Pennsylvania legislation could shield some of the largest public university salaries from disclosure; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2/25/15

Bill Schackner, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Pennsylvania legislation could shield some of the largest public university salaries from disclosure:

"Senate legislation intended to require more public disclosure by Pennsylvania’s four state-related universities would, as currently written, enable those schools to shield from the public many of their largest employee salaries — figures they currently release.

Senate Bill 412, introduced this month by state Sen. John Blake, D-Lackawanna, is part of an ongoing effort to revamp Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law that has been working its way through the Legislature for two years.

Mr. Blake said his bill’s intent is to give the public greater insight into the workings of the University of Pittsburgh, Penn State University and Temple and Lincoln universities, which receive hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars each year but are largely exempt from Right-to-Know requirements.

Indeed, his bill (explore below) would create free accessible online databases with extensive budgetary information, non-personal employee and enrollment data, and would compel the four universities to list vendor contracts above $5,000 and maintain a 20-year archive of minutes from school trustee meetings.

But in one key area of disclosure — individual salaries — the bill’s language appears to be at least a partial retreat."

Lawsuits Keep Alive Scandals Surrounding Ex-Governor; Associated Press via New York Times, 2/27/15

Associated Press via New York Times; Lawsuits Keep Alive Scandals Surrounding Ex-Governor:

"Oregon's former first lady, Cylvia Hayes — at the center of an ethics scandal that forced the resignation of Gov. John Kitzhaber — has launched a legal fight to keep her private emails out of the public eye.

The lawsuit came to light Thursday, the same day that Oracle Inc., the tech giant that built Oregon's botched health insurance exchange, filed a lawsuit against several of Kitzhaber's former campaign advisers. The company accuses Kitzhaber's advisers of orchestrating the abandonment of the Cover Oregon website to help his re-election effort. Oracle also served notice that it may sue Kitzhaber and his former chief of staff...

Hayes, who is engaged to marry the former Democratic governor, filed a lawsuit Wednesday against The Oregonian asking a judge to rule that she is not required to turn over her emails to the newspaper.

She's resisting an order from the state Department of Justice that says emails from her private email accounts that concern state business must be provided to The Oregonian, which requested them under the state's public records law. The Oregonian, based in Portland, is the state's largest newspaper."

Privacy Group Files F.T.C. Complaint Against Samsung’s Voice-Operated TVs; New York Times, 2/25/15

Nick Wingfield, New York Times; Privacy Group Files F.T.C. Complaint Against Samsung’s Voice-Operated TVs:

"The Electronic Privacy Information Center has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Samsung over what it says is the recording of private conversations in homes through the company’s television sets.

The privacy rights group filed a complaint with the commission on Tuesday accusing Samsung of violating federal laws with a technology that allows viewers to operate the company’s Internet-connected smart TVs with voice commands."

Computer fiasco: CMU must make amends on its false acceptances; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2/19/15

Editorial Board, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Computer fiasco: CMU must make amends on its false acceptances:

"How does CMU recover from this? How does it ensure that it never happens again? An emailed acknowledgement of error just doesn’t do it.

If nothing else, the university should give the 800 applicants another round of scrutiny with an eye toward accepting some of them — presuming they would even enroll after this fiasco. Accepting 10 percent into the program — 80 — would at least make some amends.

Although other universities have made similar grievous errors — Fordham, Johns Hopkins, Vassar, Northwestern and Cambridge, to name a few — it does not excuse Carnegie Mellon’s screwup. Nothing less than the university’s integrity is on the line — the integrity of a computer science leader that committed a colossal computer error."

Prison Architecture and the Question of Ethics; New York Times, 2/16/15

Michael Kimmelman, New York Times; Prison Architecture and the Question of Ethics:

"Faced with lawsuits and a growing mountain of damning research, New York City officials decided last month to ban solitary confinement for prison inmates 21 and younger. Just a few weeks earlier, the American Institute of Architects rejected a petition to censure members who design solitary-confinement cells and death chambers.

“It’s just not something we want to determine as a collective,” Helene Combs Dreiling, the institute’s former president, told me. She said she put together a special panel that reviewed the plea. “Members with deeply embedded beliefs will avoid designing those building types and leave it to their colleagues,” Ms. Dreiling elaborated. “Architects self-select, depending on where they feel they can contribute best.”

What are the ethical boundaries for architecture? Architecture is one of the learned professions, like medicine or law. It requires a license, giving architects a monopoly over their practices, in return for a minimal promise that buildings won’t fall down."

Debating the Rules and Ethics of Digital Photojournalism; New York Times, 2/17/15

New York Times; Debating the Rules and Ethics of Digital Photojournalism:

"Significant questions have arisen after a large number of images were disqualified from this year’s World Press Photo competition because of excessive — and sometimes blatant — post-processing. After independent experts examined the images being considered for prizes in the final rounds, and presented their findings to the jury, 20 percent of the photos were disqualified by the judges. This was often because of significant addition or subtraction to the image content.

These disqualifications — almost three times more than in last year’s competition — have generated discussion about the standards in photojournalism for post processing and the alteration of images. Understandably, there is concern over the degree of manipulation in widely published images."

The Long Good Fight: Libraries at the heart of intellectual freedoms | Editorial; Library Journal, 2/17/15

Rebecca T. Miller, Library Journal; The Long Good Fight: Libraries at the heart of intellectual freedoms | Editorial:

"Librarians and libraries are essential to discourse about intellectual freedoms. Now we have more work to do in light of violent efforts to curtail such rights, perhaps most notably the January 7 attack on the offices of Paris’s weekly Charlie Hebdo. For me, these events brought our work to date into high relief but also intensified a sense of urgency about what librarians can do to defend a richer understanding of the value of freedom of inquiry and expression.

American Library Association (ALA) president Courtney Young’s statement on the attacks framed the library ethos: “Such attacks are counter to the values of access to information with diversity of views—and to the values of civic engagement, which encourages people to read and discuss these views without fear.”

