If there’s one thing you get when you have close to 600 million users the way Facebook does, it’s a lot of data about how they are all connected — and when you plot those inter-relationships based on location, as one of the company’s engineers found, you get a world map made up of social connections. There are gaps in the data, of course, with dark spots in China and other countries that block the social network (or have large competitors of their own, as Russia does), but the result is quite an amazing picture of a connected world. If that’s what an intern at Facebook can come up with, imagine what else would be possible with that data.
The visualization is the work of Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team. As he described in a blog post, he started by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends from the Facebook data warehouse, then combined that with each user’s current city and added up the number of friends between each pair of cities, and merged that with the longitude and latitude of each city. And then to make the data more visible, Butler says he “defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them.”
I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn’t represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships.
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What Butler did with the data is similar to — although much more elaborate than — what a programmer outside Facebook tried to do with some of the site’s profile data, before he was threatened with a lawsuit. Pete Warden scraped information from millions of profiles and then analyzed it to see the connections between states and between countries, and drew interactive maps based on the number of those connections. But Facebook threatened him with a lawsuit and he was forced to delete the data, because his scraping of user profiles was against the site’s terms of service.
As the WikiLeaks saga continues, with founder Julian Assange facing potential extradition to Sweden (although not for leaking secret documents) and the U.S. considering espionage charges against him, it’s easy to overlook some of the key issues that have arisen out of the affair — particularly those raised by Amazon’s removal of WikiLeaks from its servers, out of concern about the legality of the content being hosted there. At least one senior technologist thinks that this could raise red flags about the utility of cloud computing, while programmer and open-web advocate Dave Winer believes that the incident reinforces the need for an open cloud host of some kind.
In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Dr. Joseph Reger — chief technology officer for Fujitsu Technology Solutions — said that Amazon’s decision to withdraw hosting for WikiLeaks from its EC2 servers is “bad news for the new IT paradigm of of cloud computing,” and ultimately calls “the security and availability of cloud services into question.” Although Amazon maintained that it was simply enforcing its terms of service — which prevent companies from hosting content to which they do not have the rights, or content that will could lead to injury — Reger said that the company’s actions would cause many to lose faith in the cloud.
The Fujitsu executive also raised the issue of whether cloud providers should even be in the business of assessing the legality or morality of the content on their servers, asking: “Should providers of cloud services constantly review whether any of their customers are pursuing an unpopular or immoral activity and continually make value judgments as to whether they are willing to continue the service?” Deciding whether content is legal, he said, “is not the job of providers. It has to be judged by a court of law.” Reger has a point: is Amazon going to start reviewing all the content on its servers just in case someone has uploaded something to which they don’t own the rights?
As pointed out by Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca Mackinnon — both of whom are affiliated with the Harvard Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, and are the co-founders of Global Voices Online — the Internet may seem like a giant open commons where we share our thoughts, but it is effectively the domain of large corporations. And any of them can cut off our access or our ability to host content whenever they wish, according to terms of service and service-level agreements that are often vague and easy to bend in whatever direction a company wants them to go.
All of this has led Winer, who developed the RSS syndication format and other web technologies, to call for a “web trust” that can reliably and safely store documents of all kinds — whether they are WikiLeaks cables or personal Twitter accounts — in such a way that they are free from both corporate and government intervention, an entity that is “part news organization, university, library and foundation.” Winer said in a blog post that he has been discussing this idea with Brewster Kahle, the founder of Archive.org, which has been building a public archive of the web for years as well as an Open Library of e-books.
When WikiLeaks was first removed from Amazon, and then had its DNS listing deleted by EveryDNS (ironically, it has since gotten support from Canadian provider EasyDNS, which many mistakenly assumed was its original host), we raised the idea of a “stateless, independent data haven” that could host the documents, something WikiLeaks has been trying to create in Iceland. Luckily for Assange, his organization has secure hosting from a Swedish company whose servers are located deep inside a mountain — and says it has no plans to stop providing service to the organization — as well as the country’s Pirate Party and other supporters.
But what about those who don’t have the kind of resources and support that WikiLeaks does? They are at the mercy of Amazon and other hosting companies — and while Google has refused requests to pull down information in the past, citing free speech, it could just as easily change its mind at some point down the road. Winer’s proposal may never get off the ground, but it is a worthwhile effort nonetheless.
According to media analyst Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, the list of things that the Internet has killed — or is in the process of killing — includes media syndication of the kind that the Associated Press and other newswires are built on. In a look at what 2011 will bring for media, written for the Nieman Journalism Lab, Shirky says this process, which is “a key part of the economic structure of the news business,” is next in line for widespread disruption.
