Nieman Journalism Lab |
- Presetting how your article gets tweeted
- When openness backfires: Is there room for more gray area in how court records are made public?
- This Week in Review: Tech companies’ NSA pushback, and Rolling Stone’s cover backlash
| Presetting how your article gets tweeted Posted: 19 Jul 2013 11:39 AM PDT Laura Hazard Owen notes that Slate isn’t sending an article’s headline to tweets generated by its tweet button. Instead, it’s setting a different, more social friendly string — "This Is a Terrible Way to Commemorate a Major Civil Rights Victory" becomes "The New Yorker's Bert and Ernie Cover Is a Terrible Way to Commemorate a Major Civil Rights Victory,” for instance. As she points out, nothing new — it’s as simple as changing the language in your tweet button template — but worthwhile anyway. (In WordPress, you’d be replacing a call to
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| When openness backfires: Is there room for more gray area in how court records are made public? Posted: 19 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT Is more public access to court records always a good thing? Not according to Sophie Hood and Helen Nissenbaum of NYU's Information Law Institute. “We don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the more public, the better," said Hood in a talk at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society this week. That’s both because of the legitimate privacy concerns of those whose records are being released and because the rise of open court records can make it more likely that there’ll be government blowback — returning once public records to the shadows. While journalists have long been on the side of increased government transparency — and the rise of data tools has opened up new venues for gathering information from previously impenetrable databases — Hood and Nissenbaum want people to be aware of unintended consequences. The common law right of access to court documents allows the media to report on the courts, and news coverage of court proceedings are one set of checks and balances designed to keep the courts honest. Hood and Nissenbaum quoted the political philosopher Jeremy Bentham: “Publicity is the very soul of justice….It keeps the judge himself, while trying, under trial.” With many court documents now digitized and publicly available on services like PACER — accessible to anyone willing to pay 10 cents a page — the idea of the public's right of access has shifted. "It's the difference between the practical obscurity of a paper record versus the ubiquity of an electronic record," Hood said. The increased surfacing of public records risks a counterbalancing response. When the Journal News decided to map the locations of gun permit holders in suburban New York, the response in some jurisdictions as far away as Louisiana was to make disclosure of permit data a crime. The rise of skeezy mugshot exploitation sites — which rely on public criminal records — has led to calls and in some cases legal attempts to reduce public access to crime information. The rise of online broadcast of police scanner traffic has pushed some to encrypt it and keep out the public. RECAP, a project from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy that takes court documents out from behind the Pacer.gov paywall, has found its mission curtailed by privacy concerns, which have led administrators to remove select documents from the site. "The ultimate result of that is that you may be able to access a document on Pacer that you can't on RECAP," Hood said. When transparency goes onlineThe information that these sites use has always been publicly available — but available and accessible aren’t the same thing. "The information is the same, but it is radically altered by the novel ways in which it flows," said Hood. "When documents are published online, there is more access but there is also more susceptibility for error…what is at stake is different — dramatically so." Now, information used in even minor federal cases is searchable on the open web. Court documents published online are officially subject to privacy restrictions — Social Security numbers, some home addresses, and other sensitive pieces of information are supposed to be redacted — but mistakes are quite common. "There seems to be less of both publicity and privacy," Hood said. "There has been an increase in the use of blanket protective orders, and there also seems to be less privacy — it’s very easy to go onto Pacer and find someone's bank statement if they've been in a bankruptcy case," said Hood. Historically, Hood explained, news organizations were the ones pushing for the right to access court documents, and the extent of access has fluctuated with the presiding court. Gannett lost a 1979 suit to observe the proceedings of a murder trial when the Supreme Court ruled that it was obligated to "minimize the effects of prejudicial pretrial publicity." The same court reversed that decision the following year in Richmond Newspapers Inc. v. Virginia, finding that open access to court proceedings was "implicit in the guarantees of the First Amendment." Another case, Nixon v. Warner Communications, established that the common law right to access is "not absolute," and that it depends on the medium and aggregation. The Internet has, unsurprisingly, complicated existing laws governing on public access. Nissenbaum is one of the authors of a paper in the Maryland Law Review addressing why online court records may increase violations of privacy. "The primary findings of that piece were just that there had been a quite radical alteration in the costs of the ways in which personal info flows as a consequence of this shift to online publication, versus a physical, local access system," said Hood. "It's quite a different experience to go to a court, and talk to a clerk, go through a metal detector, give your ID, to see a file and photocopy it, than it is to simply Google someone." Making