> Consider in the 1800s it wasn't uncommon for a publisher to be paid for a product & make it seem like they were simply endorsing something they truly liked.
Since you work in advertising, you should know that that kind of thing is more pervasive than ever today.
It's a pretty easy win-win situation–offer both, inform users appropriately. And then provide a third set: a list of the sanitized files not present in the virus-free dump. I think a quick spot check through those would show whether any editorializing was going on.
I have serious concerns about their publishing the private emails of employees of a private company that, from all I can gather, turned out to be pretty non-evil. But the virus issues, while not Stratfor's or Wikileaks's direct fault, could have been mitigated by Wikileaks pretty easily.
(Disclosure: I've subscribed to them for many years, but have no interest beyond that.)
The emails from SONY had some controversial stuff in them.
For example here is an interaction between the CEO and the State Department about setting up a group of media executives to develop US propaganda for the Middle East and Russia: https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/117082
Of course it was also revealed that The Interview was a propaganda product aimed at destabilizing North Korea (in anticipation of the upcoming planned unification).
These sorts of things can only be found when there's wide access given to journalists. It's also true that the emails were available via torrent and hosted other places online.
To play the other side, 99% of the SONY leaks were innocuous. While it is a company with management that works, like most US international corporations, with the US government on 'shady things', it is also in large part also a private company with the usual mundane concerns of a corporation.
> Of course it was also revealed that The Interview was a propaganda product aimed at destabilizing North Korea (in anticipation of the upcoming planned unification).
I missed all that–can you point me in the right direction?
> These sorts of things can only be found when there's wide access given to journalists.
Sure, but there's an argument to be made that the only way to end domestic violence is to place cameras inside all homes. Obviously that tradeoff is one most people aren't willing to make, and I don't think that leaking the private emails of employees of a private company is ultimately morally defensible.
Whistleblowing is one (very important) thing–bulk dumps of 99% of innocuous stuff became there's 1% of stuff in there that isn't great (but probably isn't all that bad, in the grand scheme of things) is both tactically questionable–leaking something with a 1:99 S/N ratio is a terrible way to get your message across–it's also morally suspect.
If Wikileaks & Co. truly wanted to change the world (and it wasn't about garnering attention and giving indiscriminate anger an outlet), they'd be approaching things differently.
> I missed all that–can you point me in the right direction?
Sure!
The CEO of SONY, high level state department officials, RAND specialist on nuclear deproliferation, regime change and North Korea, and Special Envoy to Korea discussed what direction the ending of the movie should go for it to most optimally destabilize the Kim regime. Special Envoy talked about plans (and RAND specialist Bennett) mention plans to seed the film into NK:
The decision to name the leader of NK in the film came down from executives - in the original script it had entirely fictional names (http://www.scpr.org/programs/the-frame/2014/12/15/40758/how-...). This is also confirmed by the SONY leaks, which have the executives trade emails concerned about the appearance of their having brought up the idea.
This all came out pretty early during the hacks but unfortunately the skepticism over it having been NK behind the hacks overwhelmed the media at the time. (It did turn out to be pretty definitively North Korea, or at least sympathizers, after all).
> 99% v. 1%
I happen to agree with you wholeheartedly. I do like the way that Wikileaks operates, though. They don't want to be the people in charge of curating and censoring information because they feel that this process can become politicized. So they publish everything.
The cost of their publications is extremely high. The returns are also high and IMO the ROI is good so in general I'm for them. But yeah if the ROI wasn't very good I would question it a lot more.
Definitely Wikileaks operates in pretty challenging legal waters.
Are you offended by the definition of Jian Yang, or the actual character in the show? That's like being offended by Wikipedia's entry on the KKK because it accurately describes their position.
Anyway–it's not stereotyping Asians, it's stereotyping Chinese-national engineers in Silicon Valley. That's a pretty specific cultural subset.
> no one would accept this logic if it were applied to Black people or gays.
No? Because comedies have never had characters like Tracy Jordan or Franck Eggelhoffer?
So, just how specific does cultural satire have to get before you won't declare it racism?
I ask, because "Chinese" includes about 56 recognized ethnic groups in mainland China. I don't think we can say whether this character is Han, Zhuang, Hui, or necessarily any specific race that happens to exist primarily within the borders of what we call the nation of China.
Seems to me that character is more making fun of the culture of a nation than of a single ethnic group (or even some set of ethnic groups). If they had a character that made fun of, say, British culture, would that be OK with you? Or only if the character was white? (Which would seem awfully racist to me.)
Or is it only safe to satirize culture if the subject of the satire has ethnic roots in the Caucuses?
