Reason Magazine - Topics > Web & Blogs

Perez Hilton Hates Sharing the Spotlight

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:06:00 EDT

It seems that even bloggers who routinely skirt the Digital Millenium Copyright Act have a place in their hearts for intellectual property rights. Mario Lavandeira, the founder and host of Perezhilton.com is suing Elizabeth Silver-Fagan, the founder and host of Perezrevenge.com, for "cybersquatting and deceptive trade practices," according to Joseph Menn at the Los Angeles Times.

While there may be some small, innocuous truth to the deception claim (both sites ooze hot pink graphics), Perezrevenge.com isn't cybersquatting on Perezhilton.com. From Nolo:

Cybersquatting means registering, selling or using a domain name with the intent of profiting from the goodwill of someone else's trademark. It generally refers to the practice of buying up domain names that use the names of existing businesses with the intent to sell the names for a profit to those businesses.

The folks at Perezrevenge.com seem to be using their space, rather than holding it for ransom. They also have a slightly different business model, in that they steal photos, report celebrity journalism, and attack Lavandaeira's site, rather than just steal photos and draw semen on them. And by attacking Lavandeira's site, they're supplementing—not replacing—his product, and possibly even driving traffic his way.

Regardless, Lavandeira claims the following in his suit (full pdf):

[The] Defendants deceive the public and create the impression that www.perezrevenge.com emanates from, originates from, is associated with and/or is otherwise endorsed by Lavandeira which results in lost sales and severe damage to Lavandeira's reputation and goodwill.

Damage to his reputation and goodwill? The semen guy? The one with the blue/blond/strawberry hair? Seriously? Lavandeira doesn't have an ethical leg to stand on. His job entails pirating other people's work and then begging them not to sue him. His copyright page says as much:

All images on perezhilton.com are readily available in various places on the Internet and believed to be in public domain. Images posted are believed to be posted within our rights according to the U.S. Copyright Fair Use Act. [Emphasis added]

Where, then, does Lavandeira get off suing someone for doing to his work what he does to the works of hundreds of celebrity photographers? I wouldn't be surprised if it came out that this was a way for Lavandeira to boost traffic to his site ("Perez Hilton Admits Lawsuit Attempt Slutty and Silly"). Publicity stunt or no, I'm crossing my fingers that his attempt at abusing the court system to stifle a competitor comes back and bites him in the ass, much as it did Violet Blue when Boing Boing secretly took down all her guest posts and links after the supposedly anti-DMCA Blue sued an up and coming porn star for "stealing" her totally original name.

Remixing Television

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Is It Safe?

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:05:00 EDT

Gmail announced on its blog yesterday that it has upgraded its privacy settings to allow users to sign out of their accounts remotely, as well as track who has signed in under their name:

The top table, under "Concurrent session information," indicates all open sessions, along with IP address and "access type" -- which refers to how email was retrieved, for example, through iGoogle, POP3 or a mobile phone. The bottom table, under "Recent activity," contains my most recent history along with times of access. I can also view my current IP address at the very bottom of this window, where it says "This computer is using IP address..."

With this information, I can quickly verify that all the Gmail activity was indeed mine. I remember using Gmail at the times and locations listed. Being extra cautious, I can also click on the "Sign out all other sessions" button to sign out of the account I left open at home.

Scott Loganbill at the tech blog Web Monkey wrote about the privacy upgrades like a gleeful, paranoid voyeur, and calls the new application features an opportunity "to turn the table and spy on the spies"—proof that even innocuous geeks suspect that someone, somewhere, is reading their email.

And now, Marathon Man:

ICANN: Give Us .sex!

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:50:00 EDT

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) votes today on expanding domain name endings from .org, .net, .com, and a few others to include any combination of letters and numbers. Computerworld explains:

If ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, relaxes those rules, then companies will be able to buy generic top-level domain names ending in whatever they want...That means, for example, that eBay Inc. could add its company name to the end of its URL and become eBay.ebay and Microsoft Corp. could become Microsoft.microsoft...

According to the report, when asked about the possibility of an .xxx domain name, [ICANN CEO Paul Twomey] said the new system would be "open to anyone."

I hope that the forward thinking members of ICANN convince their squeamish peers to open up domain restrictions for the good of the world. Editor Jesse Walker listed the many advantages of myriad domain names in a 2001 reason article:

Surfing would be easier, with shorter addresses to remember; cybersquatting would be less of a problem, since it would be harder to buy up all the possible permutations of a person's or company's name; and domains themselves would be cheaper.

UPDATE: The ICANN conference is over, and I'm on the prowl for resolutions and whatnot. What I found thus far suggests that the attendees implemented (or are implementing) a system for the creation of new top-level domains (TLD)—.org, .net, .sex, etc., etc.

Golden State of Bliss

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:11:00 EDT

The L.A. Times has an interesting blog full of reported snippets from this week's historic gay marrying in California, my favorite of which might be this tale of the first gay couple to be married in the great military town of San Diego:

[Bob] Lehman, a former Marine, and [Tom] Felkner were married by Lehman's brother, Jeff, a retired Marine.
"I'm a Marine. I like to do things first," said Bob Lehman.

Link via Tony Pierce.

List: Revolution for Kids!

info@reason.com (Cory Doctorow) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Cory Doctorow is a one-man miniature media empire. He is co-editor of Boing Boing, one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, and he has also written Essential Blogging (2002). He has also written several science fiction books, most famously Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), a novel about a post-scarcity society run by informal, voluntary “adhocracies.” In his spare time, he’s an activist for copyright reform.

His latest book, Little Brother (Tor), is a dystopian young adult novel set in a near-future security state put into place after terrorists attack San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. We asked Doctorow, a devout civil libertarian, to recommend three political books for young adults:

1 Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater: “One of my all-time favorite books, period. A subversive novel about a kid who moves from a funky urbanized inner city neighborhood to a place where he attends Heinrich Himmler junior high and is lost among very plastinated people. He and a friend discover an occult book shop in the funky neighborhood and go spelunking.”

2 Pretties, by Scott Westerfeld: “Well paced, and wildly popular. It’s about the pressures on young people to conform, specifically to physically conform and to switch off their minds while they’re conforming. All Westerfeld’s books are good revolutionary texts.”

3 Animal Farm, by George Orwell: “It’s probably the most perfect bit of political exposition disguised as fairy tale of all time.”

The Golden Collapse

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Where were you when the bubble burst, Daddy?

No, not the housing bubble (see Paul Thornton’s “The War on Renters,” page 19) and the ensuing wipeout at the exotic edges of the credit market, a contraction so grave that it has jeopardized such nonsubprime economies as Iceland’s. Nor am I referring to the severe early-’00s overvaluation of the U.S. dollar, a now-forgotten artifact of irrational exuberance that was nonetheless obvious enough back in 2001 that even a nonanalyst like me was urging Americans to enjoy those cheap European vacations “before the currency bubble bursts.” (The greenback has almost halved its value against the euro since then.)

I’m talking instead about one of the most beautiful and under-appreciated collapses in modern financial history: the great dot-com crash of 2000, when NASDAQ lost 10 percent of its value in just one day, Pets.com went from $1.2 million Super Bowl commercials to $82.5 million initial public offerings to full liquidation within 11 short months, and the nation’s professional chin strokers transformed themselves from envious and befuddled New Economy spectators to world-weary bringers of harsh business truths. The air was thick with a vindictive Schadenfreude directed at those Generation Xers who had the bad manners to make fortunes (or just an interesting living) while experimenting with new technology during what until recently had been called the Long Boom.

