Tag: Journalism

Turns Out That the New York Times Buried the Weinstein Story 13 Years Ago

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It turns out that Sharon Waxman wrote just such a story, and it was edited to irrelevance by New York Times senior staff in 2004:

A whole lot of fur has been flying since last Thursday, when The New York Times published a game-changing investigative story about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct that in lightning speed brought the mogul to his knees.

He apologized and took an immediate leave of absence from the company he co-founded, but that wasn’t enough. His board members and legal advisers have been resigning en masse. And as new, ugly details emerge of three decades of settlements for sex-related offenses, he’s quickly becoming a national pariah.

I applaud The New York Times and writers Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey for getting the story in print. I’m sure it was a long and difficult road.

But I simply gagged when I read Jim Rutenberg’s sanctimonious piece on Saturday about the “media enablers” who kept this story from the public for decades.

………

The story I reported never ran.

After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted.

was told at the time that Weinstein had visited the newsroom in person to make his displeasure known. I knew he was a major advertiser in the Times, and that he was a powerful person overall.

But I had the facts, and this was the Times. Right?

Wrong. The story was stripped of any reference to sexual favors or coercion and buried on the inside of the Culture section, an obscure story about Miramax firing an Italian executive. Who cared?

The only question I have is, “Why Now?”

There has to be some sort of back-story which we have not yet heard.

This has been an open secret for years.

A friend of my father’s has been deep in Oregon politics for years, and she said that it was generally known that Bob Packwood was a sexually abusive drunk for at least a decade before this became public.

Why does this sort of crap stay covered up and then suddenly come out?

I can understand a few years, but why a few decades?

Why does it take so f%$#ing long?

This Story Is Not What You Think It Is

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For the past few days, there has been a story making the rounds about how a mother has been sent to jail for refusing to vaccinate her child.

You could think of this as a story of overreach by public health authorities, but it’s not.

You could also think of it as long overdue action by public health authorities against the clear and present dangers of the loss of herd immunity, but it’s not that either.

It’s a child custody dispute.

Both parents have joint custody, and they ended up in court to adjudicate their disagreement over whether or not their child should be immunized.

They judge ruled, the wife disobeyed, and he sent her to jail for contempt of court.

This is a remarkably ordinary dispute between two divorced parents over a medical decision, and that is all.

The Motives of Leakers Don’t Matter

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What matters is what they leaked, and the context of that information.

Case in point, if one looks at the history perhaps the most prominent leaker of all time, Mark “Deep Throat” Felt, it becomes clear that he was motivated by a desire to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as the head of the FBI, not concerns about either the bureau or the rule of law:

The unarticulated presumption, which Sullivan, Litman and Rich are not alone in making, is that Felt—the FBI’s deputy director in June 1972, and subsequently the parking-garage interlocutor who steered Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to reportorial heights—was an honorable, selfless whistleblower intent on exposing the lawlessness rampant in the Nixon White House. Or, as David Remnick spelled out in the New Yorker—echoing Deep Throat’s original hagiographers, Woodward and Bernstein—Felt “believed that the Nixon administration was corrupt, paranoid and trying to infringe on the independence of the bureau.” The president and his top aides ran, Felt believed, “a criminal operation out of the White House, and [Felt] risked everything to guide” the Post reporters. A new biopic about Felt, starring Liam Neeson, is due out on September 29 and shows every sign of continuing to portray Deep Throat as a profound patriot and dedicated FBI lifer.

But here’s a heretical thought: Mark Felt was no hero. Getting rid of Nixon was the last thing Felt ever wanted to accomplish; indeed, he was banking on Nixon’s continuation in office to achieve his one and only aim: to reach the top of the FBI pyramid and become director. Felt didn’t help the media for the good of the country, he used the media in service of his own ambition. Things just didn’t turn out anywhere close to the way he wanted.

Only recently, more than four decades after Nixon’s downfall, has it become possible to reconstruct Felt’s design and what really happened during those fateful six months following the Watergate break-in. Doing so requires burrowing through a great number of primary documents and government records against the backdrop of a vast secondary literature. Nixon’s surreptitious tape recordings rank first in importance, but only mark the starting point. One has to also research documents from the FBI’s vast Watergate investigation; the bureau’s subsequent internal leak investigation; records from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force; documents from Felt’s own FBI file; and lastly, two unintentionally rewarding books: Mark Felt’s original 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid, and the slightly reworked version published in 2006, A G-Man’s Life. What you’ll end up with is the real story of Deep Throat. And you might be left with this realization: No matter what happens to Donald Trump—whether he’s absolved, exposed or neither—you should hope there’s nobody as duplicitous as Mark Felt manipulating our understanding of Russiagate.

Here’s the important thing:  Felt’s motives do not matter.

Except to the degree that they effect credibility,* a source’s motives never matter.

What matters was that he was telling the truth.

What matters is the accuracy of the information and the significance of the information.

If reporters refused to take information from disgruntled bureaucratic climbers, there would be very little real news out there.

