Hacking Victims Deserve Empathy, Not Ridicule; New York Times, 9/2/15

Farhad Manjoo, New York Times; Hacking Victims Deserve Empathy, Not Ridicule:

"There has been a tendency in the tech commentariat to minimize the Ashley Madison breach. The site has always seemed like a joke and possibly a scheme, and those who fell for it a testament to the Internet’s endless capacity to separate fools from their money.

But the victims of the Ashley Madison hacking deserve our sympathy and aid because, with slightly different luck, you or I could just as easily find ourselves in a similarly sorry situation. This breach stands as a monument to the blind trust many of us have placed in our computers — and how powerless we all are to evade the disasters that may befall us when the trust turns out to be misplaced...

“It’s easy to be snarky about Ashley Madison, but just because it’s unpopular or even immoral, it doesn’t mean this sort of activity shouldn’t be protected,” said Scott L. Vernick, a lawyer who specializes in digital privacy issues at the firm Fox Rothschild. “This gets at fundamental issues like freedom of speech and freedom of association — today it’s Ashley Madison, tomorrow it could be some other group that deserves protection.”"

Stop Spying on Wikipedia Users; New York Times, 3/10/15

Jimmy Wales and Lila Tretikov, New York Times; Stop Spying on Wikipedia Users:

"TODAY, we’re filing a lawsuit against the National Security Agency to protect the rights of the 500 million people who use Wikipedia every month. We’re doing so because a fundamental pillar of democracy is at stake: the free exchange of knowledge and ideas.

Our lawsuit says that the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance of Internet traffic on American soil — often called “upstream” surveillance — violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects the right to privacy, as well as the First Amendment, which protects the freedoms of expression and association. We also argue that this agency activity exceeds the authority granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that Congress amended in 2008."

"Duck Dynasty" Pits Free Speech Against Shifting Cultural Taboos; Reason.com, 12/26/13

Cathy Young, Reason.com; "Duck Dynasty" Pits Free Speech Against Shifting Cultural Taboos: "There are at least two lessons to be learned from the “Duck Dynasty” debacle, in which reality TV star Phil Robertson got indefinitely suspended from the A&E hit show after making anti-gay remarks in a GQ magazine interview. One: on freedom of speech, hypocrisy and double standards are rampant across the political spectrum (the title of 1992 book by the great civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, “Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee,” remains ever-relevant). Two: while some speech will always be regarded as beyond the pale in even the freest society, the rapid shifting of those boundaries is sure to generate intense cultural anxiety and conflict."