“One minute you’ve got zip-drive techies pulling all-nighters amid their look-at-me-I’m-wacky workstations, and the next moment—poof—it seems so stale,” New York Times pop sociologist David Brooks wrote in May 2001. “Suddenly, it doesn’t really matter much if the speed of microprocessors doubles with the square root of every lunar eclipse (or whatever Moore’s Law was).”

Late-breaking Old Media gold diggers like Space.com co-founder Lou Dobbs woke up the morning after, presumably feeling a bit ridiculous, while analog-world moguls like Pop.com’s Steven Spielberg and David Geffen quietly folded shop before the ice was sculptured for the launch party. Retirement-age investors who saw their NASDAQ-heavy 401(k)s cut in half seemingly overnight were derided as “greater fools” who got what they deserved for buying into the 21st-century equivalent of tulip mania. Even some of the tech industry’s long-toiling observers took vicious aim at the bubble blowers. In April 2000, longtime PC Magazine grump John C. Dvorak warned darkly (and inaccurately) of “a depression that will rival 1929.” Newly popular sites such as Net Slaves and Fucked Company reveled in the spectacular—and occasionally criminal—flameouts of such buzzword-slinging, broadband-dependent money burners as the Internet Entertainment Group (IEG) and the Digital Entertainment Network (DEN).

I was a gleeful participant both in the last great days of the dot-com boom (when I worked briefly at the aforementioned DEN) and the first grim days of the bust. Despite the considerable hit that the wave of tech publication closures had on the pocketbooks of freelancers like me, it was terrific fun to have post-crash sport at the expense of jargon-addicted IPO charlatans and Koolaid-drinking late adopters, and there was a hope in those days that the post-crash Web would revert to the individual, low-budget level of wacky experimentation and cheap humor. That hope, we have seen, has turned out well.

But what turned out best of all, and what has the most relevance to today’s various economic busts, was the regulatory response to the technology crash: a grand, collective shrug.

Like the subprime collapse of 2008, the dot-com bust of 2000 took place during a heated presidential campaign. Yet the tech bubble didn’t merit a single mention in any of the presidential or vice presidential debates that fall. The Federal Reserve responded to the 2000 contraction by using the main mechanism at its disposal: repeatedly slashing interest rates (a move, many say, that helped inflate the next bubble). The Fed is responding to 2008, on the other hand, by proposing vast new mechanisms for itself, including regulatory oversight of investment banks, new rules for credit rating agencies, and authority over such far-flung sectors as insurance and commodities trading.

Even the villains of the dot-com collapse mostly came out smelling like roses. Remember Mary Meeker? She was the “Queen of the Net,” a Morgan Stanley analyst who midwifed Netscape’s IPO and championed scores of others, including eventual busts like Drugstore.com. After the dot-com crash she was crucified as a walking conflict of interest, investigated for fraud, and quickly forgotten as a pop culture figure. Now? She’s still a managing director at Morgan Stanley, still championing the technology boom (this time, in China), and has long been cleared of all charges. Meeker’s colleague Henry Blodget, after paying a $2 million settlement on a securities fraud charge levied by then–New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, left Wall Street and founded the thriving tech blog Silicon Valley Insider. Even that stock-picking loudmouth James Cramer, who was temporarily disgraced for having said in February 2000 that Internet stocks “are the only ones worth owning right now,” was quickly rehabilitated as the ubiquitous host of CNBC’s Mad Money.

The only substantial “reform” that came in the wake of that crash was the disastrous Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a make-work program for accountants that was more a reaction to the shoddy internal reporting of Enron, Adelphia, and WorldCom than it was to the fantasy-based price/earnings ratios of fill-in-the-blank.com.

What were the nefarious effects of the surprisingly laissez-faire attitude toward tech stock de-listings and baby boomer NASDAQ wipeouts? The Dow Jones recovered its 2000 highs by 2006, and even tech-heavy NASDAQ has more than doubled its value since post-crash lows in October 2002. The United States, led by the ongoing information revolution, has continued to innovate and thrive, with only a few minor macroeconomic hiccups in 15 years of robust growth. The broadband dream that seemed so far off in 2000 has long since become a reality: It’s YouTube’s world; we just live in it.

Eight years ago, as the freelance contracts dried up and the nation knuckled down for a presidential race that turned out even more tedious than predicted, my sympathies were with Tim Cavanaugh, then of Suck.com, now a freshly minted reason columnist (see “Classical Gasbags,” page 62), who wrote: “It was a wild ride, and now it’s over. The spectacle of an industry in full retreat might be good for a few chortles, but it’s the kind of laughter you try to choke back at a funeral. We remember the whole story; we know it was a golden age; and we know better than to join in the exultation of dot-com backlashers, old economy scolds, or now-jobless economic naïfs still excited over the prospect that San Francisco housing rates might fall.”

In fact, the dot-com collapse was better in retrospect than we could have ever predicted in its wake. By becoming associated in the popular imagination with the kind of loathsome young techno-weenies immortalized in such films as Office Space and Startup.com, by headquartering itself in the always loathable (and self-loathing) San Francisco, and by spawning an entire self-caricaturizing literature of New Economy boosterism, the Internet bubble was allowed to inflate and burst the old-fashioned way—privately, as the result of transactions between consenting adults.

So add another arrow to the quiver of nostalgia for the 1990s. We will tell our disbelieving grandchildren that there once was a time when you could board an airplane without removing your shoes, travel all over the Western Hemisphere without flashing a passport or submitting to an eyeball scan, and engage in risky, exciting economic behavior knowing full well that you’d actually have to pay the consequences. (Well, unless you’re James Cramer.) Say what you will about Generation X, but we were never too big to fail.

Matt Welch is reason’s editor in chief.

Dunkin' Dhimmitude

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:59:00 EDT

Michelle Malkin scores the scalp of . . . celeb chef Rachel Ray.

Does Dunkin’ Donuts really think its customers could mistake Rachael Ray for a terrorist sympathizer? The Canton-based company has abruptly canceled an ad in which the domestic diva wears a scarf that looks like a keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn by Arab men.
Some observers, including ultra-conservative Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin, were so incensed by the ad that there was even talk of a Dunkin’ Donuts boycott.
The company at first pooh-poohed the complaints, claiming the black-and-white wrap was not a keffiyeh. But the right-wing drumbeat on the blogosphere continued and by yesterday, Dunkin’ Donuts decided it’d be easier just to yank the ad.
Said the suits in a statement: ‘‘In a recent online ad, Rachael Ray is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design. It was selected by her stylist for the advertising shoot. Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, given the possibility of misperception, we are no longer using the commercial.’’

You've come a long way, blogosphere!

Matt Welch's seminal 2005 piece on the death of blogospherian innocence here.

Finally, a Good Reason to Declaim Wikipedia

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:30:00 EDT

Mark Bauerlein, occasional reason contributor and author of the provocative and exhaustingly subtitled book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30), has come up with a legitimately interesting critique of my favorite online resource:

The site is criticized for its superficiality, erroneousness, and amateurism, but, in fact, Wikipedia provides ready access to a fact, definition, or overview. No, the real problem with Wikipedia is a stylistic one. Read a dozen entries on the similar topics and they all sound the same. The outline is formulaic, the prose numbingly bland. Sentences unfold in tinny sequence. Perspectives arise in overcareful interplay. If a metaphor pops up, it’s a dead one. Consider the entry on Moby-Dick:
Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a great white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaling ships know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have knowingly encountered the whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab’s boat and bit off Ahab’s leg. Ahab intends to exact revenge on the whale.
Compare that to a sentence from Collier’s Encyclopedia, first published in 1950: “As he makes very clear to Starbuck, his first mate, Captain Ahab envisions in Moby-Dick the visible form of a malicious Fate which governs man thoughtlessly...” Or the description of Ahab in the 1953 Encyclopedia Americana: “a crazed captain whose one thought is the capture of a ferocious monster that had maimed him...” Or even this in CliffsNotes from 1966: “Ahab’s monomania is seen then in his determination to view the White Whale as the symbol of all the evil of the universe.”