*Yes, I acknowledge that the trustworthiness of the source is a big f%$#ing deal. But once you are past that not inconsiderable hump, motive does not matter.

Libel Troll Fraudster Gets Case Thrown Out of Court

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Shiva Ayyadurai claimed to have created email in 1978.

The facts, of course speak otherwise.

Email predates his high school freshman programming exercise by at least 10 years, email actually accounted for over half of all ARPANet traffic two years before he wrote his program, but that didn’t stop him from attempting to sue Techdirt out of existence, possibly in collusion with wannabe Bond villain and literal vampire Peter Thiel.

Well, the judge just threw out his whole case.

It’s not a complete win for the defendant, because the federal judge did not strike the case under California’s anti-SLAPP law, which would have have allowed them to sue for legal fees and penalties, but this is still an unambiguous win:

As you likely know, for most of the past nine months, we’ve been dealing with a defamation lawsuit from Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims to have invented email. This is a claim that we have disputed at great length and in great detail, showing how email existed long before Ayyadurai wrote his program. We pointed to the well documented public history of email, and how basically all of the components that Ayyadurai now claims credit for preceded his own work. We discussed how his arguments were, at best, misleading, such as arguing that the copyright on his program proved that he was the “inventor of email” — since patents and copyrights are very different, and just because Microsoft has a copyright on “Windows” it does not mean it “invented” the concept of a windowed graphical user interface (because it did not). As I have said, a case like this is extremely draining — especially on an emotional level — and can create massive chilling effects on free speech.

A few hours ago, the judge ruled and we prevailed. The case has been dismissed and the judge rejected Ayyadurai’s request to file an amended complaint. We are certainly pleased with the decision and his analysis, which notes over and over again that everything that we stated was clearly protected speech, and the defamation (and other claims) had no merit. This is, clearly, a big win for the First Amendment and free speech — especially the right to call out and criticize a public figure such as Shiva Ayyadurai, who is now running for the US Senate in Massachusetts. We’re further happy to see the judge affirm that CDA Section 230 protects us from being sued over comments made on the blog, which cannot be attributed to us under the law. We talk a lot about the importance of CDA 230, in part because it protects sites like our own from these kinds of lawsuits. This is just one more reason we’re so concerned about the latest attempt in Congress to undermine CDA 230. While those supporting the bill may claim that it only targets sites like Backpage, such changes to CDA 230 could have a much bigger impact on smaller sites like our own.

We are disappointed, however, that the judge denied our separate motion to strike under California’s anti-SLAPP law. For years, we’ve discussed the importance of strong anti-SLAPP laws that protect individuals and sites from going through costly legal battles. Good anti-SLAPP laws do two things: they stop lawsuits early and they make those who bring SLAPP suits — that is, lawsuits clearly designed to silence protected speech — pay the legal fees. The question in this case was whether or not California’s anti-SLAPP law should apply to a case brought in Massachusetts. While other courts have said that the state of the speaker should determine which anti-SLAPP laws are applied (even in other states’ courts), it was an issue that had not yet been ruled upon in the First Circuit where this case was heard. While we’re happy with the overall dismissal and the strong language used to support our free speech rights, we’re nevertheless disappointed that the judge chose not to apply California’s anti-SLAPP law here.

This guy is running for Senate in Massachusetts, as a Republican, and he gave a speech at the recent white supremacist rally in Boston.

He also claims that anyone who knows the history of email is a racist.

What a lovely fellow.

Looting 101

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Common across American business, but particularly cherished by the tech sector, is stock grants to senior management.

It turns out that the primary reason for this is that it allows companies to ignore the cost of stratospheric pay levels and creating misleading metrics to justify bonuses:

Investors liked what they saw in PayPal’s second-quarter financial results, reported by the digital and mobile payments giant on July 26. Revenues grew to $3.14 billion in the quarter that ended in June, an increase of 18 percent over the same period last year. Total payment volume of $106 billion was up 23 percent, year over year.

Even better, PayPal’s favored earnings-per-share measure — which it does not calculate in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP — came in at 46 cents per share, 3 cents more than Wall Street analysts had expected. The company has trained investors to focus on this number, rather than on the less pretty GAAP-compliant numbers most companies are judged by. And focus they did.

Exceeding analysts’ estimates — “beating the number,” in Wall Street parlance — is crucial for any corporate leader interested in keeping his or her stock price aloft. Even the smallest earnings miss can send shares tumbling.

………

Naturally, many factors contributed to PayPal’s second-quarter earnings. But one element stands out: the amount the company dispensed to employees in the form of stock-based compensation.

How could stock-based compensation — which is a company expense, after all — have helped PayPal’s performance in the quarter? Simple. The company does not consider stock awards a cost when calculating its favored earnings measure. So when PayPal doles out more stock compensation than it has done historically, all else being equal, its chosen non-GAAP income growth looks better.

Accounting rules have required companies to include stock-based compensation as a cost of doing business for years. That’s as it should be: Stock awards have value, after all, or employees wouldn’t accept them as pay. And that value should be run through a company’s financial statements as an expense.