Libraries, in an important sense, exist to help remove fear from our culture: fear of the other, fear of the unknown, and fear of the differences of opinion that make us human. They do not exist to remove those differences. Our libraries hold and foster access to countervailing opinions, information about worlds beyond our own, and insight into cultures we have never experienced, as well as awareness of people living right next door. They are full of words answered by words—sometimes divisive ones—that together shape our evolving way of life.

Librarians are often out front in this freedom fight, perhaps most noticeably when it comes to book challenges. I think of acts of censorship as existing on a continuum of sorts. Acts of terror sit at one extreme but are still related to nonviolent attempts to use leverage of some kind to force a limitation on what others can say or read. Libraries have a mandate to exercise the muscles that counter the censor’s impulse early and often."

Gunman Kills 1 in Attack on Free Speech Event in Denmark; Associated Press via New York Times, 2/14/15

Associated Press via New York Times; Gunman Kills 1 in Attack on Free Speech Event in Denmark:

"A gunman opened fire Saturday on a Copenhagen cultural center, killing one man in what authorities called a terror attack against a free speech event featuring an artist who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad.

The shooting, which also wounded three police officers, came a month after extremists killed 12 people at a satirical newspaper in Paris that had sparked Muslim outrage with its depictions of Muhammad...

Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist who has faced numerous death threats for caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad, was one of the main speakers at Saturday's panel discussion, titled "Art, blasphemy and freedom of expression.""

Can We Strengthen our Fragile Public Domain?; Library Journal, 2/12/15

Kevin L. Smith, Library Journal; Can We Strengthen our Fragile Public Domain? :

"In fact, even in the United States there has been some recognition that the Sonny Bono extension has done more harm than good. In a 2013 paper called, apparently without irony, “The Next Great Copyright Act,” Registrar of Copyrights Maria Pallante acknowledges that the copyright term is very long and that its length “has consequences” and needs to be made “more functional” (see pages 336-7). Although she stops short of asking Congress to repeal the 20-year extension, she does suggest “offsets” to mitigate the harm that has been done. Pallante is a far cry from being a “copyleft” radical; like previous Registrars, she tends to favor the interests of big content industries. So her suggestion that the term of copyright be readjusted because it is too long is a remarkable acknowledgement of the problem we have created.

Public Domain Day is one more reminder that our copyright laws in the U.S. have tipped the balance of protection too far away from its public interest roots."

'Code for America' fellows aim to make Pittsburgh more transparent; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2/13/15

Robert Zullo, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; 'Code for America' fellows aim to make Pittsburgh more transparent:

"Contracts and campaign contributions often are the fuel that powers political machines, but Mr. Peduto said he wants the three Code for America fellows who will spend a year in Pittsburgh to help open up city purchasing to small businesses and others who have been historically shut out of the process and strip away “that whole machine.”

“For the taxpayers, they’re basically left in the dark they look at government with suspicion because they don’t really see how their money’s being spent,” Mr. Peduto said at the Thursday news conference. “What if we shed light on it so everyone could see how that money has an influence and then take away the influence by allowing more people to bid on contracts.”

Pittsburgh was one of eight government entities selected to receive 2015 fellows from the national nonprofit, which allows young technology professionals to spend a year working to make government services “simple, effective and easy to use,” a news release said.

“We’re going to create the model for cities all around this country and all around the world to follow,” Mr. Peduto said."

A Failed Trial in Africa Raises Questions About How to Test H.I.V. Drugs; New York Times, 2/4/15

Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times; A Failed Trial in Africa Raises Questions About How to Test H.I.V. Drugs:

"The surprising failure of a large clinical trial of H.I.V.-prevention methods in Africa — and the elaborate deceptions employed by the women in it — have opened an ethical debate about how to run such studies in poor countries and have already changed the design of some that are now underway."

Frauds: 17 Medical Journals Publish This Scientist’s Fake Medical Research; Higher Perspective, 1/15

Higher Perspective; Frauds: 17 Medical Journals Publish This Scientist’s Fake Medical Research:

"Mark Shrime, a Harvard scientist pursuing a PhD in health policy wanted to see just how easy it is to get medical research published in various medical journals. Every day he says he receives at least one request from an open-access medical journal asking to publish his research.

The catch? They only need $500 to publish it.

So Shrime decided to see how easy it would be to public a bogus article. So he made one up using www.randomtextgenerator.com. He titled the article “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and wrote that the authors were Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. The articles subtitle was “The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.”

Shrime submitted his bogus article to some 37 journals, and two weeks later, 17 journals had accepted it. Note: They haven’t published them yet, but say they’re ready to just as soon as Mr. Shrime sends them that $500."

A Discredited Vaccine Study’s Continuing Impact on Public Health; New York Times, 2/1/15

Clyde Haberman, New York Times; A Discredited Vaccine Study’s Continuing Impact on Public Health:

"To explore how matters reached this pass, Retro Report, a series of video documentaries studying major news stories of the past and their consequences, offers this special episode. It turns on a seminal moment in anti-vaccination resistance. This was an announcement in 1998 by a British doctor who said he had found a relationship between the M.M.R. vaccine — measles, mumps, rubella — and the onset of autism.

Typically, the M.M.R. shot is given to infants at about 12 months and again at age 5 or 6. This doctor, Andrew Wakefield, wrote that his study of 12 children showed that the three vaccines taken together could alter immune systems, causing intestinal woes that then reach, and damage, the brain. In fairly short order, his findings were widely rejected as — not to put too fine a point on it — bunk. Dozens of epidemiological studies found no merit to his work, which was based on a tiny sample. The British Medical Journal went so far as to call his research “fraudulent.” The British journal Lancet, which originally published Dr. Wakefield’s paper, retracted it. The British medical authorities stripped him of his license.

Nonetheless, despite his being held in disgrace, the vaccine-autism link has continued to be accepted on faith by some."

Alabama Judge Faces Ethics Complaint for Gay Marriage Letter; NBC News, 1/28/15

Miranda Leitsinger, NBC News; Alabama Judge Faces Ethics Complaint for Gay Marriage Letter:

"A civil rights group on Wednesday filed a judicial ethics complaint against Alabama's controversial Supreme Court Chief Justice, Roy Moore, saying his comments urging judges to disregard a recent ruling striking down the state's gay marriage ban were "encouraging lawlessness."