documents decodableHood and Nissenbaum think we need "more granular rules" governing digital accessibility of court documents that might selectively remove sensitive information, while leaving the bulk of the contents open. "You can talk about privacy or publicity, and craft arguments that would suggest that documents should be open or closed. We really want to get beyond that binary, and think through whether or not you can develop technological tools that would enable both. The law is not that that clearly established," said Hood. For example, a movement toward adopting uniform LegalXML standards for the entry of court filings is a step in that direction; making documents machine-readable would make it easier to automatically redact sensitive information. The term here is contextual integrity — which rather than trying to view information access as an across-the-board issue instead tries to put it within the context of the information flows. As Nissenbaum's paper puts it:
Those different contexts can require different levels of access, and that means knowing more about what’s inside those documents. In practice, this might mean that journalists would access digital court documents the way they access public events — with a press pass. Hood envisioned that journalists could sign on to a court database with their press credentials, thereby agreeing to the court's terms and conditions upon logging in. (And everyone gets to enjoy Round MCMDCXXIII of the “Who is a journalist?” debate.) Apportioning access according to who is requesting it — and why it’s being requested — is a thorny proposition. Hood acknowledged that whether that would be constitutional is "an open question," and it would certainly demand clear delineation of who is a journalist and who is not. Ultimately, digital court records are having much the same impact on the fourth estate as they are on the third. Now that so much information is available online, journalists have to be more discerning about what sensitive information is worth publishing. As Nissenbaum put it, contextual integrity would underscore the fact that "the press have certain professional values and we rely on the press to uphold those values." Image of the Supreme Court from the Boston Public Library used under a Creative Commons license. |
| This Week in Review: Tech companies’ NSA pushback, and Rolling Stone’s cover backlash Posted: 19 Jul 2013 07:00 AM PDT Snowden, Greenwald, and the tech pushback: Again this week, we got more of the three core elements of the U.S. National Security Agency leaks aftermath: More revelations about the breadth of NSA spying and attempts to further uncover that information, more developments in leaker Edward Snowden’s attempts to find a safe home, and more debate over the journalistic merits of The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story. Briefly, in turn: First, an NSA official told a congressional committee that the agency is examining the data of people who are “two or three hops” away from terror suspects, a very large net and one that’s bigger than the NSA had previously acknowledged. In response to the ongoing revelations, a group of Anonymous hackers claimed to have broken into and stolen data from a server of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency. Meanwhile, tech companies are pushing back harder against the secrecy surrounding government use of their users’ data. A group of top tech companies and a variety of nonprofits wrote a letter to the Obama administration asking for more transparency regarding data requests, though The New York Times noted that telecommunications firms refused to sign on. Meanwhile, Yahoo won a court order forcing the U.S. Department of Justice to reveal documents that Yahoo says show how it fought a secret court order to hand over its users’ data, and Microsoft also asked the U.S. attorney general to allow it to release similar information about how it responds to government requests for user information. Second, in his first public appearance since he arrived in Moscow, Snowden renewed his request to Russia for asylum. Later in the week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Snowden could only stay in Russia if he stopped leaking U.S. secrets, but that Snowden ultimately wants to stay somewhere else once he’s able. The U.S., Putin said, has effectively trapped Snowden in Moscow by revoking his passport. Snowden hasn’t said much publicly other than that Moscow press conference, but Greenwald has given several interviews in which he’s said that Snowden has more documents that amount to a blueprint of the NSA and that, if released, could seriously damage the agency’s interests. Greenwald took issue with a particular Reuters article, characterizing those statements as a sort of threat on Snowden’s behalf. Greenwald said the point he was making was to highlight the fact that Snowden hasn’t released those documents and thus is more intent on prompting democratic debate than harming the U.S. Which brings us to the third area: Greenwald said all the attention on Snowden and him, and the questions about both of their intentions is merely “an ongoing effort to distract attention away from the substance of the revelations.” Others, such as Jillian York at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, also castigated the American media for continuing to focus on Greenwald and Snowden rather than the substance of their revelations. Der Spiegel’s Marc Pitzke suggested that part of the reason for the backlash is that the U.S. media is wary of the competitive threat Greenwald’s Guardian is beginning to pose stateside. Reuters’ Jack Shafer argued that the Greenwald backlash was prompted instead by a slavish devotion to the “corporatist ideal” of journalism, one that betrays a extremely incomplete understanding of American journalistic history. In fact, Shafer argued, partisan journalism has been an indispensable part of American journalism since its founding.