Wikipedia, concludes Bauerlein, an English prof at Emory, is "a useful repository of information, but as a model of discourse, it’s a killjoy."

Whole thing here.

reason on Wikipedia creator and libertarian visionary Jimmy Wales.

The State of Libertarianism, 2058

pinkerto@ix.netcom.com (James P. Pinkerton) — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

As we consider the current condition of libertarianism, here in the middle of the 21st century, we might pause to reflect upon the bleak fate that befell the last flowering of personal freedom. That period of liberalism and liberation blossomed in the late 20th century, before coming to a disastrous end in the first decade of this new millennium. We can call that happy period the Rand Era, in honor of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, a book still intensely and tragically relevant 101 years after its publication.

But let's look back before we look to the present—and to the future. The Randian libertarianism that emerged in the 1950s was a fierce critique of planning and centralization, manifested in its minor (New Deal), major (Swedish), and malignant (Soviet) forms. The school of anti-statist criticism, reinforced by émigré economists, was further strengthened by the obvious failures of American "Big Government" in the 1960s, from the war in Vietnam to the "War on Poverty." Interestingly, during that same decade of the '60s, libertarianism received a major boost from the so-called New Left. These leftists were ostensibly socialist, or even communist, but, in fact, they were more typically, in practice, anarchists and libertarians. Indeed, by the decade of the 1970s, it became clear that radicals and counter-culturalists were mostly interested in "doing their own thing," an attitude leading them toward an insistence on personal freedom-or, as they put it, not being hassled in their "personal space." Thus the New Left helped spawn the New Age, producing a generation of intensely capitalist music producers, natural food entrepreneurs, and then, most portentously, computer geeks and software developers. But of course, in their private moments, these folks retained their youthful predilections for drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

By the 1980s, these libertarian Boomers were in alliance, conscious and unconscious, with President Ronald Reagan. That is, even if yuppies looked down their nose at Reagan over matters of partisan style, they remained in tune with the pro-business substance of the Gipper's "supply side" ideology. The result was a robust consensus for lower taxes and freer trade, in both political parties. And of course, at the end of the '80s came the end of Communism, inspiring some to proclaim that a full-scale "end of history" was dawning—the permanent and decisive victory of liberal capitalist democracy.

Moreover, in the 1990s, the Internet seemed to bring with it the promise of libertarian nirvana, connecting everyone all across the cyber-flattened "borderless world" in a win-win capitalist nexus. Finally, in that same decade, the failed effort by right-wingers to impeach President Bill Clinton—a libertarian Boomer if there ever was one—was seen by many as the high-water mark of censorious "social" conservatism.

Click above to watch Jim Pinkerton discuss the state of libertarianism in the year 2058.

But then came the Big Shift, from the Rand Era to the Surveillance Era. We can point to five events in particular that heralded this repressive shift:

First, the 9/11 attacks brought a new sense of terrible danger to the world. After that Tuesday morning, normal travel and normal life took on a new menace, to be alleviated, seemingly, only by monitors, security guards, and checkpoints. "The twilight of sovereignty" didn't seem like such a slam-dunk good idea anymore, as nations instead redoubled their surveillance of borders, airports, and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Iraq and Afghan wars had a paradoxical effect on American politics. On the one hand, those disappointing conflicts demonstrated the incompetence of civilian planners and would-be nation-builders and democratizers. But on the other hand, the two wars rekindled patriotic ardor in many, engendering a sense of social solidarity and government generosity. An old phrase from the end of the First World War, "a nation fit for heroes," was heard again. As defined by politicians with the power of the purse, such a nation proved, of course, massively expensive.

Second, the long stock market slump at the turn of the century shook people's faith in "shareholder capitalism." The bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and some notorious corporate bankruptcies led to the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation in 2002—a bill producing unforeseen legal consequences that echo down to this day. But even before the passage of "Sarbox" white-collar prosecutions spiked; ambitious DAs knew that juries had little sympathy for millionaire and billionaire defendants. So when the subprime mortgage market started melting down in 2007, the legal and political climate was ripe for a long siege of regulation and enforcement. A string of spectacular trials and spectacularly long prison sentences for well-heeled defendants permanently changed the business climate on Wall Street. And there was no escape; from the City of London to the Caribbean to Cyprus to Moscow, prosecution (some called it persecution) ratcheted upward. Yet at the same time, the federal government took on new responsibility on behalf of the property-owning middle class; Uncle Sam would, in effect, guarantee both high stock prices and high home prices. A falling dollar, and rising inflation, be damned.

Third, the disgrace of Democratic New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2008 underscored the expansion of state power into areas thought to be mostly private and thus off-limits to government snoops. Spitzer's fall was ironic, because, as the Empire State's attorney general, he had been a zealous proponent of white-collar prosecutions. And so the business class had no sympathy for Spitzer when he was snared on a prostitution rap. But what was little discussed at the time was the ease with which the federal government had nailed this particular defendant. Spitzer was caught on the basis of cash transactions totaling just $80,000—that is, an $80,000 minnow inside the ocean of the then-$14 trillion economy. That the government could be so effective at threshing out Spitzer's activity should have been a red flag to libertarians, but in the scandalous heat of the moment, few bothered to reflect coolly upon what state power had been able to enforce. (And even fewer paused to think about what it meant for the future of personal freedom if all Americans—indeed, all humans—were on the same easily-searchable Google grid. Only too late did "organizing all the world's information" come to seem like more of a threat than a promise.)

Fourth, the 2008 Beijing Olympics taught a bitter lesson: Capitalism and personal freedom do not march forward together. To be sure, China in 2008 was infinitely freer than China of the Maoist era, but the government's tough tactics against Tibetan protestors was proof that the PRC was not moving in a democratic direction, but rather reverting back to Confucianism, albeit with capitalist-mercantilist characteristics. And speaking of mercantilism, the emergence of a whole new work force in tariff heavy and immigrant-proofed Japan—a huge class of mostly subservient robot-helots—did nothing to advance the idea of personal freedom.

Fifth, and finally in our sad saga, that same year, 2008, saw the election of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) as the 44th President, spelling the final end of the Rand Era. In retrospect, we can see that the political triumph of a military leader, carrying his stern message of national service and sacrifice, was made inevitable by the continuation of the Iraq and Afghan wars; in times of severe crisis, democratic electorates naturally turn to the Strong Man. A few lonely figures, notably Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), argued that McCain-style policies were not the solution to America's problems, but rather the cause of the problems. But despite big fundraising totals, Paul's argument was little regarded during the 2008 Republican primary. And in the general election, McCain swept to victory against the Democrats, who, interestingly enough, seemed actually to be more libertarian than McCain. And as president, as we all know, McCain was supremely eager to stride manfully in the Progressive footsteps of his activist-interventionist idol, Theodore Roosevelt.

But America's strenuous efforts in the Middle East proved unsustainable. Even substantial tax increases, as well as the enactment of a "voluntary draft," were not sufficient to maintain the tempo of operations as the fighting dragged across decades. And so most Americans breathed a sigh of relief when Saudi Arabia, engorged with profits from Euro-denominated oil, engineered what was effectively a buyout of U.S. Central Command.

And by then, of course, America faced many other national security challenges closer to home. After Venezuela, and then Mexico, exploded their atomic bombs in the 2020s, Americans concluded, once and for all, that border security needed to be a top priority.

But the biggest shock came in East Asia. The Chinese takeover of Taiwan was a masterpiece of patient and subtle Go-like positioning, followed by a sudden cyber-strike that left Taiwanese and American defense planners blinded and befuddled—until, of course, it was too late to thwart the People's Liberation Army. Only then did it become clear that America's policy toward China had to change.