The Southern Poverty Law Center said it had lodged the complaint with the state's Judicial Inquiry Commission, which could recommend that Moore face ethics charges in the Alabama Court of the Judiciary."

French Arrests Raise Question: Is Free Speech for All?; Associated Press via New York Times, 1/25/15

Associated Press via New York Times; French Arrests Raise Question: Is Free Speech for All? :

"That has unleashed accusations of a double standard, in which free speech applies to those who mock Islam while Muslims are penalized for expressing their own provocative views. Many Muslims complain that France aggressively prosecutes anti-Semitic slurs, but that they are not protected from similar racist speech.

French police have arrested more than 70 people since the attacks for allegedly defending or glorifying terrorism. The most famous is comedian Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, charged over a Facebook post saying "I feel like Charlie Coulibaly" — a merger of the names of magazine Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly, the attacker who killed four hostages at the supermarket. The comic also has repeatedly been prosecuted for anti-Semitism.

Dieudonne later suggested he was being silenced by free-speech hypocrisy. "You consider me like Amedy Coulibaly when I am no different from Charlie," he wrote in an open letter to French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.

Many countries have laws limiting free speech, and on paper most hate-speech rules do not discriminate against any particular faith or group."

California Bars Judges From Boy Scouts Membership; Associated Press via New York Times, 1/24/15

Associated Press via New York Times; California Bars Judges From Boy Scouts Membership:

"California's Supreme Court voted Friday to prohibit state judges from belonging to the Boy Scouts on grounds that the group discriminates against gays.

The court said its seven justices unanimously voted to heed a recommendation by its ethics advisory committee barring judges' affiliation with the organization.

In 1996 the state Supreme Court banned judges from belonging to groups that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, but made an exception for nonprofit youth organizations.

The Supreme Court's Advisory Committee on the Code of Judicial Ethics in February recommended eliminating the exception to enhance public confidence in the judiciary."

Former Atlanta Fire Chief, Fired Over Book Storm, Files Complaint; Reuters via New York Times, 1/23/15

Reuters via New York Times; Former Atlanta Fire Chief, Fired Over Book Storm, Files Complaint:

"Reed said earlier this month Cochran was not fired due to his religious beliefs, but rather because of questions that arose about his "judgment and ability to manage the department" in connection with the book.

Reed said the city has a clear policy that forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation and that Cochran's published views could be a legal liability.

Cochran consulted the city's ethics officer but not the mayor before he published the book, Reed said."

Terrible new Pennsylvania law muzzles speech, threatens press freedom; Washington Post, 1/21/15

Radley Balko, Washington Post; Terrible new Pennsylvania law muzzles speech, threatens press freedom:

"Pennsylvania just passed an awful new law that bars convicts from publicly discussing their crimes if doing so could cause victims “a temporary or permanent state of mental anguish.” Journalist Christopher Moraff is part of a group that’s suing to have the law overturned. At the Daily Beast, he explains why striking down the law, which he calls the “Silencing Act,” is so important."

The Charlie Hebdo Massacre in Paris; New York Times, 1/7/15

Editorial Board, New York Times; The Charlie Hebdo Massacre in Paris:

"Just days after the 9/11 attacks, an editorial in the newspaper Le Monde declared: “We are all Americans.” In France, “Je suis Charlie” — “I am Charlie” — has gone viral as the words to show solidarity with the victims at Charlie Hebdo. This attack was an assault on freedom everywhere. On Wednesday, the American Embassy in Paris put that message on its social media accounts."

News organizations wrestle with whether to publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons after attack; Washington Post, 1/7/15

Paul Farhi, Washington Post; News organizations wrestle with whether to publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons after attack:

"Ever since a Danish newspaper drew death threats and incited protests by publishing cartoons satirizing the prophet Muhammad in 2005, American news organization have wrestled with a question: to publish or not to publish the offending, if clearly newsworthy, cartoons?

The issue came roaring back Wednesday with the attack on a satirical Paris publication that had republished the Danish cartoons and created its own in the face of violent threats from Muslim extremists. The attack by three gunmen on the publication, Charlie Hebdo, left 12 people dead, including its editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, who once defiantly posed with a copy of his magazine featuring a cartoon of an Orthodox Jewish man pushing Muhammad in a wheelchair."

American Apparel updates its ethics code after ousting Charney; Fortune, 1/6/15

John Kell, Fortune; American Apparel updates its ethics code after ousting Charney:

"American Apparel has updated its code of ethics less than a month after firing controversial CEO Dov Charney — a move that could help improve the apparel chain’s tattered reputation as it considers a possible sale, or a turnaround.

The updated policy wasn’t exactly a surprise: American Apparel APP -3.55% in a regulatory filing last month said it would replace its prior code of ethics by Jan. 1 (it appears it slightly missed that deadline). In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the company said the revised code was intended to “clarify, update, or enhance the descriptions of the standards of conduct that were expected of all directors, officers and employees of the company.”"

Chris Christie’s trip to Dallas on Jerry Jones’s dime raises ethics concerns; Washington Post, 1/6/15

Cindy Boren, Washington Post; Chris Christie’s trip to Dallas on Jerry Jones’s dime raises ethics concerns:

"The trip may comply with the letter of the law, but it’s still raising questions, especially given Christie’s George Washington Bridge scandal.

Jameson Doig, an emeritus Princeton University professor who wrote a book about the Port Authority, said Christie’s relationship and receiving of gifts from Jones “sends the wrong signal if Christie or any of his top aides appear to have a conflict of interest in their relationship to the Port Authority.”

“The governor ought to do all he can to avoid that conflict of interest or the appearance of a conflict,” Doig, a member of a panel on overhauling the agency’s ethics rules and structure, told the Wall Street Journal.

The trip may have violated no laws, but it may prove to be a bigger blow to his image than just that orange sweater that became a social-media meme."

French Official Campaigns to Make ‘Right to be Forgotten’ Global; New York Times, 12/3/14

Mark Scott, New York Times; French Official Campaigns to Make ‘Right to be Forgotten’ Global:

"Europe is pressing for its ‘‘right to be forgotten’’ ruling to go global.