………

Back in the 1990s, technology companies argued strenuously against having to run stock compensation costs through their profit-and-loss statements. Who can blame them for wanting to make an expense disappear?

They lost that battle with the accounting rule makers. But then they took a new tack: Technology companies began providing alternative earnings calculations without such costs alongside results that were accounted for under GAAP, essentially offering two sets of numbers every quarter. The non-GAAP statements — called pro forma numbers or adjusted results — often exclude expenses like stock awards and acquisition costs. And the equity analysts who hold such sway on Wall Street seem to be fine with them.

………

PayPal is by no means the only company that adds back the costs of stock-based compensation to its unconventional earnings calculations. Many technology companies do, contending, as PayPal does, that their own arithmetic “provides investors a consistent basis for assessing the company’s performance and helps to facilitate comparisons across different periods.”

………

PayPal takes the opposite approach. [From companies like Google and Facebook] And look at what it does to its results.

Under generally accepted accounting principles, PayPal reported operating income of $430 million in the second quarter of 2017. That was up almost 16 percent from the $371 million it produced in the same period last year.

But under PayPal’s alternative accounting, its non-GAAP operating income was $659 million in the June quarter, an increase of almost 25 percent from 2016.

So what’s to account for the added $230 million in operating income under PayPal’s preferred calculation? Most of it — $192 million — was stock-based compensation PayPal dispensed to employees in the June quarter and added back to its results as calculated under GAAP.

That was a big jump — 57 percent — from the $122 million PayPal handed out during the second quarter of 2016. And back in 2015, PayPal reported just $89 million in stock awards.

………

Craig Maurer is a partner at Autonomous, an independent investment research firm in New York. He follows payments companies and rates PayPal’s stock an underperformer.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Maurer was critical of how the company accounts for stock-based pay. He said that as a percentage of PayPal’s non-GAAP operating income, stock-based compensation has risen to 29 percent this year from 17 percent in 2015.

“They are literally taking a cost out of their income statement, moving it to a different line and backing it out of results,” Mr. Maurer said in an interview. “And you can see that it’s adding significantly to their ability to meet earnings expectations. If you backed out the difference between what we were expecting on stock-based comp in the quarter versus what they reported, it was 2 cents of earnings.”

………

PayPal’s stock-based compensation practices have another noteworthy effect: They drive executive pay higher at the company. Here’s how.

The company says it has three main metrics for calculating its managers’ performance pay each year. One of those measures, its proxy shows, is non-GAAP net income. So, as PayPal awards more and more stock to its executives and employees, non-GAAP net income shows better growth. And the greater that growth, the more incentive pay the company awards to its top executives.

For PayPal insiders, at least, that’s one virtuous circle.

While I have commented on a number of problems in the American economy, particularly excessive rent seeking through IP, it’s important to note that business practices that have the effect of allowing managers to loot their companies, and defraud investors are a problem as well.

The Real Trump-Russia Connection

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Like pretty much every major player in the real estate market in New York City, Trump aggressively aided the Russian mob in laundering their proceeds through property purchases:

In 1984, a Russian émigré named David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City. The 38-year-old had arrived in America seven years before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet Army—his specialty had been shooting down Americans over North Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself. Bogatin wasn’t hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as “Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet Union. Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58-story edifice with gold-plated fixtures and a pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.

A monument to celebrity and conspicuous consumption, the tower was home to the likes of Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg, and Sophia Loren. Its brash, 38-year-old developer was something of a tabloid celebrity himself. Donald Trump was just coming into his own as a serious player in Manhattan real estate, and Trump Tower was the crown jewel of his growing empire. From the day it opened, the building was a hit—all but a few dozen of its 263 units had sold in the first few months. But Bogatin wasn’t deterred by the limited availability or the sky-high prices. The Russian plunked down $6 million to buy not one or two, but five luxury condos. The big check apparently caught the attention of the owner. According to Wayne Barrett, who investigated the deal for the Village Voice, Trump personally attended the closing, along with Bogatin.

If the transaction seemed suspicious—multiple apartments for a single buyer who appeared to have no legitimate way to put his hands on that much money—there may have been a reason. At the time, Russian mobsters were beginning to invest in high-end real estate, which offered an ideal vehicle to launder money from their criminal enterprises. “During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.” When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.

In 1987, just three years after he attended the closing with Trump, Bogatin pleaded guilty to taking part in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters. After he fled the country, the government seized his five condos at Trump Tower, saying that he had purchased them to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets.” A Senate investigation into organized crime later revealed that Bogatin was a leading figure in the Russian mob in New York. His family ties, in fact, led straight to the top: His brother ran a $150 million stock scam with none other than Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. At the time, Mogilevich—feared even by his fellow gangsters as “the most powerful mobster in the world”—was expanding his multibillion-dollar international criminal syndicate into America.