For a painful and perilous decade, America feverishly worked to rebuild its military computer systems, all of which had to be completely replaced and redesigned, since the turn-of-the-century equipment had been so honeycombed by Chinese viruses and spyware. During that period of American rebuilding, only America's nuclear arsenal kept the homeland safe; in the meantime, China was able to consolidate its hegemony in Asia, regaining its historic position as The Central Kingdom.

But of course, the rising threat from China provoked a strong response here in the U.S., as policymakers massively rethought their assumptions about economic policy and national strategy. The old consensus, in which both parties had agreed that propping up the stock market and real estate values was the top priority, became no longer viable. As we all remember, the second crash of '29 was worse than the first. In the difficult decade that followed, the federal government spearheaded the "New New Deal," which, a century after the original New Deal, once again witnessed the fitfully effective economic and military restructuring of the United States.

Meanwhile, around the world, capitalist prosperity waxed and waned, in response to booms and busts of secular liberalization, followed inevitably by sacred radicalization. From Dubai to Mumbai to Shanghai, unparalleled frenzies of conspicuous consumption were followed by equally conspicuous bonfires of the vanities. The reluctant conclusion: Over time, culture trumps economics, and piety stomps freedom. But fortunately for freedom, new libertarian thinkers have blossomed in recent decades, seeking to liberate humanity from the not-at-all-dead hand of state power. These new thinkers, re-reading Rand, Hayek, Friedman, and others, are determined to learn the sad lessons of history and apply the new hope of technology. And they have reached a few conclusions that we must study closely:

First, true freedom—camouflaged from all-seeing eyes in the sky, hidden even from the all-penetrating Google Grid—can flourish only in a few small and isolated places around the globe, where self-selected populations can gather together as ex-pats and exiles, to live free or die. These places have been mostly small islands, protected by nuclear booby traps, although a few have existed on the poles, or under the sea, or deep underground. Poignantly, one such place was called "Galt's Gulch," named after the place where the capitalist strikers hid out in Rand's Atlas Shrugged. But this time, the strikers were real enough—until, of course, they met their tragic end at the hands of bounty-hunting looters.

So the second lesson: No permanent victories for freedom can be found in this finite physical earth. Hobbes was right: The nation-state—sometimes, the imperial state—is the most effective monopolizer of force, thus the inevitable master of territory.

The third lesson: The true frontier of freedom will have to be elsewhere, not in this physical world as we commonly think of it. Many freedom-seekers have experimented with virtual reality as an escape hatch, or various kinds of nanotechnology. We wish those dematerialized libertarian voyagers well—but, frankly, we don't know what has happened to them.

The fourth lesson is the keeper: A free world is a new world, the farther away, the better. The next significant victory for freedom—a return to Randianism—will be best realized via transportation to somewhere else, off this earth. Flight beats fight, especially when the freedom-fighter is guaranteed to lose to the statists in the end. The Europeans who came to America found liberty in the empty spaces of the New World; the same was true in Australia. It's no accident that North America and Australia have traditionally been among the freest countries in the world. And if they are now less free, in the middle of this grim 21st century, that's because they are increasingly filled up. They have regressed to the regimented condition of the rest of the planet.

As free-market economists said in the last libertarian era, the only true freedom that one has is the power of an alternative—that is, the power to go somewhere else, to go where a man or a woman can breathe free air, even if that air is artificial. And that means outer space—to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

Of course the moon has long been settled by various countries. And Mars and other asteroids have been touched by humans, too, mostly those wearing uniforms and working for various governments and mining collectives. Does that mean that the state has permanently extended its grip there, too? Is freedom finished off-earth, as well as on-earth?

Maybe. But it's easier to stage a freedom revolution in the far pavilions. Just as the mountains of West Virginia were free when the lowlands of Virginia were enslaved, so the periphery is always freer than the core.

Just as the American colonies rebelled from the mother country in 1776, so, too, could the space colonies rebel from this earth. Will it work? Could a space-revolt succeed? There is only one way to find out.

In the meantime, as we hatch our plan for the big breakaway, we might turn to another great libertarian writer from the Rand Era, Robert A. Heinlein. His 1966 novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, remains the best handbook for an off-world revolution, leading, in this instance, to a libertarian Luna.

Yes, the moon is a harsh mistress, but the earth is even harsher.

James P. Pinkerton served in the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He is a Fox News contributor and a fellow at the New America Foundation.

Blog It, Soldier!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:12:00 EDT

A small victory for openness from a surprising quarter:

At one of the Army's leading intellectual hubs..., the commanding general there has directed his troops to start blogging. Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who heads the Combined Arms Center [CAC] and Ft. Leavenworth, told his soldiers in a recent memo that "faculty and students will begin blogging as part of their curriculum and writing requirements both within the .mil and public environments. ...
Lt. Gen. Caldwell, the former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, is a blogger himself, contributing to Small Wars Journal. He made waves in January when he wrote that "we must encourage our Soldiers to... get onto blogs and to send their YouTube videos to their friends and family."

Of course, this is goes against the military's current official position. Remember the YouTube ban on military networks? There's even a mini campaign inside the military at the moment, along the lines of the old "Loose Lips Sink Ships" posters, reminding soldiers that blogging can compromise security.

But my bet is that Lt. Gen. Caldwell's way of thinking will win out in the end. The idea, he says, is "telling the Army’s story to a wide and diverse audience." More openness, not less, will reconnect the average American with the average soldier--something pro- and anti-war factions should both want to see, each for their own reasons.

Why not have a few classes reminding soldiers not to post sensitive material (and reminding them what "sensitive material" includes) and then let 'em have at it?

Via Danger Room

Missing Pedophiles

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In March, London’s Daily Mail reported that a British elementary school had obscured the heads of children in group photographs on the school’s website with oval smiley faces, “apparently to protect them from paedophiles.” The widespread anxieties underlying that bizarre incident are almost entirely off the mark, according to a recent review of the evidence concerning Internet-related sex crimes.

Writing in the February-March American Psychologist, Janis Wolak and three colleagues at the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center conclude that “the stereotype of the Internet child molester who uses trickery and violence to assault children is largely inaccurate.” In their survey of more than 2,500 law enforcement agencies, “99 percent of victims of Internet-initiated sex crimes…were 13 to 17 years old, and none were younger than 12.” The cases typically involved teenagers who knew they were talking to adults online, agreed to meet them specifically for sex, and were not forced or threatened with violence.

In short, Internet-related sex crimes are overwhelmingly cases of statutory rape rather than child molestation.

Based on telephone surveys of 10-to-17-year-old Internet users, Wolak et al. also question commonly held beliefs about what kinds of online behavior expose teenagers to the risk of such encounters. Neither posting personal information nor participating in social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace was by itself associated with victimization. Instead the researchers found that “youths who interacted online with unknown people and also engaged in a high number of different risky online behaviors” (such as “having unknown people on a buddy list, talking online to unknown people about sex, seeking pornography online, [and] being rude or nasty online”) were “much more likely to receive aggressive sexual solicitations than were youths who interacted online with unknown people but restrained their risky behaviors.”

The idea that the Internet has fostered a “shocking increase in the sexual exploitation of children,” as Newsweek put it in 2001, also appears to be unfounded. Wolak and her colleagues estimate that Internet-related sex crimes account for something like 7 percent of all statutory rapes. They note that “several sex crime and abuse indicators have shown marked declines during the same period that Internet use has been expanding.”

Mike Gravel Crosses Over

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:39:00 EDT

No comment:

"As a subculture, we are not the spawn of Satan"

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:08:00 EDT

The New York Times profiles the weird world of steampunk,

a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines.