Terrorists and the rock-star treatment: Rolling Stone published a long profile this week of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that was met with outrage not for its content, but for the rock star-like cover image that accompanied it. The opposition poured in not only on social media (well documented by BuzzFeed and Boston magazine) but also from more consequential sources, such as the victims of the bombing, local political officials, and magazine retailers such as the pharmacy chains CVS and Walgreens, all of which was documented well by The Boston Globe. On its own cover, the Boston Herald called the Rolling Stone cover “dumb as a rock.” A Massachusetts State Police photographer, in response to what he called the insult of the cover, gave new photos of Tsarnaev’s capture to Boston magazine to publish. Rolling Stone issued a statement defending the cover story as “within the traditions of journalism” as well as the magazine’s history of serious political and cultural coverage. Plenty of others were defending it as well: The New Yorker’s Ian Crouch, The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, Complex’s Foster Kamer, The Huffington Post’s Jack Mirkinson, Politico’s Dylan Byers, USA Today’s Rem Rieder, and Northeastern University’s Dan Kennedy. A few common arguments ran through their pieces: The magazine still called him “the bomber” and “a monster” on the cover, hardly the full rock-star treatment; Rolling Stone has a rich history of doing substantial journalism on serious topics like this, so the cover isn’t out of place for the magazine; The New York Times ran the same photo on its front page and no one complained then (something Wemple explored in another post); and Rolling Stone’s cover was smartly subversive, illustrating that the face of terror looks more like ourselves or people we know than we’re comfortable admitting. As Stern wrote, “By depicting a terrorist as sweet and handsome rather than ugly and terrifying, Rolling Stone has subverted our expectations and hinted at a larger truth.” On the other side, Rachel Sklar pushed back against each of those arguments, making the case that the cover was “the irresponsible glamorization of a terrorist.” The New Yorker’s Crouch argued that the cover’s backlash revealed the public’s post-terrorism “hostility toward free expression,” as well as “a kind of culture-wide self-censorship encouraged by tragedy, in which certain responses are deemed correct and anything else is dismissed as tasteless or out of bounds.” Blogger Dave Winer flipped the rock-star subversion on its head, saying that Rolling Stone has revealed its own pretense by showing that the rock-star exterior it loves to display can hide some truly evil stuff. And Hypervocal’s Slade Sohmer said the magazine’s sin is in being not offensive, but boring, by featuring an already heavily used photo. Reading roundup: Only a couple of big stories this week, but quite a few interesting smaller ones: — The judge in the military trial of WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning decided not to drop the charge of “aiding the enemy” — the most serious the government has leveled — against Manning for his leaks. Several people explained why this ruling could be so damaging to future whistleblowers, including Ben Wizner of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Mike Masnick of Techdirt, and Emily Bazelon of Slate.
— After 16 years apart, ESPN rehired Keith Olbermann this week. Olbermann was a legendary anchor there before leaving acrimoniously in 1997 and working throughout the last decade on politics for MSNBC and Current TV. Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch noted Olbermann’s contrition and called it a “low-risk, high-upside” move for ESPN, though Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici questioned whether Olbermann will be able to stay away from politics. — The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald reported on a lengthy, irate internal email indicating that Al Jazeera may be toning down the voice of its new American network Al Jazeera America in an effort to make itself more palatable to American viewers and cable distributors. Joe Pompeo, who wrote a feature on the new network last week, pointed out that this isn’t Al Jazeera’s first attempt to formulate an American-friendly image of itself. — The Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is taking applications for 2014 class of programmer-journalists fellows, so it’s posed the question, “Why develop in the newsroom?” to several news developers. The range of responses is wonderful — several of them were rounded up by the project’s head, Dan Sinker, and there are a few others floating around, like the one from NPR’s Brian Boyer. — The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that Google is trying to license TV channels to create an online paid TV service. It’s joining Apple among the tech giants working to move paid TV online, and The Times reported on the status of Apple’s different approach of working more closely with cable distributors and programmers. — Medium’s Bobbie Johnson issued a caution against overdoing the current trend of “snowfalling” — creating ambitious, longform multimedia stories like The New York Times’ celebrated feature last year by that name. Many of the times it’s done, it doesn’t actually help the reader, he said. — Finally, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham issued some invaluable advice to tech startups, led by the admonition to “do things that don’t scale.” A lot of it is really useful for those of us who are outside of the startup world, too. Photo of Keith Olbermann by Vaguely Artistic used under a Creative Commons license. |
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