Or is it not about ethnicity, but appearance? Is it enough if they merely appear white? Because that opens the comedic landscape far beyond the Caucasus. Can we satirize Mexican culture, provided we limit it to Mexicans of European descent? (Again, how racist is that?)
There are some real battles worth fighting, but this really seems like a cosmetic one to me, no matter how much you think it "smells like racism."
It's like some people have a sense of indignation that's only tuned to detect a few things, and throw any sense of nuance or concept of false-positives out the window.
Tracy Jordan's entire character is not being a Black stereotype, and making fun of the discrepancy between his character and the stereotype. Jian Yang is an Asian stereotype.
The character of Jian Yang is a very specific subset of Chinese nationals, namely those who come to work in a very specific industry in a very small part of Northern California.
That's like being upset about a show with a character poking fun at Americans who teach English in South Korea. (Which, I'm guessing, could provide some pretty good material.)
> I don't know, but it's a fascinating experiment, anyone who is not paying for it should be in favor of this experiment -- unless you just hate poor people.
What a bizarre statement. It's really easy to read that as two things:
1. You're totally game to experiment, just so long as it's not your money.
2. Anyone who doesn't agree must hate poor people.
I'm pretty certain you didn't really mean either, but the net result of that sentence is awfully unproductive: "anyone who doesn't like this must either have skin in the game or hate poor people!"
1. It's POSSIBLE to be unhappy about this, IF it is your money being used, and you have certain criticisms.
but
2. If it's not your money, I can't see how anyone could possibly have an issue with the experiment.
Which part do you disagree with? I'm not saying that anyone whose money is involved here HAS to be upset about it. I'm just saying, if they have skin in the game, they at least may have REASON to quibble. And if they don't, I don't see what complaint a person could possibly have with research (that, incidentally, benefits people).
That's the common tactic of argument these days. The notion of "criticism" has been re-cast as "hate". Hate is more easily dismissed, ridiculed, and trivialized.
After re-reading your parent's statement a few times, I think (s)he thought I was saying you must dislike it if you're paying for it, but if you're not paying for it, you can't dislike it.
I merely was saying I can't see a valid criticism for those of us who aren't paying for it. There may be some valid criticisms of the idea, but I'd rather see how this goes.
I can't think of a single (valid) reason to oppose basic research on solving poverty, when that research has no negative impact on the person who might be opposing it. Can you? The only one I can think of is "I want to ensure poor people are kept poor."
> If this wasn't exaggeration, we should study the fortunate circumstances by which this calamity has been avoided for 17 years.
Leaving aside the truth of their claims at the time–because it's irrelevant–your comment makes the fatal error of assuming conditions haven't changed at all in 17 years.
Assuming I'm not dead, ISTM "changed conditions" would be such a fortunate circumstance, although perhaps somewhat unspecific. How have conditions changed? Have all the hackers been eliminated? Do hackers have no interest in taking down the internet? Have previously vulnerable processes been made more secure? Have previously trusted parties been removed from positions of trust? Can you fill in the blanks for us?
As an aside, it's been my experience that titles are often written not by the person who wrote the article, but by someone who is tasked with writing titles that are intended to attract attention, and not necessarily perfectly reflect the views of the author.
That it's easy to do is all the more reason to try to establish controls to prevent abuse.
It's trivially easy to sell customer data for profit at the expense of their privacy. It's easy to store personal information without securing it. It's easy to take credit cards without using SSL certs.
It's also easy to lock someone up and deny them due process, or to enter someone's home and seize their effects without a warrant, or to set absurdly high bail.
Etc. Again, it's because this is such an easy thing to do–and it's only going to become easier to collect, store, and analyze this data-that it makes sense to establish definitions of what constitutes fair use, and what constitutes abuse, and to do so sooner, rather than later.
So, what is the responsibility for capturing faces for recognition purposes when in a public setting? It's already established that members of the public can record events like arrests legally, thanks to 1st amendment defense.
But above is in public. What about "my" property? Or the supermarket? We already have cameras everywhere. Just look up. So what does it matter that they run software on the back end? The hardware is already there.
Walking in gives implicit permission that "you agree to be recorded or leave". Vandalization of cameras is criminal. Many places insist you not wear masks, or they call the cops.
The difference to me is that when your presence was merely recorded on video, it required the manual labor of humans to search for your face in the recording. This isn't something that is likely to happen unless authorities are looking for you in particular for some actual reason.
Now with it all automated, it just takes running some scripts on a computer system to locate your face from any number of sources, so people who are not particularly under suspicion for anything will have their whereabouts identified automatically just as if they were actual suspects.