………

 The very nature of Trump’s businesses—all of which are privately held, with few reporting requirements—makes it difficult to root out the truth about his financial deals. And the world of Russian oligarchs and organized crime, by design, is shadowy and labyrinthine. For the past three decades, state and federal investigators, as well as some of America’s best investigative journalists, have sifted through mountains of real estate records, tax filings, civil lawsuits, criminal cases, and FBI and Interpol reports, unearthing ties between Trump and Russian mobsters like Mogilevich. To date, no one has documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements in his far-flung businesses, let alone that he was directly compromised by the Russian mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are closely allied with the Kremlin. So far, when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, there is no smoking gun. 

 But even without an investigation by Congress or a special prosecutor, there is much we already know about the president’s debt to Russia. A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.

(emphasis mine)
Some observations:

  • You cannot be a major real estate developer in New York City and not have made some sort of  accommodation to the mob.
  • Much of the appreciation of real estate in NYC (and London and Miami) has occurred only because of money laundering operations.
  • Trump has deliberately structured his real estate operations (“anonymous buyers”) to benefit as much as possible from dirty money.
  • There is a f%$# load of dirty money in Russia looking for a safe home.

This is something that an enterprising reporter could have covered during the election, but they were all to busy covering Trump’s latest tweets.

Seriously, This ain’t rocket science,* this is just decent shoe leather reporting.

I get that everyone goes to J-School imagines themselves meeting with Mark Felt (Deep Throat) in a parking garage, but most good reporting is an artifact of hard work, connecting the dots, and understanding the institutions that you are investigating.

*Full Disclosure, in 1999-2000 and 1996-1998, I worked as a mechanical engineer for what is now Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, and I have some claim to actually having been a rocket scientist.

More of This

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Tronc, the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing, has failed in its bid to buy the Chicago Sun Times and the Chicago Reader.

Instead, a group of investors, including the Chicago Federation of Labor, purchased the publisher of the two papers, maintaining its independence of one of the largest media conglomerates in the nations:

In the end, one man made all the difference.

Edwin Eisendrath, the former Chicago alderman who ran losing campaigns for governor and congressman earlier in his career, just won the most unlikely challenge he’d ever undertaken: He kept the Chicago Sun-Times independent and out of the clutches of Chicago Tribune owner tronc. “It was bashert,” Eisendrath told me, using the Yiddish word for “destiny.” How else to explain the odds he overcame to make it happen?


On Wednesday, Eisendrath and a coalition of labor unions and individual investors closed on the purchase of the daily Sun-Times and the alternative weekly Chicago Reader from Wrapports Holdings LLC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but sources said the key was securing more than $11.2 million in escow to cover projected operating losses over the next two years.

“Today’s deal to buy the Sun-Times preserves two independent newspaper voices in Chicago, a rare thing in America these days,” Eisendrath tweeted. “We wanted to make sure that Chicago had a genuine voice with honest and good reporting that connects with working men and women.”

Eight weeks ago it seemed all but certain tronc would take over the Sun-Times in a move that many believed would have stifled competition and led to the inevitable demise of the city’s No. 2 newspaper. All that stood in the way of the deal was the vigilance of the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division.

Alone in answering the Justice Department’s call for alternative bidders was Eisendrath, backed by the Chicago Federation of Labor and a belief that the Sun-Times was too vital to the life of the city to forfeit its independence.

My guess is that the (probably pre-Trump) DoJ call for bidders had a lot to do with Tronc losing the bid, because it implied a lot of litigation if the two big Chicago papers merged.

I’d like to see more official moves against consolidation.

OK, This is Now Officially a Legitimate Sh%$ Storm

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TheNew York Post states the obvious.*

OK, so now we know that in June of last year, Donald Trump, Jr., aka “Fredo”, was setting up a meeting with a Russian lawyer at the request of a publicist for a Russian to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. (Yes, this is profoundly weird and f%$#ed up)

This is now a big deal, not because this was necessarily a crime, I find the claims of a violation of Section 30121 of Title 52 to be a stretch in the world of Citizens United, but because we now have evidence of a conspiracy and a coverup.

It was a conspiracy to obstruct justice that took down Richard Nixon, after all.

I don’t think that this is the most impeachable thing that Trump has done (that will be a later post), but this has a potential to hamstring the Trump administration, particularly if the Democrats take back the House and Senate in 2018.

The underlying crime here is still a violation of campaign finance law, not espionage, not treason† or some similar heinous crimes.

From a political perspective, I do not think that this is a good thing for the Democratic Party.

This provides yet another opportunity for the Dems to miss the opportunity to reform, and ditch the incompetent and clueless deadwood that populate the party’s professional consultant class.

As opposed to a movement toward some sort of ideological coherence, the national Democratic Party will remain in, “A noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin,” mode, which I do not believe will resonate with voters.

If hostility toward Russia were a political winner nationwide, Hillary Clinton would be President now.

My guess is that right now, Republicans will slow walk any investigation, saying that they need to wait for Special Prosecutor Muller’s report.

I expect months of overwrought press coverage over this, because this is a classic example of catnip for reporters.