In fact, as Shirky himself admits, the kind of distribution that a newswire engages in has been in decline for some time now. Newspapers still push content to The Associated Press, hoping to get the benefit of the syndication it offers, but the only ones getting any benefit are tiny newspapers and websites who rely on the wire because they can’t produce enough content by themselves. While the web and RSS and other digital syndication models are not perfect, the need to have a combination one-stop shop for content and Big Brother-style copyright cop is dwindling. Says Shirky:
Put simply, syndication makes little sense in a world with URLs. When news outlets were segmented by geography, having live human beings sitting around in ten thousand separate markets deciding which stories to pull off the wire was a service. Now it’s just a cost.
Even the newswire itself realizes this, of course, and it has been trying desperately for the past year or two to find some way of shoring up the crumbling walls of its former gatekeeper status. It has railed against Google News and threatened to file claims against everyone from the web giant to individual bloggers because of the use of even tiny excerpts of its content, but still its media castle continues to erode.
As Shirky notes in his piece, the AP has also been talking for some time now about changing the nature of its relationship with member papers, and keeping some of its content to itself — requiring members to link to that content on the AP website, rather than running it on their own sites. The wire service, which was originally formed to distribute content produced by its members, seems to want to become a destination, now that the Internet allows anyone to distribute content far and wide without the AP’s help.
One interesting sub-plot is that Google is working on developing better attribution for content that appears in Google News, according to a recent blog post entitled “Giving credit where credit is due.” The idea is that publishers will tag their content with special tags so that the search engine can recognize who originally created a story — and presumably use this as a way of determining which of those 45 carbon-copy versions of a story it should highlight in Google News. Shirky is right that this could improve things for users, but make things substantially worse for newspapers and wire services:
Giving credit where credit is due will reward original work, whether scoops, hot news, or unique analysis or perspective. This will be great for readers. It may not, however, be so great for newspapers, or at least not for their revenues, because most of what shows up in a newspaper isn’t original or unique. It’s the first four grafs of something ripped off the wire and lightly re-written, a process repeated countless times a day with no new value being added to the story.
The AP isn’t completely dead yet, mind you. The service has its own news staff, who generate their own stories, just as Reuters and Bloomberg and other wire services do. Google’s pending change to attribution rules could actually help the AP when it comes to these internally produced stories — but they could also do substantial damage to the service at the same time, by shifting the spotlight to member papers who create the original stories that AP would traditionally get credit for. In a world where syndication is available to anyone with an Internet connection, what is AP selling?
Everywhere you look, newspapers and magazines are trying to figure out how to evolve in an online world. Some have merged with online outlets, like Newsweek did with The Daily Beast, while others — including the New York Times — are busy putting up paywalls to try and retain readers. But The Atlantic took a more radical approach to surviving in the web era: it set out to deliberately disrupt its own business, rather than letting someone else do it, and while the experiment is not over yet, it seems to be paying dividends for the magazine’s parent company.
A feature in the New York Times on Sunday details how the magazine, which has been around for over 150 years, has not turned a profit for more than a decade — but is now looking at recording a healthy profit for 2010 of almost $2 million. How did it manage to do such a thing? According to Atlantic Media president Justin Smith, who joined the company at a low point three years ago, the magazine imagined itself as a venture-capital backed startup in Silicon Valley “whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic.” As he described it to the New York Times:
In essence, we brainstormed the question, “What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?”
The first thing to do was to remove the walls — both literal and figurative — between the web side and the print side of the publication, both in terms of the business operations and the editorial division. Another wall that came down was the website’s paywall (are you listening, New York Times?). Younger writers with web experience were hired, and advertising staff were given the freedom to sell print or online ads, so long as they hit their targets. The magazine also branched out into conferences and other brand-extension experiments, and it hired superstar blogger Andrew Sullivan away from Time magazine.
The result? Revenue at The Atlantic has almost doubled since 2005, hitting $32 million this year, of which half is made up of advertising revenue. Digital advertising accounts for almost 40 percent of that number, compared with less than 15 percent at some other traditional print publications, and the amount of digital ad revenue is up by close to 70 percent over 2009. The addition of traffic draws like Sullivan has undoubtedly helped — he accounts for almost 25 percent of the site’s 4.8 million monthly unique visitors, a number that is up 50 percent over last year.
As the NYT feature notes, not every traditional publication is going to be able to do what The Atlantic has done — or at least, not as easily. It is a relatively small business compared with giants such as Newsweek and Time magazine, and has a single motivated owner. But The Atlantic had plenty of one thing that was crucial to its success: desperation. According to owner David Bradley, who bought the magazine in 1999, “Atlantic had so serially failed that it was overwhelmingly likely the next thing we would do was fail, and the next thing we would do was fail.”
That sense of desperation provided just the impetus that the magazine needed to remake itself — and not just a little, but from the top down and from the inside out. There are plenty of traditional media outlets who could use a bit more of that desperation themselves, as they tinker and fidget instead of making the hard changes that need to be made.