Same story with automatic license plates readers. Manual searching for a license plate is so time-consuming that it's unlikely to get done without cause. With automatic systems, records can be kept of every car that passes through a monitored intersection, whether if the car or driver is of actual interest or not.
That particular arbitrary line in the sand seems mighty.. well.. arbitrary. The data is being collected either way, but it only becomes objectionable because a computer is involved? On what grounds?
I think it's a pretty big difference, going from labor-intensive manual inspection of data to fully automated inspection of data, opening up everyone within few of the camera to being automatically tracked.
It's not the same thing that's always been done, except now it's being done with a computer. It's the same thing that's always been done, except now it's being done for everyone, rather than for just a few select individuals of interest. It doesn't really matter that a computer is involved; it's the scope of the surveillance that is disconcerting. If huge numbers of humans were hired to track everyone manually, that would also be disconcerting.
Who cares? I'm not entirely sure. And I guess that's sort of the point. This level of surveillance has, in my opinion, surpassed what most of society is ready for. I don't think that most people have a good grasp on what's going on, or what impact it will / could have on their lives.
If arbitrary companies and government agencies can know my whereabouts at all times, should this have any impact to how I live my life? It's a question that society at large has never had to really answer before.
Are you seriously implying that you see no difference between "thou shalt not kill" and "thou shalt not analyze images of public places with anything more complicated than an abacus" ??
Nice Strawman, but murder is not the only other law on the books
We have regulations for how tall your grass shall be, what color you can paint your home, how many dogs you are allowed to have etc etc etc etc.... 1000's of aribirary rules and regulations for society.
For businesses there are even more, things like handicapped parking, bathrooms, depending on the type of business the hours or days you are allowed to be open, etc etc etc 10's of thousands of rules arbitraly defined as to what a business can and can not do
This is more akin to regulations around either medical records, or finical records both have regulations around how the data can be stored, and how the business can use it.
The public is better off with reasonable restrictions on the mass collection of data. It is a utilitarian solution. What grounds are there to require wearing a seatbelt when driving a car?
I agree with you that they're a private company so they can do what they want with their business–I actually think private entities don't have enough rights on that front in many regards–but that doesn't mean that it isn't a conversation worth having, and or that they aren't unregulated entities–there are legal limits to what stores can do in their relationships with customers, how is this any different?
And walking in doesn't give implicit permission that I agree for them to store, analyze, sell, leak, publish or otherwise use that data however they please, in perpetuity. Are they allowed to disclose my presence to law enforcement without a warrant? Can they tell my health insurance provider that I spent an unusually long amount of time in the dessert aisle?
I'm sure a lawyer could argue (probably quite successfully) otherwise, but from a let's-address-the-problem-before-it's-fully-mature standpoint, these are the kinds of conversations we're supposed to be having right now.
> I agree with you that they're a private company so they can do what they want with their business–I actually think private entities don't have enough rights on that front in many regards–but that doesn't mean that it isn't a conversation worth having, and or that they aren't unregulated entities–there are legal limits to what stores can do in their relationships with customers, how is this any different?
Well, they are people. The only distinction is they have no voting rights in the elections.
> And walking in doesn't give implicit permission that I agree for them to store, analyze, sell, leak, publish or otherwise use that data however they please, in perpetuity.
The pharmacy counter is guarded by HIPAA and the payment done with credit card or debit card is protected by agreements from PCI DSS. The last catch-all is whatever the company's privacy policy is. No privacy policy = no FTC violation of privacy policy.
> Are they allowed to disclose my presence to law enforcement without a warrant? Can they tell my health insurance provider that I spent an unusually long amount of time in the dessert aisle?
And the Arab Spring was supposed to result in a great liberalization of MENA countries.
I don't know whether it's optimism or naiveté–or likely some mixture of the two–but the western public tends to ignore how large changes in technology and society can (and usually does) tilt the balance of power towards the establishment.
I work for a global campaigning/petitioning organization and one of our focuses is climate change.
I'm wondering who the key players are, what is currently being done, whether there's opportunity for public pressure to influence any of the actors, etc.
I'd highly recommend you get in tough with GreenPeace as they're pretty active in this space, not only in pressuring organizations to use sustainable palm oil, but also pushing the RSPO to improve themselves and holding it accountable, too.
I'm sure they have a much better assessment than I could ever make of the worst performers, the biggest players, and the key organizations to target to bring change. Not to mention that if they have campaigns running/planned it would be nice to coordinate with what it sounds like your organization is doing. Annisa Rahmawati (@AnisaHijauDamai) was representing them at this years RSPO european roundtable two weeks ago.
The WWF is also very involved with the RSPO and Palm Oil. Good luck!
Since you work in advertising, you should know that that kind of thing is more pervasive than ever today.