Whole thing here.

Though the article does refer to the great William Gibson, whose short story "The Gernsback Continuum" is a bona fide steampunk classic, it somehow fails to mention Bruce Sterling, whose own contributions to the genre are far from negligible. Contributing Editor Mike Godwin sat down with Sterling back in 2004 for a freewheeling interview that touched on everything from "Google blindness" to Islamic terrorism. Read it all here.

Hogwarts Law School

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Harry Potter gets along with his fans. Some media companies fire off menacing legal threats at the first sign that someone might be doing something unauthorized with one of their characters, but J.K. Rowling and Warner—the author of the Harry Potter books and the studio behind the Harry Potter movies, respectively—have had a generally tolerant attitude toward the amateur fiction, home movies, and online guides created by the boy wizard's fan base.

So some were surprised last fall when Rowling and Warner sued to stop RDR Books from publishing Steven Vander Ark's The Harry Potter Lexicon. The Lexicon is essentially a hard-copy version of Vander Ark's website, which collates information about the Potter series; the site is filled with detailed lists of the peoples, places, spells, and creatures that inhabit Rowling's world. Much of the text was drawn directly from Rowling's books, prompting the novelist to argue that Vander Ark intends to make money by repackaging her words. It's unclear how the courts will rule, but I'm inclined to agree with Columbia Law School's Tim Wu as to how they should rule. Wu wrote in Slate that Rowling "has confused the adaptations of a work, which she does own, with discussion of her work, which she doesn't….Textually, the law gives her sway over any form in which her work may be 'recast, transformed, or adapted.' But she does not own discussion of her work—book reviews, literary criticism, or the fan guides that she's suing."

Yet even if the courts end up agreeing with Wu, Vander Ark has lost a more important battle. The Harry Potter fan community has overwhelmingly sided with Rowling, shunning Vander Ark and denouncing him with such phrases as "arrogant, egotistical, self-absorbed jerk." The reasons for this reaction are complex. In part it reflects the difference between a book sold for profit and a website offered for free. In part it reflects allegations that Vander Ark misled potential contributors into believing his book had Rowling's blessing. In part it simply reflects the fact that fans are predisposed to agree with their favorite authors. The case hasn't been decided yet, but in the court of his peers Vander Ark will be punished—is being punished—either way.

Speaking at the OnCopyright conference in Manhattan on May 1, Wu pointed out just how sharply this cuts against most people's expectations. Ordinarily we assume that the fan norms surrounding intellectual property will be looser than the letter of the law. This time, the law may be more permissive than the fans.

The conference was sponsored by the Copyright Clearance Center, a company that helps guide businesses, universities, and others through the thicket of licenses and permissions required by intellectual property law. There were four panels over the course of the day: one on copyright's collision with technology, one on copyright and society, one on copyright and the arts, and one on copyright and the law. The speakers ranged from industry figures eager to strengthen intellectual property controls to radicals ready to dump some rules into the harbor.

But the most important division on display wasn't the split between the conservatives and the reformers. It was the line that divided the law panel from all the others. The former featured three intelligent attorneys debating how the law should be interpreted and what the law should say. The latter featured artists, journalists, entrepreneurs, activists, and academics grappling with a world where people's behavior is governed much more by tools and norms than by statute books.

Kevin O'Kane, for example, is the man behind redlasso, a service that makes it easier to search for ongoing and recent TV and radio broadcasts, extract the parts you want, and drop them into the context of your choice. You could, for example, find all the references to the word "Myanmar" in the last 12 hours of TV news, pull out the appropriate clips, and add them to an online news commentary. The result, O'Kane hopes, will be an "online media center for bloggers."

There may come a day that CNN or Fox or a local broadcaster in Iowa City decides that this useful tool is a machine for piracy and takes redlasso to court. But you need only visit YouTube, Crooks and Liars, or any video-heavy blog to see that the Web already welcomes such efforts to recycle what used to be perishable content, that this enriches our ability to discuss the issues of the day, and that people across the political spectrum engage in this behavior without pause. If the law thinks they're wrong, then our norms may know something that our laws do not.

Nor did this informal borrowing begin with the Internet. On the arts panel, the novelist Jonathan Lethem spoke about the imitation and appropriation that has always been embedded in creative activities. Every artist begins by copying, he said, and some of the best—he singled out William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan—keep borrowing until the end of their life. This is part of the creative process, he argued, and it should be welcomed rather than banished.

Lethem has covered this territory before. Last year he contributed an article to Harper's called "The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism"; it not only touted the virtues of quoting and appropriating other people's work, but was itself largely stitched together from other writer's words, a fact revealed at the end of the essay when he listed the texts he had pilfered. It was a clever stunt, but it highlighted something important about creativity: not just the fact that writers draw on other people's work, but the fact that the best writers transmute those influences into something of their own. Lethem's novel Gun, With Occasional Music carries a critic's quote on the cover declaring that it "Marries Chandler's style and Philip K. Dick's vision." It's a good description: The book, a murder mystery that features talking apes and kangaroos, feels like a mash-up of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled crime writing and Philip K. Dick's surreal science fiction. But it's impossible to imagine either Chandler or Dick producing this particular story. It's part Chandler, part Dick, and all Lethem.

The book also says something about what the world would be like without that free-flowing creative exchange. Where other dystopian novels imagine states that force individuals into a suffocating collective, the totalitarian society in Gun keeps people apart, by limiting the questions they can ask and the memories their minds can contain. The result is a world without communication and a world without a past—a world where every thought is an orphan work.

Not even the most militant copyright maximalists would consider that desirable. But even if they tried to impose such a restrictive regime, they'd be helpless in the face of technologies that make it easy to defy antiquated copyright rules, and in the face of norms that put more gentle restrictions on our behavior. The OnCopyright conference didn't give me the impression that the lawyers were on the verge of fixing America's intellectual property laws. But it did bolster my faith that we'll manage to muddle through anyway.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

Hmmm. What Changed??

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:31:00 EDT

W magazine writes about Arianna Huffington:

It wasn't that long ago that Huffington was variously dismissed as a social climber, "intellectual lap dancer" and political opportunist

Next up: W reveals how it wasn't that long ago that David Brock was dismissed as a partisan hack!

Bonus Arianna-ana: 1) Time's classic mid-'90s Margaret Carlson piece, "Should the Huffingtons Be Stopped?" 2) Watch ex-hubbie Michael call B.S. on her post-facto opposition to Proposition 187. 3) Jacob Sullum tells you what you really need to know about La Huffington's 2003 anti-SUV ads.

Bissinger's Buzz-Kill

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:10:00 EDT

Wow. I didn't think there was any sports-twit more irritating than Bob Costas, but along comes non-astronaut auteur Buzz Bissinger, on Bob Costas' show last night, blowing a gatekeeper-gasket at the very existence of unwashed, non-jocksniffing bloggers like Deadspin's Will Leitch (who is actually a very good writer in addition to running one of the most successful sports blogs on the planet). First segment here; then watch the mid-life crisis unfold in real time:

Leitch reacts here; world piles on. As always, few things are more hilarious than watching the defenders of a deeply degraded form (newspaper sportswriting? Are you kidding me?) bust veins about modernity they understand not, while the kids laugh and laugh....

I'd never really heard of Bissinger (though he's the author of the famous Friday Night Lights), until I picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune on vacation a couple weeks back and beheld the single most rancid column you will probably ever read about the Olympic Games. Sample:

There is only one way left to improve the Olympics: to permanently end them.
True, in the world of sports, any plan that puts morality over money is unlikely to happen. Commissions are formed only once the problem is over (see Major League Baseball) and the cheaters will always find another angle -- you can bet that some lab somewhere is working on the design of a new steroid undetectable to testing (see every professional sport and many "amateur" ones). The loftier the rose-colored rhetoric, which in the Olympics has become an Olympian growth industry, the worse the underlying stink. And this is an institution that is rotted in so many different ways.