As WikiLeaks continues to release classified diplomatic cables, and fights to remain online and solvent, it is becoming increasingly clear that what is happening has less to do with WikiLeaks itself, and more to do with what seems to be a new form of media emerging: not a news or journalism entity specifically, but a kind of media middleman that exposes secret or undiscovered information, which can then become a source of news. Could WikiLeaks — and the other similar efforts it appears to be spawning — become a crucial new part of the digital media ecosystem?
Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen WikiLeaks attacked by the U.S. government — now apparently considering espionage charges against leader Julian Assange for publishing the cables — and shut down by companies such as PayPal and Amazon (which seems to see no irony in selling a book made up of the WikiLeaks’ cables). Both of those companies have in turn come under attack by Anonymous, a rogue group of hackers who targeted their websites as part of what the group called Operation Payback, although the group appears to be moving away from denial-of-service attacks to less destructive attention-getting strategies.
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks has been making itself so distributed — by setting up over a thousand mirror sites through which it can publish documents automatically, as well as moving servers to several different hosts — that it seems almost unassailable, even if Assange is found guilty of something. The WikiLeaks founder has said that in addition to the mirror sites, BitTorrent archives of the cables have been provided to 10,000 sources who could continue to publish them even if WikiLeaks was somehow taken offline.
And it’s not just WikiLeaks any more: a new spin-off group called OpenLeaks, formed in part by a splinter faction from within WikiLeaks, says it is launching next week with much the same mandate as its predecessor — to make documents public whether governments and companies want them to be or not. And another group calling itself BrusselsLeaks is apparently also looking to create the kind of document clearinghouse that WikiLeaks has set up, but it will be focused on **.
As Evgeny Morozov notes in a piece written for the New York Times, and in a summary of that piece on his blog at Foreign Affairs magazine, WikiLeaks has come to serve as a kind of middleman for media outlets such as the NYT and The Guardian. Although these entities have investigative teams, they can’t possibly find everything — and there is so much more information out there to comb through. What agencies such as WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks could provide is a single source for such documents, as well as a way of publicizing that these secrets have been revealed, something that WikiLeaks has done very well.
Do newspapers and other media need WikiLeaks? Some would argue that the sources who went to Assange could just as easily have gone to the NYT or The Guardian directly. So why didn’t they? Possibly because they wanted the information to be spread more widely than just one media outlet, or were worried that one newspaper might not report on the cables properly if they were the only ones with that information. In a sense, as my former colleague Doug Saunders — the European bureau chief for Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail — has noted, WikiLeaks is not that different from the brown envelope that the leaker behind the Watergate scandal delivered documents in.
In this era of real-time publishing and the ubiquitous web, however, the power of that brown envelope has been amplified a thousandfold, and its reach is far broader than was ever possible before, and that changes the game entirely.
If you’ve used a smartphone — like an iPhone or an Android, or one of the newer BlackBerrys — for a fairly long time, here’s a challenge: go for a day or two without your phone, and see how it feels. And I don’t mean going skiing or hiking the Appalachian Trail or something like that either; try to go without it during a regular day in a city, or better still try to do without it when you are on a business trip to an unfamiliar city. I did that — not deliberately, mind you — on a recent day in San Francisco, when my iPhone suddenly decided to lock me out (maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention to it). And it was a painful experience.
Why was it painful? Simply put, I was disconnected. And I don’t mean that I couldn’t make phone calls — in fact, that was the part about the phone I missed the least. But I couldn’t look up where I was in Google Maps or any other GPS-based service, to try and find out where I was going, or measure how long it was going to take me, or get directions on how to get there (I was trying to get to the Apple store, so they could help me fix the phone, which suddenly started asking me for a passcode, even though I hadn’t set one). Particularly in an unfamiliar city, this kind of tool is hugely useful — and even in the city I normally live in, I use it all the time.
But it was more than just that. I couldn’t take photos of my surroundings, which is another thing I like to do a lot (especially in a city as great-looking as San Francisco), because the iPhone is my main camera, and I have it with me at all times. I used to like to snap shots and upload them to Flickr or Facebook — and now I share them with Instagram — a service that posts your photos to a stream your friends can follow and comment on, but also automatically cross-posts them to other services as well, including Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and Tumblr.
Twitter and Facebook were the other two things I missed. As anyone who follows me on Twitter (I’m @mathewi) probably knows, I share a lot on Twitter — thoughts, but mostly links to interesting content. It’s become an integral part of my day (and often of my night as well); not just posting things that I come across, but reading and commenting on the things that others post. I know it’s an overused term, but it really is a conversation, and it was something I missed a lot. And probably above all else, I missed being able to do that while killing time waiting in line — like the line I was waiting in to get my phone fixed.