The privacy decision, which allows individuals to ask that links leading to information about themselves be removed from search engine results, has been gaining traction worldwide ever since European officials released guidelines last week that demanded Google and others apply the ruling across their entire search empires.

And on Wednesday, Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, who heads the French data protection authority and has campaigned heavily for expanding the ruling, defended European efforts to force search engines to apply the ruling to search results outside of Europe."

Research Is Just the Beginning: A Free People Must Have Open Access to the Law; Electronic Frontier Foundation, 10/23/14

Corynne McSherry, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Research Is Just the Beginning: A Free People Must Have Open Access to the Law:

"The bad news: the specter of copyright has raised its ugly head. A group of standards-development organizations (SDOs) have banded together to sue Public.Resource.Org, accusing the site of infringing copyright by reproducing and publishing a host of safety codes that those organizations drafted and then lobbied heavily to have incorporated into law. These include crucial national standards like the national electrical codes and fire safety codes. Public access to such codes—meaning not just the ability to read them, but to publish and re-use them—can be crucial when there is an industrial accident; when there is a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina; or when a home-buyer wants to know whether her house is code-compliant. Publishing the codes online, in a readily accessible format, makes it possible for reporters and other interested citizens to not only view them easily, but also to search, excerpt, and generate new insights.

The SDOs argue that they hold a copyright on those laws because the standards began their existence in the private sector and were only later "incorporated by reference" into the law. That claim conflicts with the public interest, common sense, and the rule of law.

With help from EFF and others, Public.Resource.Org is fighting back, and the outcome of this battle will have a major impact on the public interest. If any single entity owns a copyright in the law, it can sell or ration the law, as well as make all sort of rules about when, where, and how we share it."

How Sacred Are Our Patrons’ Privacy Rights? Answer Carefully; Library Journal, 10/23/14

Rick Anderson, Library Journal; How Sacred Are Our Patrons’ Privacy Rights? Answer Carefully:

"This month I want to address the issue of patron privacy in the context of the recent revelations about privacy incursions in the latest version of Adobe Digital Editions (ADE)—specifically, the fact that version 4 of the e-reader software gathers highly specific data about individual users’ reading behavior and transmits it, unencrypted and with all identifying information included as well as other data culled from the user’s machine, back to Adobe. (A very useful running summary of the issue and details about how the situation is quickly evolving can be found at the Digital Reader blog.)

Understandably and rightly, the fact that this is happening has ignited something of a firestorm in the library world and elsewhere."

Widespread Nature of Chapel Hill's Academic Fraud Is Laid Bare; Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/23/14

Jack Stripling, Chronicle of Higher Education; Widespread Nature of Chapel Hill's Academic Fraud Is Laid Bare:

"An academic-fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took root under a departmental secretary and die-hard Tar Heel fan, who was egged on by athletics advisers to create no-show classes that would keep under­prepared and unmotivated players eligible. Over nearly two decades, professors, coaches, and administrators either participated in the scheme or overlooked it, undercutting the core values of one of the nation’s premier public universities.

Such are the sobering findings of an eight-month investigation led by Kenneth L. Wainstein, a longtime official of the U.S. Justice Department who was hired by the university to get to the bottom of a scandal that came to light four years ago."

Readers Debate Online Piracy and the Future of Digital Entertainment; New York Times, 9/29/14

Jenna Wortham, New York Times; Readers Debate Online Piracy and the Future of Digital Entertainment:

"On Sunday, The New York Times published the story of a popular — and illegal — website that let people stream and download movies and television shows at their leisure. The site was taken offline in 2010 by the federal government, and the administrators behind the site were charged with conspiracy and copyright infringement. Nearly all served time in prison. The article touched a nerve among Times readers, eliciting hundreds of reactions about copyright infringement and intellectual property, and how the digital world complicates both.

Here is a sampling of their comments..."

What Kind of Town Bans Books?; New Yorker, 10/1/14

Annie Julia Wyman, New Yorker; What Kind of Town Bans Books? :

"The Highland Park Independent School District, and all the other American institutions that still censor books, grapple with a set of very old and perhaps unanswerable questions: What is art, anyway? Must it be good for us? Do we accept a character’s moral flaws if we read about them? Must we experience everything an author puts into a book, or can we skip the things that disturb us or with which we disagree? On one side of the cultural divide, the pro-books side, our answers align against moralistic messages, against utility, against excisions of any kind. We feel that, while art is so powerful it can change lives, it is also so fragile and precious that it badly needs our protection. But there are other answers to these old questions—new perspectives that literary culture allows us to access. The dog from Garth Stein’s novel thinks, “I learn about other cultures and other ways of life, and then I start thinking about my own place in the world and what makes sense and what doesn’t.”* That’s exactly the kind of openness that I want to teach, and exactly what I learned in the place where I grew up."

The Censor in Each of Us; New Yorker, 5/6/14

Colm Toibin, New Yorker; The Censor in Each of Us:

"...we understood two things.

First, that the urge to riot in a theatre to stop actors being heard, the urge to ban books, the urge to threaten to cut subsidy are almost built into our nature, they lurk always in the shadows, especially in societies where there are divisions and pressures and fears or sudden and uneasy change, but maybe they lurk everywhere.

Second, the need to resist these urges, urges that can be both shadowy and substantial, both threatening and pressing, which weaken and poison the richness and potential of our lives, requires single-mindedness, vigilance, cunning, knowledge that the enemy is within as well as without, an absolute belief in the idea of the glittering mind and the power of the shifting and uncertain image, and a belief in the challenge of the word and the often awkward presence of the new. The doctrine that these things are fundamental to us, to our way of living in the world, to our humanity, means then that we must work, using examples from the past, toward the right for others, as well as ourselves, to be let alone to imagine, to write, to read, to share, and to be heard."

China Scrambles To Censor Social Media; Reuters via HuffingtonPost, 9/29/14

Paul Carsten, Reuters via HuffingtonPost; China Scrambles To Censor Social Media:

"Chinese censors and opponents of the protests sweeping Hong Kong are engaging in a cat-and-mouse game with demonstrators and commentators in a bid to stop news of the unrest spreading online and, in particular, reaching the mainland...

