Thanks
Chris

More power to you!

In the UK there is almost an inverse ratio of facts to the money earned by the writer. Investigative pieces take weeks, months, five years in the case of MPs expenses.Yet if you are a freelancer (as I am) you are paid only for the articles published.

News is expensive in terms of time, resources and legal risk. The more investigative the piece the more costly it is to publish for these reasons. At some point, people will understand that if they want quality in-depth reporting they will have to pay for it.

I’ll have to get your book to see the context of your research here, but it sounds to me as if you are citing your interview with Aaron Swartz to set up an implication of Danny Clark as the person who in fact did help Bradly Manning with the US government server hack and/or the transfer of those files to WikiLeaks.

You must know that the grand jury asked David House, one of the MIT hackers who invited Manning to the open house party for BUILDS, what he knew about Clark’s breakfast with Manning the following morning.

I’m also wondering if at the end of the day you’re implying that Swartz helped Manning — or helped Clark without realizing he was helping Manning. Or what the story is. I’ve thought a lot about it and laid it out on my blog:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/02/did-aaron-swartz-help-bradley-manning-hack-for-wikileaks.html

I read through the posts at Empty Wheel that also ask a lot of questions about the alleged overreach of federal prosecutors and the possible fishing expedition on WikiLeaks. But on the way to asking all those questions, they don’t seem to realize, as you don’t, that in fact you are implicating these MIT hackers. They aren’t under arrest, but at least one, Jacob Appelbaum, in this circle, was under investigation by the grand jury.

As Eric Priezkalns points out: “Privileges can be given, or taken away, by somebody in authority.”

He goes on to point out the problems inherent with the supposed protections when you end up with a corrupt authority.

The moment you make anonymity a privilege, is the moment anonymity ceases to exist. There will always be those who abuse the system, that is not an excuse to limit rights only to those people we view as legitimate.

One final thought: Anonymity on the internet is damn near impossible to pull off, most of the people who you appear to be railing against could be found quite easily by anyone with even a basic level of skill and a little time. The way you deal with trolls is not to ignore them, but to put them in the spotlight, by highlighting their own words and using their message against them (which is different from feeding them). Failing that, simply take away their voices. It’s your blog afterall.

Frankly this blog post reads back as being very poorly thought out, which is a shame given the usually fairly consistent high quality. Pity.

However, that does not mean it is the only justification.

The internet is awash with louts and bullies. So is society. Some of them do not limit their unpleasantness to the internet. If I state an opinion or a fact and give my real name, I leave myself and my family wide open to anonymous bullying and interference both on line and in the real world.

It’s all too easy to find oneself being the recipient of vindictive abuse from people who disagree with what one has said politely and without personal offense. A lot of people take strong offense merely because they don’t like what one says.

Another justification for anonymity is potential harm. Since the potential is real and strong, it is a valid justification.

- corporate whistleblowers
- oppressed people fighting for their freedoms
- people who write unpleasant things online

You chose to put the last example in bold, but the first two are far more important. Only rights can be universal, and these people must be defended by rights, not privileges. Privileges can be given, or taken away, by somebody in authority. What is the purpose of arguing that whistleblowers and oppressed people must have anonymity so they can fight corrupt authority, whilst also saying their anonymity is a privilege, and hence the gift of authority?

Where has this expansion of the understanding of “ad hominem” come from? Until recently, the term was used to describe the fallacy of concluding that an argument can be invalidated by a discrediting of the person making it. As explained here:-

http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html

“I will say very specifically: these are my words. I own them. I stand by them.”
Greg Anders, Heritage Flight Museum

It’s a creed I live by. I know you do as well.

lsjfdksdfjlk@sdljkfdsjlk.com

And the IP address 112.79.40.247 traces to a location in India.

Cowards the lot of ‘em.

To obtain it, you would have to do a FOI Act request to each individual MP – but they are not obliged to reveal it. I have been informed by the House of Commons that MPs and Lords are not regarded as public authorities and so under the FOI Act are not required to provide data about what corporate entities provide them with free meals.

The corporate sector goes to a lot of effort goes to cultivate relationships and food is one very good way of doing this. Drug reps (used to) courier in free daily breakfasts for hospital staff and for community health teams and pick up the tab. Short “educational” talks are accompanied by generous free lunches.

If MPs and Lords are exempt under the FOI, how did you obtain all that data?

The evidence that this kind of thing can shape behaviour is here:

A study [1] tracked drugs that doctors prescribed, before and after attending all-expenses trips paid for by drug companies to drug-company sponsored conferences.

The doctors’ prescribing patterns for only two drugs were tracked for 22 months before and 17 months after each conference.

Ten doctors, invited to each conference, were interviewed about how likely they thought that such an incentive might affect their prescribing patterns.

There was a significant increase in doctors prescribing both drugs after the all-expenses trips to the conferences and this alteration in behaviour took place even though the majority of physicians attending the symposia were quite sure that such incentives would not alter what they prescribed.

A second study [2] that showed that:

(a) gift-giving in radiation oncology was endemic; and
(b) although each doctor was likely to consider himself or herself immune from being influenced by gift-giving,
(c) he or she was suspicious that the “next person” might be influenced;

There was a correlation between (i) the willingness of each doctor to accept gifts of high value and (ii) their sympathy toward this practice.

From these two studies, it sounds as if decision-makers worry that others are too easily persuaded and are very confident that they themselves can’t be – even though their own behaviour suggests that something quite different may be happening.

Here are the papers:

[1]. Orlowski and Wateska.
Chest. (1992; 102:270-273.
The effects of pharmaceutical firm enticements on physician prescribing patterns. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=PubMed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=1623766&dopt=Abstract)

2]. Halperin et al.
International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology and Physics: 2004 Aug 1;59(5):1477-83
A population-based study of the prevalence and influence of gifts to radiation oncologists from pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment manufacturers.
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15275735)