*I cannot f%$#ing believe that I am f%$#ing citing the f%$#ing New York f%$#ing Post.
†It was never treason. Treason is specifically defined in the US Constitution because of at least a millennia of abuse in Europe, and this does not meet that very specific definition.‡
‡That being said, Nixon’s sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968, and Reagan and Poppy Bush’s deal with Iran to keep the hostages held in Iran in 1980 might meet the statutory requirements of Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution.

Baltimore Just Got Smaller

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It’s alt-weekly, The Baltimore City Paper, will be closed down by the end of the year:

The Baltimore Sun Media Group plans to close City Paper later this year. No official end date has been announced for the alt-weekly, now in its 40th year.

“Like many alternative weeklies across the country, declining ad revenue at City Paper continues to be a challenge,” BSMG’s director of marketing, Renee Mutchnik, said in a statement. “It became clear to us this past fall that we would cease publishing City Paper sometime in 2017. Details about the closing date are still being discussed. This is a difficult decision and we are mindful of how it affects our employees, the readers and advertisers.”

Editorial staffers found out about the news in June during a meeting with senior vice president Tim Thomas, who cited declining ad revenues and future projections for those numbers as reasons for the closure.

City Paper editor Brandon Soderberg offered the following: “This is Brandon Soderberg, City Paper editor reporting live from the deck of the Titanic. Yes, we’re being closed by BSMG/Tronc/and so on. We were told this news last month and there isn’t a clear date but what we’ve been told is no later than the end of the year. We were trying to hold off announcing it because, well, it’s very sad, but also because I’m not sure about how this is all going to play out and I’m half-convinced this won’t be the end of the paper and someone will swoop in and buy us.”

The Sun bought the paper from Times-Shamrock Communications, which had owned the paper for more than two dozen years, in early 2014. In an announcement of the purchase, BSMG’s then-publisher, president, and CEO Tim Ryan praised City Paper’s independent streak. 

(emphasis mine)

That last bit, about The Sun is the most important bit: The fate of the City Paper was sealed when The Sun bought it.

As A. J. Liebling noted in his seminal book The Press, the only way to make money by buying a newspaper is to be a competitor in the market, and the profit comes from shutting it down, which allows the survivor to increase its own advertising revenue.

Even if only 10% of the ads in The City Paper go to The Sun, they will get a non trivial amount of revenue from this.

I think that Baltimore is too large and too dynamic not to have an alt-weekly.

I’m considering starting a crowd funding effort to buy them from the Tribune Company.

Any advice/aid would be appreciated.

Why J-School Sucks

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In the old days, someone would become a journalist by working as a copy boy or a cub reporter and working their way up, and they saw themselves as tradesmen.

Now, they get a Bachelors in Journalism, and they fancy themselves professionals, and the contrast is both striking and depressing:

I was talking to this person whom I’d just met. They told me about their job and where they worked. They asked me about mine. I told them I’d worked in public media in Alaska before moving to the Lower 48. I was a couple of months from wrapping up my time as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford. They asked about what I worked on and I explained my research around collaboration in journalism and that I intended to continue working in this space after the fellowship ended.

“Well, what does your husband do?”

“He’s a truck driver and a mechanic.”

“…Oh.”

“Yeah, right now he drives for a trash company.”

“That must be…an interesting perspective to have around.”

While they didn’t explicitly say it, the person was very much thrown off by the nature of my husband’s work. I was left with a very strong feeling they were expecting a more middle-class answer than a garbage worker. Their facial reaction has been stuck in my head for a while now. Surprise. A little confusion. And just enough distaste to notice. Obviously, this one instance isn’t representative of an entire industry. But it is a symptom.

The last two ‘graphs say it all:

If that conference interaction is how a journalist responds to my husband’s job while idly chatting, how do they cover the sanitation worker that ends up in a story they are working on? If talking about someone to that person’s spouse isn’t enough to cause one to mask aversion, how do they talk about people to whom they feel even more distance from? What does this mean for our audience’s ability to trust us?

 Our industry needs to think hard about the worlds we’re living in, the kinds we’re building with each hire we make and ones that we want to reach with our reporting.

It’s natural for professors to see themselves as professionals, but by inculcating their students in this mindset, they have created a generation of journalists who afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable.

This is not a recipe for good or responsible journalism.

As Atrios Would Say, “Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel.”*

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The Wall Street Journal has just fired its chief foreign affairs correspondent because he was negotiating a business partnership with an arms merchant that he was also covering:

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday fired its highly regarded chief foreign affairs correspondent after evidence emerged of his involvement in prospective commercial deals — including one involving arms sales to foreign governments — with an international businessman who was one of his key sources.

 The reporter, Jay Solomon, was offered a 10 percent stake in a fledgling company, Denx LLC, by Farhad Azima, an Iranian-born aviation magnate who has ferried weapons for the CIA. It was not clear whether Solomon ever received money or formally accepted a stake in the company.

