otherwise it would have been more-or-less a waste of her and his time.
re the following:
“I think the real challenge posed my Moglen’s response speaks to journalism’s failure to embrace the possibilities of hypertext, and grow beyond the conventions that dead-tree publishing imposed. Why don’t stories regularly include links to the expert interviews, in their entirety? Or, if the interview is sloppy or inaccurate, links to the experts relevant work. Moglen has spoken on numerous occasions warning about the dangers of corporate surveillance, an Jeffries easily could have quoted Molgen in her article, and referred readers to talks like Freedom in the Cloud or Navigating the Age of Democratized Media. Her interviews with him should have started with these talks as a baseline, not require him to rehash privacy 101 for the umpteenth time.”
and who is paying her (or any journalist) to do all this extra work on your behalf? publications aren’t. readers certainly aren’t. so the reporter is just supposed to suck it up for the good of the medium? if that were the case we’d all be writing one story every week or two and living on food stamps.
I don’t know how adrianne recorded her interview with moglen, but I’m betting she transcribed it by hand. don’t know if you’ve ever done that, but it’s pretty time consuming. so while it’s a nice notion to have all the source materials at hand for readers to use and draw their own conclusions, you do so on the backs of someone else’s free labor.
cheers
dt