Bissinger then goes on to list every (unrelated) bad thing that's happened at Olympiads over the past 40 years, and concludes:

Would some athletes become innocent victims with the loss of the Olympics? Yes. But it would be nothing close to the number of innocent victims killed in Darfur with Chinese-supplied weapons, or in Iraq during the American occupation.

Sounds like someone forgot to take his performance-enhancing sedatives!

I Am Curious (Wiki)

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:53:00 EDT

I'm pro-Wikipedia. I think it's an inspiring example of bottom-up collaborative creation. Knock it for its inaccuracies, and I'll reel off the usual defenses: Sure, it isn't completely reliable, but there are thousands of eyes monitoring it. When someone makes an obviously inaccurate edit, someone else will usually pounce to fix it. In the meantime, the uncertainty encourages a different, more skeptical sort of reading.

That said: Boy, but some weird crap manages to slip through the cracks there. From the entry on Curious George:

As stated in an interview, the book Curious George Takes a Job was inspired by a true story. A boy, whose name is not known today, was born in Hamburg in 1909 with Down's Syndrome. He was institutionalized by his parents, condemned to a life at the facility.

When the boy was 15, he escaped from the institution and fled into the city streets. Hungry and in search of food, he found the briefly unattended kitchen of a restaurant, where a cook found him playing with the food and eating it. The cook, intrigued, put him to work to clean dishes, and took him home that evening. Within the following days, the cook arranged with a friend to have the boy wash windows at an office building.

The boy's work went well at first. But in one office, he found colored paints. He used them to paint a mural on the wall of the office. The tenant returned to his office after a lunch break to find the boy busy painting, and he started to chase after him. The boy jumped out a third-story window, breaking some bones.

The story made local headlines. After several weeks of hospitalization, the boy was formally adopted by the cook, and he later became the star of an amateur movie. He was recognized in the coming years as a talented artist. Some of his artwork was sold by the renowned bookseller, A.S.W. Rosenbach.

Tragically, his identity, art, and other details of his life were lost in the ravages of World War II, and he is believed to have been put to death by the government of Nazi Germany.

That passage has been part of the article for over a year. During that time, the page has not suffered from an absence of attention. There has been a long-running battle about whether George is an ape or a monkey. There have been arguments over the political subtexts of the stories. There have been efforts to add obviously phony info to the entry, prompting editors to leave comments like this one:

I seriously doubt "Curious George Gets AIDS" was one of the books. I don't want to change it myself since last time I made a minor edit I was banned from making any further ones by Wikipedia.

Yet that shaggy-dog story about Curious George Takes a Job is still there. No one has even suggested that it be sourced with a citation stronger than the vague "As stated in an interview."

It is my power as a Wikipedia reader to make the necessary changes myself. But a bizarre and funny passage like that one deserves to be immortalized, so I'm blogging it instead.

Bonus links: A communiqué from the Curious George Brigade.

Fr. Archimedes Aloysius Anarchy's Curious George fan fiction, including such unforgettable tales as Curious George Goes to Jail and Curious George Does LSD.

A Curious George true crime story.

Curious George meets rave culture:

Anti-Libertarian Humor

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:27:00 EDT

I have to admit it: This video is pretty damn hilarious.

Update: The creator speaks:

I'm the writer, director, editor, and producer of the video in question, and while I admit it's somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it's not intended to be anti-libertarian by any means. I wrote the poem 10 years ago when a Koch Associate applied to work for my organization and listed "libertarianism, poetry" as her interests....The idea of "libertarian poetry" seemed incongruous.

He adds that "if anything the poem and video are poking fun at a stereotype of libertarianism" and concludes, "If any libertarians or anarcho-capitalists take offense to the video, please note that it was not intended to offend you."

No offense taken. Like I said, it's hilarious.

Little Brother Is Watching

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:00:00 EDT

New ONDCP Message: Don't Smoke Pot Too Much

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:55:00 EDT

The Office of National Drug Control Policy has a new, mildly amusing anti-pot website featuring a faux documentary called Stoners in the Mist (parts of which, I assume, will also be featured in anti-drug PSAs). Although the jokes are mostly ripped off from Cheech & Chong and such pothead-depicting movies as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I suppose I prefer this soft-sell approach to the ads accusing pot smokers of funding terrorism or initimating that it's only a matter of time before they accidentally run over a little girl or blow a friend's head off. Then again, people might be more receptive to subtler lies in an entertaining package, in which case the better propaganda is actually worse.

The mockumentary and the material accompanying it include many misrepresentations (see if you can spot them all!), but the most fundamental one is the conflation of pot smokers with stoners, which is rather like treating all drinkers as drunks. No doubt people who spend most of their lives stoned do have difficulty accomplishing things, relating to others, carrying on conversations, and catching basketballs. This is the grain of truth at the center of the pothead humor from which Stoners in the Mist borrows so shamelessly. But the traditional portrayals are usually gentle, even affectionate, and are especially popular among people who like to smoke pot, who recognize both the realistic aspects and the comic exaggeration. I doubt there are many people who decide to stop smoking weed (or never to try it) after watching Dude, Where's My Car? or Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. By contrast, although Stoners in the Mist resembles a sketch from a weak episode of Chapelle's Show, the ONDCP's intended message is that all pot smokers are losers. In a country where about half the population admits to trying marijuana before graduating high school, and a substantial majority surely knows at least a few pot smokers pretty well by then, who is going to believe this message? Probably only the teenagers who were not inclined to smoke pot in the first place.

The Further Adventures of Guy Fawkes

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:55:00 EDT

From the Baltimore City Paper, the most complete account I've read of the war between Anonymous and Scientology. An excerpt:

In an e-mail, Doc describes Anonymous as "the first internet-based superconsciousness." Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a flock of birds is a group. How do you know they're a group? Because they're travelling in the same direction. At any given moment, more birds could join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely. A popular picture of sign-waving Anonymous protesters in their trademark Guy Fawkes masks is captioned: "Oh Fuck, The Internet is here."

At the March 15 protest, an anon in his 30s who says he works in homeland security, compares Anonymous to the War on Terror--you can fight terrorists, but you can't fight an idea. Anonymous, he says, is an idea.

As he says this, he's wearing a suit and surgical mask, standing on a street corner outside the Washington Church of Scientology, while someone reads L. Ron Hubbard's military record over the PA system.

A guest blogger at Henry Jenkins' site has more. Whether or not you care about Scientology itself, this is a fascinating study in decentralized, leaderless organization -- and in the ways ephemeral online fandom can evolve into something politically engaged.

Your Great and Terrible World

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:23:00 EDT

Some recent blog-post recommendations sent along by loyal Hit & Run readers:

* Chicago education chief wants to start public boarding schools.
* Jaguars (the panthers, not the cars) make a comeback in the Southwestern U.S. [pdf].
* Lawrence Welk vs. The Hippies.
* Democrats pull plug on telephone located inside Capitol deli, saying workers were using it to make personal calls.
* Competitive Enterprise Institute launches national ad campaign against Al Gore.
* Ilya Somin conducts a multi-post seminar of sorts about Steven Teles' new book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.
* "The Boston Zoning Commission unanimously approved a controversial measure this afternoon that limits the number of undergraduate college students who can share an apartment to a maximum of four."
* Brits consider new laws to enforce patriotism.
* David Horowitz eulogizes his late daughter.
* Frisco sex workers circulate petition to stop enforcing sex-crime laws.