But it was more than that. I missed the ability to look up anything I was curious about in Google at a moment’s notice. What is that building? Why is it called that? What does that sign mean? Why is there a giant bow and arrow sticking in the ground near the Embarcadero, which is right on the bay in San Francisco? Lots of questions like that occurred to me, but I was incapable of finding the answers. Sure, I could have bought a guidebook or something, or I suppose I could have stopped someone, but the ability to do it from a handheld device on a whim is something I have become fairly addicted to. And I have learned a lot as well.
This isn’t about the iPhone either — I am a big fan of the iPhone, but I think it’s fine if other people use a BlackBerry or an Android. My point is that smartphones have changed our lives in hundreds of tiny ways, and it isn’t until we try to spend a day or two without them that we find out exactly how dependent we are on them. Is that a good thing? I don’t know, to be honest. Maybe not. Maybe I should remember more things, instead of relying on my ability to look them up in Google. But I do know that having those tools at my fingertips is incredibly powerful — it may change the world, but it has certainly changed mine. And I think for the better.
If the WikiLeaks saga was a comic book, it would be starting to look a lot like the Justice League of America vs. the League of Supervillians — or maybe it’s more like Star Wars, with the plucky rebel alliance up against the might of the Empire. As the U.S. government and a variety of corporations such as Visa and PayPal keep up the pressure on the document-leaking organization that they see as a traitor and a scofflaw, a rough alliance of WikiLeaks supporters have taken it upon themselves to wage a cyber-war in its defense.
Leading the fight is a shadowy group called Operation Payback, which in turn is loosely affiliated with Anonymous, an organization (although that term makes it sound more co-ordinated than it really is) that grew out of the alternative website 4chan, and became infamous for its attacks on Scientology, among other things. At last check, the Operation Payback site itself was offline — another symptom of the back-and-forth battle in which the group has been co-ordinating “distributed denial of service” or DDoS attacks on Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard.
All of those corporations have cut off support for WikiLeaks in the past week, despite the fact that it’s not clear the organization has actually done anything illegal by publishing classified military documents — something the New York Times and The Guardian have also done. In a statement on its website, Operation Payback quoted digital guru John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who said on Twitter that “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” Operation Payback added that:
While we don’t have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas.
It’s not clear how much disruption the group and its supporters have been able to create, however. MasterCard’s website was down for at least part of Wednesday, but the company said its cardholders and payment systems were not affected. PayPal said that it suffered a denial-of-service attack on Monday but that it was dealt with fairly rapidly, and Visa has not reported any issues at all so far. The website for the Swedish bank that froze WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange’s accounts went down for at least part of Tuesday, but the bank’s other operations appeared unaffected.
In other words, the Empire remains strong. Meanwhile, after sending out a plea for ways to keep the site up and running following the removal of DNS services by its provider EveryDNS, the organization now has over 1,200 mirror sites set up — many of them in Europe — through which it can publish any documents instantly. The site has also taken a number of other steps that will make it virtually impossible to remove it completely from the Internet (including having at least some of its servers hosted by The Pirate Bay, the file-sharing network based in Sweden) and Assange has said that there are over 10,000 sites that have full copies of the diplomatic cables.
The cyber-noose is tightening around Wikileaks: Visa has joined the list of corporations that will no longer allow its users to send payments to the organization, which is looking for funding support as it continues to release thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables. MasterCard has done the same, and so has online payment service PayPal. All three have said they have legal concerns about dealing with WikiLeaks — but is there any real justification for this? Not really. In fact, it’s not clear that what WikiLeaks is doing is even illegal.
As media analyst Jeff Jarvis and others have pointed out, Visa and MasterCard and other payment services allow online users to send funds to a wide range of questionable entities, including sites that offer pornography. So why are they so concerned about WikiLeaks? Visa said that it had suspended support for payments to WikiLeaks while it “investigates” the organization, while MasterCard said that its rules prohibit customers from “directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal.” PayPal also said its terms of use prevents the service from being used to “encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.”
Needless to say, the phrasing of those rules casts a pretty wide net — not just engaging in illegal activity, but encouraging it or instructing others in how to engage in it. But do even these broad rules apply to what WikiLeaks is doing? It’s not clear that they do. All the organization has done is to publish classified documents that originally belonged to the U.S. government — something that may be uncomfortable and embarrassing, but is not obviously illegal (even the Justice Department doesn’t seem too sure about whether WikiLeaks is guilty of anything). The only obvious crime that was involved in the release of those diplomatic cables was committed by the person who originally took them, since doing so is an offence under the U.S. Espionage Act.
Publishing those documents is not illegal — or at least, not yet, which is why Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn), the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, has put forward his proposed SHIELD law (which stands for Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination), which would make it a crime to publish leaked classified information if doing so endangered U.S. agents or was otherwise not in the national interest. And this law would not just apply to WikiLeaks, but potentially any mainstream or online publication or media outlet that chose to publish any of the information, since — as I have tried to argue before — WikiLeaks is effectively a media entity.