 “We are dismayed by the actions and poor judgment of Jay Solomon,” Wall Street Journal spokesman Steve Severinghaus wrote in a statement to The Associated Press. “While our own investigation continues, we have concluded that Mr. Solomon violated his ethical obligations as a reporter, as well as our standards.”

 Azima was the subject of an AP investigative article published Tuesday. During the course of its investigation, the AP obtained emails and text messages between Azima and Solomon, as well as an operating agreement for Denx dated March 2015, which listed an apparent stake for Solomon.

………

Read some of the source documents here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3871143-Jay-Solomon-Documents.html

This doesn’t just happen with people covering arms dealers. 

The very rich use their wealth to shape the news and bribe and or intimidate journalists routinely

*Atrios was early to the blogging phenomena, and noted how many in the MSM dismissed blogs because there were no editors, and thus no journalistic ethics. Whenever a mainstream reporter is shown to be corrupt, he ironically made this comment.

The Incercept Just Failed OPSEC 101

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The latest NSA leaker, the rather incongruously named Reality Winner, may have inadvertently been outed by a screw up by the online publication The Intercept:

Across the computer security world yesterday, heads were shaking.

The FBI filed a criminal complaint against Reality Winner, an NSA contractor, who the agency alleges stole classified documents and shared them with an “online news outlet” believed to be The Intercept. Because the documents in question appear to have been printed, some security experts have been wondering if a mysterious code used by some printers is to blame for Winner’s capture. That code is an almost-invisible grid of dots that some color printers ink into every document they print.

The complaint also details how agents say they tracked the leak back to Winner. The news org contacted the National Security Agency and said they were “in possession of what they believed to be a classified document.” The news organization then sent that document to the NSA, presumably for verification. “The U.S. Government Agency examined the document shared by the News Outlet and determined the pages of the intelligence reporting appeared to be folded and/or creased, suggesting they had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space,” the complaint continues.

From there, the agents say that they simply looked to see who had printed the document—six people had—and then discovered that one of them, Winner, had been in contact with the media company in question from her work computer (although on an unrelated topic).

When FBI agents showed up at her house, they say she confessed to “removing the classified intelligence reporting from her office space, retaining it, and mailing it from Augusta, Georgia, to the News Outlet.” She faces up to 10 years in prison.

It’s clear that in releasing high resolution scans, The Intercept made it much easier for the authorities to identify the leaker.

This is a major f%$#-up.

FYI, a good primer on the printer tracking dots here. Basically, various law enforcement agencies, most notably the US Secret Service, have required these dots on color printers as an anti-counterfeiting measure.

Gotta Check This out When It Hits the Library

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I am of course referring to the scathing tell all Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.

I’ve read the reviews, Matt Taibbi has my favorite review, and what stands out is how everyone involved with campaign knew that Hillary Clinton had no reason to tun for president beyond her sense of personal entitlement:

“All of the jockeying might have been all right, but for a root problem that confounded everyone on the campaign and outside it,” they wrote. “Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.”

As Taibbi notes:

Shattered is sourced almost entirely to figures inside the Clinton campaign who were and are deeply loyal to Clinton. Yet those sources tell of a campaign that spent nearly two years paralyzed by simple existential questions: Why are we running? What do we stand for?

………

The real protagonist of this book is a Washington political establishment that has lost the ability to explain itself or its motives to people outside the Beltway.

In fact, it shines through in the book that the voters’ need to understand why this or that person is running for office is viewed in Washington as little more than an annoying problem.

This should make for a fascinating read.

It also appears to prove that old adage, “You can’t beat something with nothing.”

Good Advice on Privacy

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Over at The Intercept, they have an article on how to run an anonymous twitter account with as much security as possible.

This is important if you are, for example, a disloyal bureaucrat serving under your Trumpian overlords

The basic steps are as follows:  (with my comments indented with lower case letters)

  1. Buy a burner prepaid phone with CASH.
    1. Get a cheap feature (non-smart) phone.  Some of them actually have keyboards.
    2. Remember, your face will probably be recorded at the 7-Eleven, or whatever, so wait 2-3 weeks until they overwrite the old records, or at least wear a hoodie and sunglasses.  (Parking a few blocks away would be a good idea as well)
    3. Don’t turn on the phone at home at work.  Better yet pull the battery.
    4. If you want to use the phone, choose a place, a very public place (like the Lexington Market Metro stop, and ONLY use it there.  I used to take the Lexington stop to work every day, which is why I know the location)
    5. Don’t buy a smart phone as a burner, they are privacy sink holes.
  2. Get a TOR compatible browser.
    1. Use a browser designed for this from the start, and not to rely on addins.
    2. You could also use I2P instead of TOR, I do not know the relative merits. 
    3. Note that there is significant evidence that much of TOR’s funding might have come via the US state security apparatus, so be careful.
  3. Get a TOR based email service.
    1.  Again, you could use I2P.
    2. Listed in the article are SIGAINT, Riseup, and ProtonMail.
  4.  Activate the phone using the TOR browser.
  5. Determine your phone number.
  6. Create your Twitter account using your the TOR browser, and enter in the phone’s number.
  7. Go to your special place (1. d.) and get the confirmation text, and then enter it into the confirmation.
    1. In the Lexington Market case, there is a Starbucks down the street, so TOR the wifi, and probably do the hoodie and sunglasses thing.
  8. Be circumspect about who you talk to.
  9. Be circumspect about who you might communicate with via TOR.
  10. Consider rebooting your machine into a secure operating system before accessing Twitter, such as “Tails, or  Qubes with Whonix,” which can boot from a memory stick.
  11. (on edit) I shouldn’t need to say this, but never use the phone for anything else but your tweeting, or in the case elucidated below for that.