The intervention is beyond what is normal for the usually free-talking Hong Kong, even as people are used to Chinese censors scrubbing the Internet in the mainland when mass demonstrations erupt.

On Sunday, users reported that Facebook Inc's photo sharing app Instagram was inaccessible on China's mainland.

Chinese websites, including Baidu Inc's search engine and the Twitter-like Weibo Corp microblog, have set about deleting references to the Hong Kong demonstrations.

Others have reported messages on Tencent Holdings Ltd's hugely popular WeChat messaging app being removed."

The Unrepentant Bootlegger; New York Times, 9/27/14

Jenna Wortham, New York Times; The Unrepentant Bootlegger:

"To the government, Ms. Beshara was a thief, plain and simple. The Motion Picture Association of America alerted the federal government to NinjaVideo and nine other movie-streaming sites, and they all went dark at the same time. The raids were carried out by several federal agencies working to combat counterfeiting and piracy, and the scale of the operation was meant to send a warning that the government wasn’t ignoring the freewheeling world of illegal online streaming and downloading.

Ms. Beshara, however, still can’t accept that what she was doing deserved the heavy hammer of the law. She served 16 months in prison for conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement, but she still talks about NinjaVideo as something grand. It was a portal that spirited her away from the doldrums of her regular life as a receptionist living with her parents to an online community that regarded her as its queen. Sure, she showed movies that were still playing in theaters, but it seemed like harmless, small-stakes fun.

“In hindsight — I know it’s naïve — but I never imagined it going criminal,” she said. “It didn’t seem like it was something to be bothered with. Even if it is wrong.”

She is not the only one who feels that way. It has proved very difficult to reverse a pervasive cultural nonchalance about what constitutes intellectual property theft on the web. Despite the government crackdown in 2010 and subsequent efforts to unplug websites that host or link to illegal content, new sites have emerged that filled the void that NinjaVideo left behind.

Online piracy is thriving. File-sharing, most of it illegal, still amounts to nearly a quarter of all consumer Internet traffic, according to Cisco Systems’ Visual Networking Index. And a recent report from Tru Optik, a media analytics firm, said that nearly 10 billion movies, television shows and other files, including games and pornography, were downloaded globally in the second quarter of 2014. Tru Optik estimates that about 6 percent of those downloads were legal. In July, a high-quality version of “The Expendables 3,” the Sylvester Stallone action comedy film, surfaced online and was downloaded millions of times, well before its release in theaters."

A Stolen Video of My Daughter Went Viral. Here’s What I Learned; New York Times, 9/26/14

Carrie Goldman, New York Times; A Stolen Video of My Daughter Went Viral. Here’s What I Learned:

"In early September, someone downloaded my video of Cleo, stripped it of all identifying information, changed the title from “Cleo on Equality” to “Wisdom of a 4-Year-Old”, and re-uploaded it to YouTube, passing it off as his or her own video. A woman in Amsterdam posted an embedded version of the stolen video to her Facebook page, from which it went viral. Within a matter of days, the stripped-down version of the video had been shared over 80,000 times.

I only learned about it when the pirated video began appearing in the news feed of people who recognized Cleo and noticed that it was not linked to any of my accounts. I felt sick on multiple levels. I have always known, of course, that the mere act of uploading a video to any digital site means potentially losing control over that content. But now it had happened, and even though the shares appeared to be harmless — approving, even — it was still terrifying. What if someone decided to do something creepy with it?

There was also a part of me that saw all the comments lauding Cleo’s grasp of acceptance, and I wanted those people to be linked back to my anti-bullying work. I missed the opportunity to share what I do for a living with a wide audience. I was sad and confused. Was I upset because the video was out there being viewed by tons of strangers, or was I upset because it was out there and I wasn’t getting credit? Both, probably...

I knew I had rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Since I speak to students and teachers all the time about good digital citizenship, I knew what steps to take next:

• Do not retaliate against someone online

• Take a screen shot and record the evidence

• Use this online form to report the violation to Facebook.

• Use this online form to report a copyright infringement on YouTube."

The Wilds of Education; New York Times, 9/27/14

Frank Bruni, New York Times; The Wilds of Education:

"WHEN it comes to bullying, to sexual assault, to gun violence, we want and need our schools to be as safe as possible.

But when it comes to learning, shouldn’t they be dangerous?

Isn’t education supposed to provoke, disrupt, challenge the paradigms that young people have consciously embraced and attack the prejudices that they have unconsciously absorbed?

Isn’t upset a necessary part of that equation? And if children are lucky enough to be ignorant of the world’s ugliness, aren’t books the rightful engines of enlightenment, and aren’t classrooms the perfect theaters for it?

Not in the view of an unacceptable number of Americans. Not in too many high schools and on too many college campuses. Not to judge by complaints from the right and the left, in suburbs and cities and states red and blue.

Last week was Banned Books Week, during which proponents of unfettered speech and intellectual freedom draw attention to instances in which debate is circumscribed and the universe sanitized. As if on cue, a dispute over such censorship erupted in the affluent Dallas-area community of Highland Park, where many students pushed back at a recent decision by high school administrators to suspend the teaching of seven books until further review. Some parents had complained about the books."

Online Renegade, Wanted in U.S., Shakes Up New Zealand Election; New York Times, 9/18/14

Jonathan Hutchison, New York Times; Online Renegade, Wanted in U.S., Shakes Up New Zealand Election:

"It was not an ordinary political rally, but it has been anything but an ordinary election.

The hundreds of people who packed Auckland Town Hall on a recent evening were regaled by speeches by Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist; Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder; and Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, the last two appearing by Internet video link. Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Snowden said the New Zealand government had carried out, or at least participated in, mass domestic surveillance.

But at the center of the show was the event’s organizer, Kim Dotcom, an Internet entrepreneur accused of mass copyright theft whose fledgling Internet Party stands a chance at winning seats in Parliament in the national elections on Saturday.

“We are going to work really, really hard to stop this country from participating in mass surveillance,” Mr. Dotcom told the crowd. “And we’ll close one of the Five Eyes,” he added, referring to the intelligence alliance that consists of Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. The crowd erupted in cheers."