Thanks to all for the tips!

Stuff I've Been Meaning to Blog

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:26:00 EST

From Nicholson Baker, one of the best essays I've read about Wikipedia.

Wired on the autistic pride movement.

A sequel to Stop Snitching.

Plagiarism in the world of online dating.

"Kremlin hawks feed conspiracy theories with 3,200 white mice."

Rodney King's Children

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Over the last few years, a brave group of Arab activists has circulated footage of Egyptian cops striking, lashing, and even raping detainees. The torture videos, which had been filmed by the policemen themselves, prompted protests both inside and outside the country. They also prompted censorship: YouTube temporarily shut down the dissident blogger Wael Abbas' digital video channel after the company received complaints about the violent clips.

The channel can now be viewed on YouTube again. Much of its footage can also be seen on a website called The Hub, which is what YouTube would look like if it had been designed by Mohandas Gandhi. The site first appeared in pilot form in 2006, and a beta version launched in December 2007; over 500 pieces of media—videos, audio clips, photo slideshows—have been uploaded to it since its debut. The offerings range from raw footage of a massacre in Guinea to a detailed documentary about forced labor in rural Brazil. Most are accompanied by further information on the issues examined and on ways to take action against the abuses.

The site was created by Witness, a Brooklyn-based group founded by the pop star Peter Gabriel in 1992. Conceived in the wake of the Rodney King beating, the group first focused on getting cameras into the hands of human rights groups around the world and then on training them in the most effective ways to use those tools—creating, in Gabriel's phrase, a network of "Little Brothers and Little Sisters" to keep an eye on Big Brother's agents. Now Witness wants to move that community of camera-wielding activists online.

Gabriel serves as the group's celebrity face and as chairman of the board, but he stays out of the organization's day-to-day operations. Those decisions are made by people like program manager Sam Gregory. A human rights activist since he first joined Amnesty International in his teens, the U.K.-born Gregory became a student filmmaker at college, where he "was always trying to find a way to combine" his two interests. In addition to his managerial work, Gregory, 33, has co-produced videos about human rights issues in Burma, the Philippines, Argentina, Indonesia, and the United States.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker met Gregory at the DIY Video Summit at the University of Southern California, where Gregory gave a presentation about The Hub; Walker interviewed him via phone in mid-February.

reason: How did Witness get started?

Sam Gregory: Peter Gabriel had been traveling the world with the Amnesty human rights tour in the late '80s. He repeatedly encountered activists who were saying, "We've experienced this abuse, we've heard these stories of abuses, and we have no ways of responding." He had been carrying a Hi-8 camera with him, and it struck him that if those activists had access to cameras they would be able to document what was happening around them and share it in a way that would be totally different from the typical text-based approach.

The Rodney King incident brought that idea home. You had this example of an amateur, George Holliday, on the balcony of his apartment filming a graphic instance of abuse and receiving massive news coverage. That gave the impetus to start the organization. What we learned over the first four or five years was that the promise that Rodney King represented couldn't be realized just by providing cameras to human rights groups. In the absence of technical training, they couldn't produce video that would be used by news organizations and they couldn't craft the stories that would engage audiences.

We also found it was challenging to reach the right audiences. For example, it's very hard for most human rights activists to get mass media coverage. Their issues are either censored by their governments or not considered newsworthy or are hard to represent in just a single snapshot—they're more structural or deeper than just a single image of, say, police brutality. Similarly, trying to use the video as evidence did not work. It's challenging to get it into court, and the Rodney King experience taught us that video evidence can be turned either way—in the Rodney King case, used in the defense as well as the prosecution of LAPD officers.

reason: Were there any notable successes in that first period?

Gregory: There was footage that got into the news media, but it wasn't a successful period in terms of creating real change. I'm trying to think of what was especially effective in those first few years. I'm actually hard pressed to put my finger on an example.

So we learned to think more strategically about what kind of training you provided to groups, how you helped them tell stories, and, most importantly, where you tried to place that material. We train them to develop something called a video action plan, which is essentially a strategic communications plan around video. They'll say, for example, "We're trying to persuade this UN committee to recognize that the government is not reporting the whole story on this issue." And we'll say, "This is how you might think about crafting videos so you'll be able to persuade that committee of the truth of your side of the story." Or they might be doing community organizing—to give a concrete example—around child soldiers in eastern Congo. They faced a problem in terms of persuading parents not to let their children be voluntarily recruited. They needed to find a way to show the impact on the children and present a range of voices explaining the damage without pointing the finger at the parents so they just feel guilty, but instead giving them an option to find alternatives for their children.

reason: How do you get the video in front of those parents? I assume this stuff isn't aired on Congolese TV.

Gregory: The idea at the root of our work is that the voices that need to be heard are the ones closest to the violations. It's not a centralized vision, and all our work derives from the agency of those locally based human rights groups. At any given time we're working with around 13 groups around the world—our core partners—on a range of issues. They'll come to us with a campaign and a strategy that they already have in place.

The group in the Congo, a group called Ajedi-ka, was already doing village meetings all around this area affected by voluntary recruitment. What they were doing with the video is bringing it into that setting: They're bringing a TV, they're bringing a generator, literally just carrying it there.

In other settings you take a different approach. In a high-tech setting, you might carry a video around on an iPod. On Capitol Hill we'll get a screen up and do a much more traditional showing. But the root of it is always the human rights groups themselves thinking about how to use it as a tool to complement what they've done before, and not assuming that video is a magic bullet that will get people to react. It has to be within this context of options for people to take action.

reason: How do you train the people?

Gregory: We train them initially around how to film. We're not trying to make human rights workers into filmmakers, but we give them the tools to be mediamakers within their work. It's media literacy: Just as they can write a written report, they should be able to pull out a camera and film. Alongside that we develop this video action plan.

Usually there's a process after that where we receive footage from them and we provide feedback. We'll say everything from "Maybe you should put that person a little bit to the right in the frame" to "Have you thought about whether you're getting the right testimonies in order to persuade the audience you want to reach?" Typically, at least in the first instance, groups will come to Witness to edit. We do that partly so they can tap into a range of experiences here. In a lot of the relationships, as time moves on, we train them how to edit on their own. So, for example, a group we've work ed with on the Thai-Burma border that secretly travels into Burma to document atrocities there—they produce all their videos in the villages on the border. At this point we're really just a strategic consultant to them.

reason: Did you have any notable successes during that period after you rethought your approach and before you launched The Hub?

Gregory: I would highlight Ajedi-ka. We worked with them first on that campaign around child soldiers, and they've seen a decline in voluntary recruitment in communities where they've been doing work. They then identified a need to reach a completely different audience, to communicate with people at the International Criminal Court, which was making a decision about what to investigate in the Congo. We worked with them to develop a video that spoke to the impact on children of being involved in conflict. The organization did private screenings with senior members of the International Criminal Court, and that helped push the court to prioritize that issue. The first arrest warrant they issued in their investigation was for a warlord, and it was specifically on the child soldier issue.

Another example is in Mexico, where a group called Comisión Mexicana has been looking at murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez. You've had this pattern of murders of young women, failures by the local police to investigate, and choices to arrest and torture scapegoats. We worked on a video that found a very powerful individual story that spoke to the broader pattern. It was the story of a young woman who disappeared shortly before she was due to go to university. She's never been found, but the police two weeks later arrested her uncle, accused him of the murder, and tortured him into confessing. So this one story wrapped together both the murders and the abuse of power.

They used this video to lobby Congress here in the U.S. but also showed it to the attorney general's office in Mexico and to local politicians there, and as a result of that the young man who had been arrested was released.

reason: What were they lobbying for in Congress?