Read the rest of the article, and then leak away.

BTW, all of part 1 should also apply to giving a burner phone to a reporter to leak.  Only use it at a specific place, and have it off, or better yet, the battery out, when not in use.

You don’t want someone using traffic analysis to figure out who your are.

This has been a public service announcement of Matthew’s Saroff’s Beer (and Laptop) Fund and Tip Jar.

Please give generously. 

    Newspaper Screw Up of the Day

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    It’s not technically a typographical error, since it is the wrong picture, and not an error in typography, but it’s a real doozy:

    A newspaper in the Dominican Republic printed a photo of Hollywood star Alec Baldwin playing President Donald Trump in a story about the real-life US president.

    The snafu appeared in the Friday editions of El Nacional, The Daily Dot reported.

    The photo showing Baldwin as Trump was captioned in Spanish: ‘Donald Trump, president of the United States’. 

    El Nacional issued an apology on its website Saturday for the photo mistake.

    It said in Spanish: ‘On Friday El Nacional published a photo of actor Alec Baldwin, who imitates the President of the United States on a television program.

    ‘The picture was sent that day by the Associated Press (AP) with the name of the actor and information about the program, but it was placed as if it were the one of Trump, a situation that went unnoticed for all those who reviewed page 19.

    ‘El Nacional apologizes to the readers and to all those who felt affected by the publication.

     They should have known.  The hands are WAY too big.

    H/t AS the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

    Well, They Would Say That, Wouldn’t They?*

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    The Democratic National Committee has hired cyber experts to look into their security, and they say that it was the Russians:

    As Donald Trump and his surrogates continue to engage in dangerous denial of Russia’s interference in our election and the intelligence community as a whole, one expert who knows of what he speaks made an appearance on Wolf Blitzer’s show yesterday to knock a huge hole in Trump’s arguments.

     Trump has long dismissed the reports of Russian interference as ridiculous, going so far as to say it was maybe China or some 400-pound creepy guy in his mother’s basement. Anything he can do to distract from Russia’s interference, he’s done.

     But Dmitri Alperovitch, employed by Crowdstrike, the security firm hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign to come in and deal with the hack, begs to differ, and he’s got the goods to prove it.

     Right out of the gate, Alperovitch tells Wolf Blitzer that his firm “did catch the Russians in the act when the DNC hired us back in May.”

    It’s remarkably convenient for Crowd Strike to echo the narratives of the people who are paying for them.

    Also in declaring it the operation of a state actor, it excuses the ineptitude of the DNC, the Clinton Campaign, and (particularly) John “Nigerian Prince” Podesta.

    Craig Murry calls this is 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag, because the report alleges that the Russians acted in a manner that appears to be deliberately calculated to point the accusing fingers at themselves:

    I am about twenty four hours behind on debunking the “evidence” of Russian hacking of the DNC because I have only just stopped laughing. I was sent last night the “crowdstrike” report, paid for by the Democratic National Committee, which is supposed to convince us. The New York Times today made this “evidence” its front page story.

     It appears from this document that, despite himself being a former extremely competent KGB chief, Vladimir Putin has put Inspector Clouseau in charge of Russian security and left him to get on with it. The Russian Bear has been the symbol of the country since the 16th century. So we have to believe that the Russian security services set up top secret hacking groups identifying themselves as “Cozy Bear” and “Fancy Bear”. Whereas no doubt the NSA fronts its hacking operations by a group brilliantly disguised as “The Flaming Bald Eagles”, GCHQ doubtless hides behind “Three Lions on a Keyboard” and the French use “Marianne Snoops”.

     What is more, the Russian disguised hackers work Moscow hours and are directly traceable to Moscow IP addresses. This is plain and obvious nonsense. If crowdstrike were tracing me just now they would think I am in Denmark. Yesterday it was the Netherlands. I use Tunnel Bear, one of scores of easily available VPN’s and believe me, the Russian FSB have much better resources. We are also supposed to believe that Russia’s hidden hacking operation uses the name of the famous founder of the Communist Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, as a marker and an identify of “Guccifer2” (get the references – Russian oligarchs and their Gucci bling and Lucifer) – to post pointless and vainglorious boasts about its hacking operations, and in doing so accidentally leave bits of Russian language script to be found.