Data Scientists Want Big Data Ethics Standards; Information Week, 9/17/14

Jeff Bertolucci, Information Week; Data Scientists Want Big Data Ethics Standards:

"The vast majority of statisticians and data scientists believe that consumers should worry about privacy issues related to data being collected on them, and most have qualms about the questionable ethics behind Facebook's undisclosed psychological experiment on its users in 2012.

Those are just two of the findings from a Revolution Analytics survey of 144 data scientists at JSM (Joint Statistical Meetings) 2014, an annual gathering of statisticians, to gauge their thoughts on big data ethics. The Boston conference ran Aug. 2-7."

Privacy, Security and GPS-Based Apps: An Inside Look From SCRUFF; Huffington Post, 9/10/14

Eric Silverberg, Huffington Post; Privacy, Security and GPS-Based Apps: An Inside Look From SCRUFF:

"SCRUFF wants to ensure our members both who live in these countries and who travel to these countries stay informed, and in an upcoming release we will be enabling "hide distance" by default for people in these regions.

In addition, we've struck an innovative partnership with ILGA, a non-profit that publishes an annual report of gay and lesbian rights worldwide. Coming soon, when a user travels to a country included in the ILGA report and launches SCRUFF, he will see an alert informing him of the presence of local laws criminalizing homosexual activity. By increasing awareness about these laws, we hope to keep our members vigilant and raise the global pressure for reform.

Ultimately, the possibility of location discovery is something we all must consider whenever we use location-based apps for dating, traveling, hooking up, or making friends. As the stakes have increased, app designers must meet the challenge of building robust systems that incorporate advanced location obfuscation techniques. Though today's headlines happen to target gays, the challenges of location security affect any religion, gender, sexuality or minority group who finds community through location-based apps."

Reddit and 4chan Begin to Button Up; New York Times, 9/8/14

Mike Isaac, New York Times; Reddit and 4chan Begin to Button Up:

"Reddit said its moderators were unable to keep up with a torrent of requests under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove the images, made by those who own rights to the photos. After a moderator removed a post in response to a D.M.C.A. request, another post would pop up in its place. Taking down the entire forums, Reddit said, was the only way to avoid playing a never-ending game of “whack-a-mole.”

The moves came amid an continuing debate over the role websites play in hosting objectionable content online, and how much user-generated content platforms should or should not interfere with what their users post. Twitter, for instance, has faced increasing pressure to protect users from abuse and hate speech on its service, while YouTube has been used at times for distribution of horrifying videos.

Despite its content removal, Reddit continues to maintain its hard-line stance on issues of free speech, even as it decided to take down the forums in question. The company said it had always dealt with D.M.C.A. removal requests by redirecting rights holders to the companies that host the photos on their servers. It has also held a zero-tolerance policy toward some content, such as child pornography.

“We uphold the ideal of free speech on Reddit as much as possible not because we are legally bound to,” said Yishan Wong, Reddit’s chief executive, but because the company believes that the user “has the right to choose between right and wrong, good and evil,” and that it is the user’s responsibility to do so. His company blog post was titled “Every Man Is Responsible for His Own Soul.”"

Officials Pledge Tighter Ethics Rules in Virginia; Associated Press via ABC News, 9/5/14

Alan Suderman, Associated Press via ABC News; Officials Pledge Tighter Ethics Rules in Virginia:

" "This is a dynamite charge blowing up Virginia political culture," said Robert D. Holsworth, a Virginia Commonwealth University political science professor who sat through most of the five-week federal trial.

McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, were convicted of doing favors for wealthy vitamin executive Jonnie Williams in exchange for more than $165,000 in gifts and loans they admitted taking. During the trial, Bob McDonnell spent five days on the stand carefully detailing how he didn't substantively break Virginia law.

While captivating a state audience with its soap opera-like details of marital discord, the McDonnell trial also highlighted the yawning gulf between what a federal jury thinks is acceptable behavior for a public official versus what Virginia law allows. And it's a gap that caused a growing chorus of calls from public officials both for new limits on what they can take, as well as for greater disclosure requirements.

"We need ethics reform here in the commonwealth," said Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who signed an executive order capping gifts at $100 for himself, his family and his staff shortly after taking office. "You go into office, you have to serve the public good. Nobody should be giving you anything of value.""

"Captain America," "Hulk" & More to Feature Anti-Bullying Variant Covers in October; ComicBookResources.com, 9/3/14

Steve Sunu, ComicBookResources.com; "Captain America," "Hulk" & More to Feature Anti-Bullying Variant Covers in October:

"In honor of National Bullying Prevention Month and Blue Shirt Day World Day of Bullying Prevention in October, Marvel Comics -- in partnership with STOMP Out Bullying -- will release special anti-bullying variant covers for seven select titles, including "Rocket Raccoon" #4 and "Hulk" #7 by Pascal Campion, "Guardians of the Galaxy" #20, by Stephanie Hans, "Avengers" #36 by Sean Chen, "Inhuman" #7 by John Tyler Christopher, "Captain America" #25 by Kalman Andrasofszky and "Legendary Star-Lord" #4 by Paul Renaud.

"The center of Marvel’s storytelling history is the eternal struggle between good and evil, with many of its greatest Super Heroes having to contend with -- and rise above -- bullying, in all its forms," Marvel EiC Axel Alonso said via Press Release."

Open data's Achilles heel: re-identification; ZDNet, 9/3/14

Rob O'Neill, ZDNet; Open data's Achilles heel: re-identification:

'Governments around the globe are embracing the mantra of open data and talking up its productivity benefits, but none have so far made the re-identification of this mass of anonymised data illegal... The possibility of outlawing re-identification is now being discussed in New Zealand, with both the Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards, and a May report (pdf) from the New Zealand Data futures Forum suggesting legal protections against re-identification may be necessary.

Edwards told ZDNet he is trying to look towards the future and ensure that the value in government data can be safely extracted in ways that maintain public confidence.

“One of the methods might be a prohibition on re-identification. If we did that we would be world leaders," he said.