Google today launched its long-awaited electronic book store, called simply Google eBooks, with more than 3 million titles and 4,000 publishers participating as partners, including most of the major industry names. Independent booksellers will also be able to offer Google eBooks through a relationship with the American Booksellers’ Association, and the company is launching an affiliate network as well. The web giant’s offering — which it said is based on a “buy anywhere, read anywhere” philosophy — is likely to ramp up competition in the electronic book market, which until now has been dominated by Amazon and Apple.
James Crawford, director of engineering for the Google Books team, said the company has scanned in over 15 million books through its massive book-scanning project, which “makes us one of the largest libraries in the world.” In the Google eBook store there will be 2.8 million books available to download free of charge, since they are in the public domain, and the rest will have a “buy” button next to them that takes readers directly to the eBook store. Google’s publishing partners include major names such as Random House, Simon & Schuster and Penguin, but also a range of smaller publishers and scholarly houses such as the Oxford University Press and Reed Elsevier.
Google will pay the publisher 52 percent of the list price if sold through Google’s store, or 45 percent if it is sold through the company’s retail partners. The web giant said it did not take a stand on whether to accept the relatively new “agency model” for selling e-books (which was introduced when Apple joined the market with the iPad), in which the publisher gets to set the price in the e-book store, rather than letting the retailer choose. Less than 10 percent of the company’s publishing partners asked for an agency deal, but they represent over half of the best-sellers in the store, the company said.
In addition to the publisher partnerships, Google is also launching an affiliate network — although Amanda Edmonds, director of strategic partnerships for the Google Books team, said the company so far only has one affiliate signed up, a site called Goodreads, which is devoted to books and discussion about books. Anyone reading a discussion forum or thread about a book that is available in the Google eBooks store will be able to click “buy” from within the discussion and go directly to the checkout at Google’s store, Edmonds said.
As part of today’s launch, Google is releasing a dedicated eBook-reading app for Android devices, and Crawford said the company also is “working on getting an app into the iTunes store” for the iPhone and iPad. Google e-books will also be compatible with the Sony Reader and the Nook reader from Barnes & Noble — but only titles without digital-rights management controls will be available for reading on the Kindle, he said, because the Kindle has a closed content-protection system for its books. And most books will also be available in the open source ePub format.
“We’re not peddling devices here –we want to focus on selling books,” Crawford said. Google e-books will be readable in any modern web browser, and for books that the company has scanned in, readers will also be able to toggle between standard view and image format, which will show the actual scans of the physical book’s pages and any photos or illustrations from the original book.
The Google e-book manager said that the company is focused on what he called a “cloud-based model of consumption,” in which “you never have to worry about where your book is, what page you were on, or where you bought it,” because it is always available in your browser or app. “We think ultimately e-books should be like physical books,” Crawford said. “Most people don’t have bookshelves sorted by which retailer they bought it from.” In the longer term, the Google manager said, “maybe the industry can come together and agree on a standard for e-books so they can be shared” across devices.
The past week has seen plenty of ink spilled — virtual and otherwise — about WikiLeaks and its mercurial front-man, Julian Assange, and the pressure they have come under from the U.S. government and companies such as Amazon and PayPal, both of which have blocked WikiLeaks from using their services. Why should we care about any of this? Because more than anything else, WikiLeaks is a publisher — a new kind of publisher, but a publisher nonetheless — and that makes this a freedom of the press issue. Like it or not, WikiLeaks is fundamentally a journalistic entity, and as such it deserves our protection.
Not everyone agrees with this point of view, of course. Some argue that there is nothing journalistic about the organization whatsoever, and that it is simply a lawless group of misfits spreading information around that it doesn’t have the right to distribute, without caring for the effects of its actions. That may be true — but it’s also true that the same description fits more than one allegedly journalistic entity in the traditional media sphere, and they are all protected by the First Amendment and its principles regarding freedom of the press. So why is WikiLeaks not worthy of the same protection?
Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn), the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, is the one who put pressure on Amazon to remove support for WikiLeaks (although the company claims it removed the organization’s site from its servers because Wikileaks did not own the rights to the content, not because of political pressure). Senator Lieberman has proposed legislation called the SHIELD law — short for Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination — which would make it a crime to publish information that might harm U.S. agents or informants, or would otherwise be contrary to the national interest.
This might as well be called the WikiLeaks law, since it is clearly targeted at the organization — which did not actually leak the documents (something that is already a crime under the Espionage Act) but is clearly publishing them. But the heavy hand of this law would not just fall on WikiLeaks; it would also potentially cover anyone who has published the cables, such as the New York Times. Just as sources used to leak secret documents to newspapers, which often published them regardless of whether the government disapproved, now those sources can go to WikiLeaks and accomplish the same thing.