Gregory: They were lobbying for a House statement that Mexico should do more to investigate these murders. I wouldn't place much emphasis on that, but you can use it in human rights advocacy. For example, recently we've done a lot of screenings around Burma with the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in D.C.—again, trying to bring those voices of people driven from their villages directly into a committee room in Washington. You can sometimes see the boomerang effect of that.

reason: What did you think of the way the Burmese atrocity footage was used at the beginning of the new Rambo movie?

Gregory: The people we work with inside Burma are tremendously excited that the Rambo movie came out, because it's another way of focusing attention on the crisis. I think it was effective. I have some concerns about how you then go into, essentially, a Hollywood revenge fantasy. But I think it was important that people knew that this was a real situation, and I think it is important to think about how this accesses other audiences that might not know about Burma.

reason: Most of the examples that you've given so far have involved one form or another of narrowcasting. Do you still make an effort to get something out to a mass audience like that?

Gregory: We absolutely do think about how you reach out to a broader audience. In fact, some of our footage appeared in the opening credits of Rambo.

We try to build media attention when we think it's complementary to the advocacy goals. We don't assume that media attention will work. The experience of many of the groups that we've worked with is that the way they're represented in the media doesn't represent either them or their communities well and can be counterproductive. So we try to find opportunities where we can help navigate how it's covered and retain the advocates' point of view. Certainly with The Hub we're thinking about how the media gets access to a broader range of grassroots footage.

reason: How do you police the clips on The Hub for accuracy?

Gregory: We don't police heavily. We made a decision early on that we cannot guarantee the accuracy of every clip. But when we look at clips, we look for red flags, such as someone being exposed to a risk by being seen, or graphic sexual violence that's not in a human rights context. If it's something we're not sure about, we'll try to contact the user who uploaded it and ask more questions. If there's a big question mark in our minds we won't upload it.

We're trying to move to a more community-based model of assessing human rights footage. We've seen success in a number of instances. There was a case from the Ivory Coast where collective intelligence helped identify falsification of footage around a shooting of civilians there.

reason: But nothing goes up until you've approved it. It's not like YouTube.

Gregory: At the moment, nothing goes up until we've approved it. In the long run, I think we'd like to move to a situation where more material can go directly up. We'd like to trust more to the community to assess that material, but right now we've got to build that community.

reason: What are some of the other differences between what you do and YouTube?

Gregory: One key area is the issue of security. We are very aware that people may be uploading from situations where the government is watching the Internet and there may be potential repression. So when someone tries to upload to the site they're given an indication of the security risks. We provide ways to upload safely and securely. Once they upload, we don't hold onto their IP address, so if someone tries to obtain that information either legally or illegally we are unable to identify where users are based.

Another element is editorial control. We're trying to tap into a participatory community of human rights activists rather than leave it in the hands of a corporation. That's an important difference.

Another element is that the pages are designed to provide space to contextualize and act around the footage. We're building a number of advocacy options into the site, so people can find ways to generate online or offline action. If you look at the Shoot on Sight clip from Burma, for example, the video itself is quite self-contained, but the underlining material gives more information, gives the statistics, gives more background about what's been happening, and gives ways to act.

One of the functionalities that will launch shortly is an ability to download the clips, so people can use them in the kind of offline settings that are particularly common outside the global North. Perhaps there's only one connection to the Internet, so what you want to do is download it and take it into a communal setting.

We're definitely encouraging people to port the media out. We want them to share it, to embed it in their blogs, and to take it offline, in a community setting or on a mobile phone.

reason: Are there projects outside of Witness that have influenced what you're doing?

Gregory: I think the Amnesty International Unsubscribe Me campaign, which shows six minutes of someone going through a stress position, is an interesting one to look at, in terms of how you use the vaudevillian characteristics of something like YouTube and turn it around for human rights purposes.

reason: The definition of human rights activism gets kind of hazy around the edges sometimes, and you'll often see groups with very broad political agendas. There are also times when people in different parts of the community have had very different ideas about, say, whether to call for military intervention. Do you accept clips from groups with different analyses? How do you deal with those tensions?

Gregory: We don't have any particular focus in terms of human rights issues. We define human rights very inclusively, so we include economic, social, cultural, political, and civil rights. We wouldn't typically take two core partners that have dueling perspectives, but we're open to groups that are on the edge and leading. We worked, for example, with the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan under the Taliban when they were definitely not the mainstream of human rights activism there. We don't necessarily go for the middle-of-the-road groups.

In the context of The Hub, there's a clear set of community guidelines in terms of how people should act on the site. So advocating violence or posting hate speech or slurs will violate the terms. But we don't legislate a particular point of view, and in fact we encourage different points of view on how to address human rights violations.

We also, in some cases, will contextualize clips that have a public service value, even though they may be a piece of hate speech. If we were to receive footage similar to, say, the incitement to violence by the Rwandan government during the Rwandan genocide, I think there would be a strong reason to feature that on The Hub, but then to put a comment around it. So there is a place where we might editorialize, to explain why something is there.

reason: How does the site deal with informed consent?

Gregory: The overall framework we've set is to think about informed consent in a victim- and survivor-focused model. That means making sure that someone who is filmed is doing it voluntarily, that they understand the risks, that they understand how it's going to be used, and that they're competent to agree, so it's not someone who for reasons of mental disability or age or trauma is incapable of making an appropriate decision. Often oppressive governments will hunt down people who are featured in human rights material. People should be aware of the risks, and they should be aware that any piece of media, once it's out there, can be seen by their worst enemy.

We recognize that we can't impose that standard on people uploading to The Hub. So we emphasize that people shouldn't just think about consent as something legalistic. It's not a legal question whether someone in Burma is filmed and faces risk. They're never going to sue you. You should think about it in a much deeper way that centers on the safety and security of the person filmed as much as the person filming.

reason: The site includes clips of beatings in Egypt that were filmed by Egyptian police officers themselves. How often does that kind of footage appear on the site?

Gregory: There's quite a lot of it. One piece of footage that surfaced in the pilot project was something that became known as squatgate. Police officers in Malaysia used a cell phone to film the humiliation of a young woman who had been arrested. They forced her to strip and to squat in a jail cell. Similar to the Egyptian footage, that escaped from the closed circle of police officers sharing it among themselves and sparked a national outcry in Malaysia around police misconduct.

reason: Do you worry about consent issues in that context?

Gregory: We do. In fact, with the Egypt videos, we made a decision not to show the most grotesque of them, which included the sodomization of one of the detainees. And in the squatgate example we decided not to post that video because it had been seen so widely, and the woman involved specifically requested to me, "Please don't circulate this anymore."

In the case of the Egyptian footage, the people involved said they really wanted people to know about what was happening. When we can get that kind of cue from the people in the material, that helps.

reason: What other approaches have the clips taken?

Gregory: One of the primary modes is witness journalism. Clips filmed by the right people in the wrong place. We have a clip, for example, from a group in Cambodia that is recording forced evictions in Phnom Penh.

Another genre is advocacy videos—videos that speak to a particular audience and push for a particular change in policy, behavior, or practice. Most of the videos from Witness are in that mode, including the videos I talked about from the Congo.

And I think there's a third kind of video: more traditional documentaries that follow a story in a human rights context but don't necessarily have an explicit call for action. It sort of splits into two. For example, we have footage from Al Jazeera on The Hub. So that's a news story. And there's a video that explains the history of West Papua under Indonesian control. That's more of a documentary.

The important elements for us are to go beyond a space where footage is viewed to think about how you create a human rights community around it and how you turn that visual media into action. It's not OK just to see scenes of misery. In fact it can be deeply draining and frustrating both for the people creating it and the people watching it. You have to think about ways to contextualize and ways to act.

Discuss this story at reason's Hit & Run blog.