Similarly, the Data Futures Forum report said it is necessary to develop a "robust data-use ecosystem" and to get the rules around open data right. This should include a data council to act as guardians and advisers, and a broad review of legislation."

You Should Have a Say in Your Robot Car’s Code of Ethics; Wired, 9/2/14

Jason Millar, Ethics; You Should Have a Say in Your Robot Car’s Code of Ethics:

"We Must Embrace Complexity

If we embrace robust informed consent practices in engineering the sky will not fall. There are some obvious limits to the kinds of ethics settings we should allow in our robot cars. It would be absurd to design a car that allows users to choose to continue straight only when a woman is blocking the road. At the same time, it seems perfectly reasonable to allow a person to sacrifice himself to save a child if doing so aligns with his moral convictions. We can identify limits, even if the task is complex.

Robots, and the ethical issues they raise, are immensely complex. But they require our thoughtful attention if we are to shift our thinking about the ethics of design and engineering, and respond to the burgeoning robotics industry appropriately. Part of this shift in thinking will require us to embrace moral and legal complexity where complexity is required. Unfortunately, bringing order to the chaos does not always result in a simpler world."

Web Trolls Winning as Incivility Increases; New York Times, 8/14/14

Farhad Manjoo, New York Times; Web Trolls Winning as Incivility Increases:

"But Dr. Phillips, of Humboldt State, pointed out that many efforts to curb trolling ran into a larger problem: “To what extent do you want to make it harder for people to express themselves on the Internet?” she asked.

“This is not the good-faith exchange of ideas,” she said. “It’s just people being nasty, and if anything, it might encourage marginalized groups to not speak up.” She added, “On the other hand, by silencing that valve, there’s a lot of other stuff that is important culturally that might also be minimized.”

If there’s one thing the history of the Internet has taught us, it’s that trolls will be difficult to contain because they really reflect base human society in all its ugliness. Trolls find a way.

“It’s not a question of whether or not we’re winning the war on trolling, but whether we’re winning the war on misogyny, or racism, and ableism and all this other stuff,” Dr. Phillips said. “Trolling is just a symptom of those bigger problems.”"

Senator Quits Montana Race After Charge of Plagiarism; New York Times, 8/7/14

Jonathan Martin, New York Times; Senator Quits Montana Race After Charge of Plagiarism:

"His withdrawal from the race comes about two weeks after The New York Times reported that in 2007 Mr. Walsh plagiarized large sections of the final paper he completed to earn his master’s degree at the prestigious Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. In his statement, Mr. Walsh expressed no contrition for the plagiarism, saying only that the “research paper from my time at the U.S. Army War College has become a distraction from the debate you expect and deserve.”...

The War College commenced its own investigation into Mr. Walsh immediately after the Times article was published, and it made a preliminary conclusion that there was evidence of plagiarism. An academic review board at the college will convene next month to reach a conclusive determination, a decision that could result in the senator’s losing his degree."

Should Germans Read ‘Mein Kampf’?; New York Times, 7/7/14

Peter Ross Range, New York Times; Should Germans Read ‘Mein Kampf’? :

"Since then, although “Mein Kampf” has maintained a shadow presence — on the back shelves of used bookstores and libraries and, more recently, online — its copyright holder, the state of Bavaria, has refused to allow its republication, creating an aura of taboo around the book.

All that is about to change. Bavaria’s copyright expires at the end of 2015; after that, anyone can publish the book: a quality publisher, a mass-market pulp house, even a neo-Nazi group.

The release of “Mein Kampf” into Germany’s cultural bloodstream is sure to be a sensational moment. In a nation that still avidly buys books — and loves to argue in public — the book will again ignite painful intergenerational debates on talk shows and in opinion pages about how parents and grandparents let themselves be so blindly misled.

Like the 1996 uproar caused by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” which accused ordinary Germans of being capable of mass-murdering Jews, this publishing event will shape contemporary politics and feed Germany’s deep-rooted postwar pacifism."

Big Data Comes To College; NPR, 7/4/14

Anya Kamenetz, NPR; Big Data Comes To College:

"So academics are scrambling to come up with rules and procedures for gathering and using student data—and manipulating student behavior.

"This is a huge opportunity for science, but it also brings very large ethical puzzles," says Dr. Mitchell Stevens, director of digital research and planning at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education. "We are at an unprecedented moment in the history of the human sciences, in which massive streams of information about human activity are produced continuously through online interaction."

Experts say the ethical considerations are lagging behind the practice. "There's a ton of research being done...[yet] if you do a search on ethics and analytics I think you'll get literally seven or eight articles," says Pistilli, who is the author of one of them.

Large Ethical Puzzles

In June, Stevens helped convene a gathering to produce a set of guidelines for this research. The Asilomar Convention was in the spirit of the Belmont Report of 1979, which created the rules in use today to evaluate research involving human subjects...

Asilomar came up with a set of broad principles that include "openness," "justice," and "beneficence." The final one is "continuous consideration," which, essentially, acknowledges that ethics remain a moving target in these situations."

Privacy Group Complains to F.T.C. About Facebook Emotion Study; New York Times, 7/3/14

Vindu Goel, New York Times; Privacy Group Complains to F.T.C. About Facebook Emotion Study:

"The group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Facebook had deceived its users and violated the terms of a 2012 consent decree with the F.T.C., which is the principal regulatory agency overseeing consumer privacy in the United States...

And on Thursday, the journal that published the study, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, issued an “expression of concern” regarding Facebook’s decision not to get explicit consent from the affected users before running the study.

“Obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out are best practices in most instances under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Policy for the Protection of Human Research Subjects,” Inder M. Verma, the journal’s editor-in-chief, wrote in the note.

Although academic researchers are generally expected to follow the policy, Facebook, as a private company, was not required to do so, Mr. Verma said. “It is nevertheless a matter of concern that the collection of the data by Facebook may have involved practices that were not fully consistent with the principles of obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out,” he said."

Did Facebook's experiment violate ethics?; CNN, 7/2/14

Robert Klitzman, CNN; Did Facebook's experiment violate ethics? :

"Editor's note: Robert Klitzman is a professor of psychiatry and director of the Masters of Bioethics Program at Columbia University. He is author of the forthcoming book, "The Ethics Police?: The Struggle to Make Human Research Safe." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author...