So what makes WikiLeaks different from the New York Times? There are the obvious things, of course — the latter publishes a print newspaper, is a member of a variety of self-regulatory bodies involving the media, and is a venerable institution with a long history of journalistic integrity. WikiLeaks, meanwhile, is a shadowy organization with an uncertain history, opaque motivations and publishes only online. That said, why are we so eager to protect one and not the other? WikiLeaks’ stated intention is to bring transparency to the political process and expose wrongdoing. Isn’t that the same thing the Times does? And yet one is being hounded by government agents, forced to remove its documents from Amazon’s servers and blocked from using PayPal, while the other is free to publish whatever it wants. What if the Times were to store some of its content on Amazon’s EC2 servers or use PayPal for transactions — would it be subject to the same treatment? And if not, why is WikiLeaks?
Some would argue that we don’t need entities like WikiLeaks, because traditional publishers like the New York Times are good enough. And it’s true that leakers took their information to newspapers before WikiLeaks came along — but it’s also true that many of them refused to publish it. And in some cases, information that should not have been published actually took the spotlight away from the truth, as in the case of the Times’ reporting leading up to the Iraq War. An independent source of documents like WikiLeaks (which journalism professor Jay Rosen has called the world’s “first stateless news organization”) would have been a very valuable thing to have during that time.
The fact is that freedom of the press, like freedom of speech in general, is a crucial part of the fabric of a free society. Every action that impinges on those freedoms is a loss for society, and a step down a slippery slope — and that applies to everything that falls under the term “press,” regardless of whether we agree with its methods or its leaders. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out, online speech is only as strong as the weakest intermediary. Any action that the government or its representatives take against a publisher like WikiLeaks should have to meet a very high bar indeed — and as Dan Gillmor argues, everyone working at the New York Times or any other media outlet should feel a shiver when they see Joe Lieberman attacking WikiLeaks, because it could just as easily be them in the spotlight instead of Julian Assange.
The international cat-and-mouse game continues between WikiLeaks and various governments over the diplomatic cables the organization recently published: in just the past few days, the site has been kicked off Amazon’s cloud-hosting platform and had its domain-name service cancelled by a second company — and even a data visualization project based on the WikiLeaks cables has been shut down. All of which raises a number of questions, including: Does the world need a stateless, independent data haven to protect the kind of freedom of information that WikiLeaks represents?
Just to recap, Amazon removed WikiLeaks’ website from its EC2 cloud on Thursday, after Senator Joe Lieberman — the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee — complained about U.S. companies helping to distribute what he called illegal documents. The web company released a statement late on Thursday saying that it was not pressured into removing the WikiLeaks data, but did so because the organization breached its terms of service, which require those uploading data to have the rights to publish that information, and to refrain from uploading data that could lead to personal injury (some have argued that the leaked cables could jeopardize the lives of human-rights workers and U.S. informants).
WikiLeaks moved its site back to another hosting provider — one which apparently uses a server farm deep within a Swedish mountain, similar to the fictional data warehouse in Neal Stephenson’s book Cryptonomicon. But within hours of making that move, the organization’s website was again taken offline, this time by its DNS provider, EveryDNS.com. According to the company, WikiLeaks’ website was being besieged by hackers using a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which risked affecting other customers (WikiLeaks originally moved its site to Amazon’s servers for the same reason). After moving its data to a server host in Switzerland, the site was back up again on Friday.
Although both Amazon and EasyDNS had what seemed to be valid reasons for removing support for WikiLeaks, both companies were undoubtedly also painfully aware of the mounting political pressure from the U.S. government — both from Senator Lieberman and others — to disassociate themselves from WikiLeaks or face potential legal action. And while many critics accused Amazon of bowing to pressure and failing to uphold freedom of speech, the reality is that private companies are entitled to do whatever they wish in the interests of their business and shareholders (within certain limits), as Derrick pointed out in his recent post.
More than anything, what WikiLeaks needs is a stable place to host its data — and potentially a separate DNS system — that is not susceptible to government interference or the kind of pressure that Amazon came under for dealing with the site (although Assange said in a Q&A Friday at The Guardian that the most recent data has been distributed to 100,000 people in encrypted form). The pictures of the mountain bunker where WikiLeaks’ data is stored, and the comparisons to the data warehouse in the novel Cryptonomicon, reminded a number of observers of an early attempt to create such a data haven: the idea was to store servers in a former military platform in the North Sea known as Sealand — whose owner claims that it is an independent country — but the effort never got off the ground.
With millions of servers in locations around the world, Google seems like a natural partner for WikiLeaks — and the company has refused in the past to remove controversial content from its sites, despite requests from the government, defending its actions based on the principle of freedom of speech. But even Google likely doesn’t want to take on Homeland Security and face potential prosecution. And so WikiLeaks will no doubt continue having to roam from from hosting country to hosting country, like the 21st century equivalent of the Flying Dutchman, doomed to sail the digital oceans forever.