    Additionally, he has said that he picked up the emails from a contact in a Washington, DC park:

    A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by ‘disgusted’ whisteblowers – and not hacked by Russia.

     Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.

     ‘Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,’ said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.’

     His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.

    ………

     ‘Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,’ Murray said. ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.’

     He said the leakers were motivated by ‘disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.’

     Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary.

    There are a number of things going on right now:

    • Numerous members of the Democratic Party establishment are flailing about trying to excuse their abject failure during the elections.
    • The “War with Russia” crowd have their casus belli.
    • It’s like catnip for journalists.
    • Despite never denying the veracity of the materials, the accusations serve to draw attention away from the actual contents of the emails.

    We know that the Democratic campaign was incompetent, and we know that their IT security protocols were ignored by senior officials, particularly John Podesta, who was phished using techniques that a script kiddie would sneer at.

    Was there Russian involvement?  I don’t know.

    Certainly the Russians were monitoring the election, as were the French, the British, the Chinese, the Japanese, etc. because it’s a big deal to them too.

    What I do know is that the CIA and the FBI disagree, and that the DNI has remained silent, so it’s not a “Slam Dunk”.

    It’s also not an act of war, as some are eager to suggest.  It’s just a computer hack, or a leak.

    The Cuban Missile Crisis this ain’t.

    *Mandy Rice-Davies Applies (MRDA). The Profumo affair. Learn your history.

    Props to the Associated Press

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    They have just updated their definition of “alt-right” to say that it means racist dirtbags:

    Recent developments have put the so-called “alt-right” movement in the news. They highlight the need for clarity around use of the term and around some related terms, such as “white nationalism” and “white supremacism.”

    ………

    “Alt-right” (quotation marks, hyphen and lower case) may be used in quotes or modified as in the “self-described” or “so-called alt-right” in stories discussing what the movement says about itself.

    Avoid using the term generically and without definition, however, because it is not well known and the term may exist primarily as a public-relations device to make its supporters’ actual beliefs less clear and more acceptable to a broader audience. In the past we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist.

    While the AP’s position on copyright is maximalist and counter-productive, (they act as if fair use excerpting does not exist) this is a very worthwhile update to their standards.

    If You Want to Observe the Wonders of the Unfettered Free Market, fly Allegiant Air

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    But if you would rather live, perhaps you might want to choose some other airline:

    Lisa Cozzolino started to panic as Allegiant Air Flight 844 circled over Pinellas County, burning off fuel for an emergency landing. “All the bad things I’ve done in my life,” she said to her sister, “and now I’m going to die.”

    ………
    All major airlines break down once in awhile. But none of them break down in midair more often than Allegiant.

    A Tampa Bay Times investigation — which included a first-of-its kind analysis of federal aviation records — has found that the budget carrier’s planes are four times as likely to fail during flight as those operated by other major U.S. airlines.

    In 2015, Allegiant jets were forced to make unexpected landings at least 77 times for serious mechanical failures.

    ………

    None of the 77 incidents prompted enforcement action from the Federal Aviation Administration, which doesn’t compare airline breakdown records to look for warning signs.

    To create such a comparison, Times reporters built a database of more than 65,000 records from the FAA.

    ………

    When the Times first reached out to Allegiant officials for this story, they declined to speak with reporters. Then, after the newspaper presented them with its findings, they asked for a meeting. During five hours of interviews at the company’s Las Vegas headquarters and training center, they acknowledged their planes break down too often and said the airline is changing the way it operates.

    ………

    “Allegiant is probably going to have an accident,” said former FAA inspector Richard Wyeroski, who became a whistleblower in 2002. “That airline should basically be grounded and re-evaluated for their certificate.”

    ………

    For this story, the Times used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain mechanical interruption summary reports for the 11 largest airlines in the United States. Then reporters connected the reports with records of unexpected landings from the U.S. Department of Transportation and FlightAware, a company that collects aviation data.

    The result is the best available picture of how often mechanical problems cause midair emergencies at major airlines.

    BTW, kudos to the Tampa Bay Times for a very good shoe leather reporting:

    How we did the story: To compare the 11 major U.S. passenger airlines, the Tampa Bay Times set out to build the most comprehensive database of in-flight mechanical breakdowns ever created. A team of journalists used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain records of mechanical problems known as “mechanical summary interruption reports” from the Federal Aviation Administration. Then they connected those records with data from the U.S. Department of Transportation and the aviation tracking company FlightAware. Working through 65,000 records, they identified midair incidents caused by mechanical breakdowns by matching tail numbers, flight numbers, origin and destination and date fields. In cases where those details didn’t match up, the incidents were discounted. The database was built by Times staff writers Neil Bedi, Anthony Cormier, Carolyn Edds, Connie Humburg, Michael LaForgia, Nathaniel Lash, William R. Levesque, Eli Murray, Adam Playford and Eli Zhang.

    This is old school journalism.

    Take a look at public records, look for patterns, and don’t waste your time sucking up to anonymous  sources with dubious agendas.