In 1974, following revelations of ethical violations in the Tuskegee Syphilis study, Congress passed the National Research Act. At Tuskegee, researchers followed African-American men with syphilis for decades and did not tell the subjects when penicillin became available as an effective treatment. The researchers feared that the subjects, if informed, would take the drug and be cured, ending the experiment.

Public outcry led to federal regulations governing research on humans, requiring informed consent. These rules pertain, by law, to all studies conducted using federal funds, but have been extended by essentially all universities and pharmaceutical and biotech companies in this country to cover all research on humans, becoming the universally-accepted standard.

According to these regulations, all research must respect the rights of individual research subjects, and scientific investigators must therefore explain to participants the purposes of the study, describe the procedures (and which of these are experimental) and "any reasonably foreseeable risks or discomforts."

Facebook followed none of these mandates. The company has argued that the study was permissible because the website's data use policy states, "we may use the information we receive about you...for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement," and that "we may make friend suggestions, pick stories for your News Feed or suggest people to tag in photos."

But while the company is not legally required to follow this law, two of the study's three authors are affiliated with universities -- Cornell and the University of California at San Francisco -- that publicly uphold this standard."

Facebook’s Secret Manipulation of User Emotions Faces European Inquiries; New York Times, 7/2/14

Facebook’s Secret Manipulation of User Emotions Faces European Inquiries:

"In response to widespread public anger, several European data protection agencies are examining whether Facebook broke local privacy laws when it conducted the weeklong investigation in January 2012.

That includes Ireland’s Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, which regulates Facebook’s global operations outside North America because the company has its international headquarters in Dublin. The Irish regulator has sent a series of questions to Facebook related to potential privacy issues, including whether the company got consent from users for the study, according to a spokeswoman.

The Information Commissioner’s Office of Britain also said that it was looking into potential privacy breaches that may have affected the country’s residents, though a spokesman of the office said that it was too early to know whether Facebook had broken the law. It is unknown where the users who were part of the experiment were located. Some 80 percent of Facebook’s 1.2 billion users are based outside North America...

The Federal Trade Commission, the American regulator that oversees Facebook’s conduct under a 20-year consent decree, has not publicly expressed similar interest in the case, which has caused an uproar over the company’s ethics and prompted the lead researcher on the project to apologize."

Why I Left 60 Minutes: The big networks say they care about uncovering the truth. That’s not what I saw; Politico, 6/29/14

Charles Lewis, Politico; Why I Left 60 Minutes: The big networks say they care about uncovering the truth. That’s not what I saw:

"Many people, then and since, have asked me what exactly I was thinking—after all, I was walking away from a successful career full of future promise. Certainly, quitting 60 Minutes was the most impetuous thing I have ever done. But looking back, I realize how I’d changed. Beneath my polite, mild-mannered exterior, I’d developed a bullheaded determination not to be denied, misled or manipulated. And more than at any previous time, I had had a jarring epiphany that the obstacles on the way to publishing the unvarnished truth had become more formidable internally than externally. I joked to friends that it had become far easier to investigate the bastards—whoever they are—than to suffer through the reticence, bureaucratic hand-wringing and internal censorship of my employer.

In a highly collaborative medium, I had found myself working with overseers I felt I could no longer trust journalistically or professionally, especially in the face of public criticism or controversy—a common occupational hazard for an investigative reporter. My job was to produce compelling investigative journalism for an audience of 30 million to 40 million Americans. But if my stories generated the slightest heat, it was obvious to me who would be expendable. My sense of isolation and vulnerability was palpable.

The best news about this crossroads moment was that after 11 years in the intense, cutthroat world of network television news, I still had some kind of inner compass. I was still unwilling to succumb completely to the lures of career ambition, financial security, peer pressure or conventional wisdom.

Just weeks after I quit, I decided to begin a nonprofit investigation reporting organization—a place dedicated to digging deep beneath the smarminess of Washington’s daily-access journalism into the documents few reporters seemed to be reading, which I knew from experience would reveal broad patterns of cronyism, favoritism, personal enrichment and outrageous (though mostly legal) corruption. My dream was a journalistic utopia—an investigative milieu in which no one would tell me who or what not to investigate. And so I recruited two trusted journalist friends and founded the Center for Public Integrity. The Center’s first report, “America’s Frontline Trade Officials,” was an expanded version of the 60 Minutes “Foreign Agent” story. Not long after this report was published, President George H.W. Bush signed an executive order banning former trade officials from becoming lobbyists for foreign governments or corporations."

Online, the Lying Is Easy: In ‘Virtual Unreality,’ Charles Seife Unfriends Gullibility; New York Times, 7/1/14

[Book Review of Charles Seife's VIRTUAL UNREALITY: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It’s True?] Dwight Garner, New York Times; Online, the Lying Is Easy: In ‘Virtual Unreality,’ Charles Seife Unfriends Gullibility:

"Mr. Seife’s new book, “Virtual Unreality,” is about how digital untruths spread like contagion across our laptops and smartphones. The author is unusually qualified to write on this subject, and not merely because his surname is nearly an anagram for “selfie.”

A professor of journalism at New York University, Mr. Seife is a battle-scarred veteran of the new info wars. When Wired magazine wanted to investigate the ethical lapses of its contributor Jonah Lehrer, for example, it turned to Mr. Seife, whose report pinned Mr. Lehrer, wriggling, to the plagiarism specimen board...

In “Virtual Unreality,” Mr. Seife delivers a short but striding tour of the many ways in which digital information is, as he puts it in a relatively rare moment of rhetorical overkill, “the most virulent, most contagious pathogen that humanity has ever encountered.”...

One of Mr. Seife’s bedrock themes is the Internet’s dismissal, for good and ill, of the concept of authority. On Wikipedia, your Uncle Iggy can edit the page on black holes as easily as Stephen Hawking can. Serious reporting, another form of authority, is withering because it’s so easy to cut and paste facts from other writers, or simply to provide commentary, and then game search engine results so that readers find your material first."