As newspapers everywhere struggle to stay afloat and remake themselves for a web-based world, many continue to debate how much emphasis they should put on digital versus their traditional print operations. John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register group of newspapers, says the time for debate is over: newspapers need to be digital first in everything they do, he says, and more than that, they need to take the same approach to media and their content business that many web-based startups have, and that means being transparent, crowdsourced, collaborative and flat.
In a speech he delivered Thursday at the Transformation of News Summit in Cambridge, Mass. (put on by the International Newsmedia Marketing Association or INMA), Paton said that the Journal Register — which he took over in February — has been living and breathing these principles for the past year, and that they have paid off in terms of revenue and profit growth for the company, which was effectively bankrupt last year.
In effect, Paton says, the Journal Register — which publishes about 170 daily and weekly papers in Philadelphia, Michigan, Connecticut and New Jersey — is already a digital-first company whether it wants to be or not, because its total online audience is bigger than its print audience. “We are already a Digital company,” he said in his presentation, “with small sales in the area of growth and a burdensome cost structure on the declining business – Print.” The newspaper CEO said the company has dealt with that cost structure problem by outsourcing everything that it can to others who can do it cheaper or better.
We are getting out of anything that does not fall into our core competencies of content creation and the selling of our audience to advertisers. Get rid of the bricks and iron [and] focus on core competencies — meaning, get rid of those things that don’t add value to the business. Reduce it or stop it. Outsource it or sell it.
What’s most interesting about the Journal Register’s approach is that it doesn’t rely on putting up paywalls, the way that media mogul Rupert Murdoch has done at his newspapers in Britain — which led to a decline in online readership of more than 90 percent — and the way some other media outlets such as the New York Times are planning. Instead, Paton is focused on expanding the relationship that his newspapers have with both readers and advertisers in their local communities, and taking that online. And he says it is working even better than expected.
Digital Ad growth is 2 times better than the industry. More importantly the Company’s digital revenue has grown from negligible to 11 % of ad revenue in November – in less than a year. The Company will write about 1,000 digital ad orders this month and has expanded its revenue streams from about 13 basic revenue streams to about 60. And all of that with less costs.
In addition to the advertising growth, Paton says that his papers are reaching out to the communities they serve, to make them part of what he calls the “new news ecosystem.” For one paper, the Register Citizen in Connecticut, that means creating a new community newsroom, which the newspaper is moving into later this month — the new offices have no walls, Paton says, and feature “a newsroom café with free public wifi, a community media lab and a community journalism school.”
The Journal Register CEO has also been taking the same approach to his own company: earlier this year, Paton launched a project called ideaLab, in which employees from across the company were chosen from an open application process that generated almost 200 comments on Paton’s blog (his post about the lab is here). Armed with their choice of mobile phone, a Netbook and iPad, members of the ideaLab get 10 hours of paid time per week to experiment and innovate — and only one rule, Paton said: there are no rules, and no sacred cows. Paton also had strong words in his presentation about why most newspapers are not changing:
The reasons… are simple: Fear, lack of knowledge and an aging managerial cadre that is cynically calculating how much they DON’T have to change before they get across the early retirement goal line. Look at the grey heads in any newspaper and you will see what I am talking about.
The solution, according to Paton?
Stop listening to newspaper people. We have had nearly 15 years to figure out the Web and as an industry we newspaper people are no good at it. No good at it at all. Want to get good at it? Then stop listening to the newspaper people and start listening to the rest of the world. And, I would point out, as we have done at JRC – put the Digital people in charge – of everything.
Whether anyone decides to take the Journal Register Co. CEO’s advice, it seems clear that the approach is working for Paton’s chain — he says in the year to date, the company outperformed the newspaper industry, with ad revenue growth that was three times better than the industry average and classified ad performance that was six times better.
the Journal Register Co., which . Journal Register’s new CEO, John Paton, has been aggressively launching new-media related ventures at the company, including a community journalism lab aimed at training local bloggers.
Amazon has removed WikiLeaks’ website and related files from its servers, a move that appears to be a result of pressure from the U.S. government not to support the document-leaking organization. According to several news reports, Senator Joseph Lieberman — the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee — had asked the web company to remove its support for WikiLeaks, which moved some or all of its website and related files to Amazon’s servers after it suffered a “distributed denial of service” attack by unknown parties.
It’s not clear whether Senator Lieberman’s actions led to Amazon’s decision, but the senator said in a statement that the company had informed his staff Wednesday morning it was no longer hosting the website, and that he wished Amazon “had taken this action earlier.” The senator added that the release of classified diplomatic cables was illegal and outrageous, and that this had “compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world.” Lieberman said he was going to ask Amazon about “the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks,” and what the company planned to do in the future to prevent being used in a similar way to host illegal material.
On Wednesday afternoon, WikiLeaks posted a comment on Twitter saying that its servers at Amazon had been “ousted,” and that its money would now be spent “to employ people in Europe,” suggesting that its website had been moved back to a hosting service outside the U.S. The organization, which has come under fire for hosting classified documents belonging to the American government — including videotapes related to attacks on civilians in Iraq — later posted a message saying that “If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.”
WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson told Reuters that he was unaware of the latest situation on servers, but that the organization had “ways and means to bypass any closure of our services.” A number of prominent members of the technology industry criticized the move by Amazon, including SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha — who called the decision “disappointing” in a Twitter message — and Dan Gillmor of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, who said the decision showed a “lack of spine.”
It’s worth noting that the U.S. State Department reached out to Twitter during the Iran protests last year, and asked the micro-blogging network to postpone some work that would have taken the network down, since it was such an important way of getting information out about the military action in that country. But when it comes to information about political matters involving the U.S. itself, the government seems more than happy to do whatever it takes to get certain things offline.
As companies add social software to help their employees work together more efficiently, and software makers add social features to take advantage of the kind of behavior seen on Twitter and Facebook, there is a growing risk that workers could get overloaded by all the information coming at them, says Jive Software chairman and former CEO Dave Hersh. A big part of what companies and workers have to deal with now is simply “noise management,” Hersh says, because the amount of data coming at them is so overwhelming.
“There’s just so much information out there, and it’s coming at people at a deafening rate,” the Jive founder said in a recent interview. The risk, Hersh says, is that some employees are going to start retreating from these newer tools (if they haven’t already) and take refuge in the old applications and behaviors that they are comfortable with — even if they don’t work very well. “Many people are reverting back to the things they are familiar with, such as email and face-to-face meetings,” says Hersh, because they feel overloaded by all the new tools they have to use.
The Jive founder and I will be talking about these and other issues involving what we call the “human cloud” and the future of work at our Net:Work conference in San Francisco next week, at the Mission Bay Conference Center on December 9th, along with Google’s vice president of product management Bradley Horowitz (the full list of speakers for the conference is here). There isn’t much time left, so if you haven’t registered already, be sure to get a ticket soon.
Hersh says that the increasing problem of information overload puts pressure on both companies and software makers to emphasize ease of use and the needs of users over feature-creep and the desire to have an all-in-one solution. “It’s like the TV remote problem,” the Jive founder says. “Everybody has eight remotes and they are a hundred buttons on each one, so eventually people just give up.” New tools need to be designed in such a way that they make people want to use them, he says. “They have to understand inherently why they are worth using or they just won’t do it.”
A comment from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone sparked much discussion recently about whether the company was planning to create a news service using its network. Our response was that Twitter already functions as a news network, since it allows anyone to publish quickly and easily from virtually anywhere. And we’ve seen another excellent example of what that means for real-time “networked journalism” over the past few days, as a 17-year-old resident of one of Brazil’s biggest slums used Twitter as a live-reporting tool during the riots and crackdowns by the police in Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil has been under increasing tension over the past weeks and months, as the government tries to clean up some of the crime and other issues in its second-largest city, which will be the host site for the 2014 World Cup of soccer as well as the 2016 Olympics. The country has promised to improve security as part of its bid for both, and Rio de Janeiro’s governor has also promised repeatedly to crush the drug gangs that have effective control over many of the “favelas” or slums in the city. This has included raids during the past week on the so-called German Complex or “Complexo do Alemao.”
One of the residents of that favela is 17-year-old Rene Silva. As the BBC describes in a story today, however, the teenager has been much more than just a bystander during the police raids in his neighborhood: using Twitter and a network of friends and fellow residents throughout the German Complex, he has been acting as a kind of one-man news service, reporting to the outside world in real-time as armored vehicles moved into the shantytown and heavily-armed drug dealers escaped into the hills around the city.
In addition to simply posting and re-tweeting observations from the ground on his Twitter account @vozdacommunidade (Voice of the Community), Silva even set up a mobile phone with video capabilities on the roof of his house and streamed video of the raids. And it’s clear that reporting on his community using whatever means possible was in the teenager’s blood even before Twitter came along: the name of his Twitter account is also the name of the community newspaper he started when he was just 11 years old. By Sunday night, Silva had over 20,000 followers and was being interviewed on prime-time television.
This is about more than just a kid using Twitter though. As co-founder Evan Williams described it recently in an interview, one of the powerful things about the micro-blogging network is that it lowers the barriers to publishing, and that this results in “more voices and more ways to find the truth.” Silva’s use of the service to provide an eyewitness view of the Rio raids is a powerful example of that at work.
As the BBC describes, the images of the raids in Rio de Janeiro — burning buses, firefights in the street with drug gangs, and so on — were readily available to anyone watching CNN or any other news program, along with analysis and reactions from “a succession of security experts, sociologists, lawyers and anthropologists.” But missing from much of this coverage are the people living inside the favelas themselves. In that sense, Silva’s coverage via Twitter served a crucial real-time, news-gathering function, one that would likely not have been possible otherwise.
