In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

"Banks aren’t the problem, he said; the users tempting banks with their Twitter and Facebook postings are the problem.<p>As are reporters who write about privacy issues with social media without first closing their Facebook accounts."<p>You know he's right, don't you?

This article makes me angry, and the groupthink of most the replies I read here supporting Moglen make me angry too.<p>You know what causes a real ecological disaster?<p>Washing Machines.<p>Yes, <i>FUCKING</i> washing machines.<p>They use too much of one of the worlds rarest resources (clean water), contribute to global warming and pollute the waste water with phosphates.<p>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 <i>greatest invention of the industrial revolution</i>[1]<p>Facebook allows companies to sell advertising and allows law enforcement to track you.<p>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]<p>Convenience has costs, but who is Moglen to judge if those costs are worthwhile for everyone?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_...</a> (watch this video - it's really good)<p>[2] <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/so-was-facebook-responsible-for-the-arab-spring-after-all/244314/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/so-was...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38379/" rel="nofollow">http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38379/</a><p>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.<p>I'd love to see people try and explain how Moglen is right about Twitter (which has much lower privacy costs than Facebook).

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.<p>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.

&#62;&#62; 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.)<p>So what ARE the reasons?!?!<p>I'd like to hear why Adrianne Jeffries didn't include any of Moglen's points in the final article.<p>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.<p>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.

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 <i>people</i> 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 <i>militant</i> privacy advocate" (emphasis mine). Then he says things like "It just doesn’t seem like the consequences are that bad."<p>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 <a href="http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084" rel="nofollow">http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084</a><p><i>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.</i><p><i>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><p><i>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.</i><p><i>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.</i><p><i>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.</i>

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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>no legitimate reason</i> 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 <i>not</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Please don't get me wrong: unlike road-direction restrictions, there's no reason why social networks <i>need</i> 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 <i>despite</i> the faults of these platforms is not ethically legitimate.<p>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?

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."<p>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.<p>As the Pinboard Blog puts it, that's ANTI-social.<p>"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?"<p><a href="http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/</a>

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.

<i>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.</i><p>How true is this?

Mr. Moglen: Thanks for the warm up. I'm having lunch with Stallman in un poco minutos. Bye!<p>Reporter: Like, bye?

<i>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.)</i><p>Could someone elaborate upon these? I am not aware of these incidents. (In particular, the first two.)

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.<p>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."<p>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.<p>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.

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.<p>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?

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.<p>I just cant describe how awesome Moglen is.<p>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 <i></i>me think<i></i> 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.