Edward Snowden, Ars, the NSA, and me: digging through the past
penny-arcade.com
penny-arcade.com
I like to go back and read some of my posts on there and I sit and go "wow - I can't believe I wrote that" -- but in a good way.
Other times I see stuff I wrote on there and feel it was from a completely different person!
The copyright status of forum posts probably means that they'll never be included in any book or work written this century except in the very limited form allowed by their authors. (Assuming that the current copyright ridiculousness is not quelled.) Which is too bad, as they're pretty interesting and I doubt their authors care so much unless you got rich off them.
Summarising and paraphrasing what someone else wrote publicly is totally ok and legal. Biographers can at the very least use all the available material for their writing. Even quoting non-substantial parts of someone else’s writing – something that could be copyright infringement – is pretty uncontroversial and legal. It falls under fair use. And not the wobbly part of fair use you can easily shot holes into. Especially if the quotes are embedded in a much larger work (say, a biography).
Copyright law sucks but it’s not that bad.
It is, thankfully. The problem is that because of the ephemeral nature of digital media, it's quite possible for biographies to outlive their primary sources.[0] This means that a complete biography would need to include the actual article, if for no other reason than to preserve the original.
[0]: This is one of the reasons why the Internet Archives mission is so important.
At the time, I was of the opinion that using real names was fine because the internet is a public space and one could self moderate. However, one big difference between this public space and public spaces INRL is that this one never forgets. I think this is a significant qualitative difference. With the ability to sift through the past, this means that your past self is not really past. I guess Faulkner was right. Imagine having to explain your past to every new person you meet!
Every time I try to imagine that, that person ends up failing to explain to me why they're so lame... I can honestly not think of anything I ever said that I would be ashamed of in comparison to that.
Sure, sometimes "old stuff" can be an indicator for what to look out for in the "current stuff", and I am fine with that, even if just to not be a hypocrite. But other than that, obsessing about things that are months or even years past just betrays people who never learn and never change projecting their mediocrity on me - and if they cannot see that, I have to do it for them :)
Furthermore, I claim that when the costs (dollars or time) of finding out about anyone are low enough it won't take much interest to warrant a look at a person's history.
How long did it take for people to start googling new acquaintances and potential dates?
That's only true if you ignore the distinction between intentionally public posts and e-mails, phone calls, and other communications intended to be privately exchanged.
I suspect that there would be a lot less people upset about the NSA monitoring only intentionally public communications.
That said, intentionally public communications, especially on a forum, are not a clear indication of a person's morality or what have you. The best example I can come up with is drawing parallels to a comedian's stand up routine.
1) they could probably justify secret rooms and data gathering on the volume of public traffic alone. In other words if they are hitting the public APIs millions of times a day, Twitter, FB, et al. Would rather give them privileged access. Then whoops, might as well read all the private stuff as well.
2) just imagine the power of analyzing topics, trends, and personalities on all public forums across the Internet, US and international! Google indexes it, but what if the NSA were able to make sense of it somehow. From usernames and posting profiles alone (and maybe language analysis) they might be able to bullied a DB of online personas. Of course, if they could read everybody's email or get IP addresses from servers and ISPs, then they could easily correlate with actual persons.
Naturally. I just don't believe that that's what the controversy is about, and that comparing searching through someone's public postings to the subject of the NSA surveillance controversy is missing the point of the controversy rather badly.
I think you're either confused or trying to muddy the waters.
Isn't this a bit ironic then if you are one who is up in arms about this NSA story? IE: Wholesale scooping up of unencrypted emails / forum posts etc should be expected. It hasn't been proven that actual listening in on phone conversations involving US citizens is actually going on, just phonecall metadata.
Isn't that what whistleblowers do?
Secondly, we aren't law enforcement and can't torture with impunity the people whose posts we find.
We are the government. If enough people want to judge someone by what they said on a forum, it'll work up the chain to someone with power.
Thirdly, public internet posts aren't subject to privacy, and to the degree one may think they are of the sort that phone calls and private emails ought to be, what is the standard being described as hypocritical here?
The hypocritical part is looking back on a trove of data and applying a narrative to it. Nobody wants to be held responsible for what they said as a teenager, but how fast are we to gobble it up when it's someone else.
The hypocrisy is in the people trying to find and make bullshit connections. This article is pointing out how ridiculous it is and pondering how the author--presumably a boring law abiding citizen--would look in hindsight.