The whole blogging privacy furore occurred over a police whistleblower who held an anonymous blog with up to half a million viewers a week and who would give an inside look at working in the police force including the things the public want, but the police imagine we shouldn't know.
Destroying the privacy of bloggers is an horrific idea. In places like China it has been the saviour of free speech, it allows people to speak out against the system despite a heavily censored and controlled national media. In the US, the success of the Huffington Post is believed to have led to more honest politics after a whole sling of exposes on the Bush administration. All these people rely on the anonymity that the blogsphere allows to escape persecution, derision and heavy-handed reprimand.
In the above instances the companies or bodies in question went about things in totally the wrong way. You can't sack staff because they don't like the job, it should be made enjoyable. A 16 year-old finds almost everything boring, especially work at a logistics company and being sacked for having some silly zombie thing is just denying anyone the right to a sense of humour. The policeman who was blowing the whistle on the Met should have been made a hero, not silenced. It seems the home/work divide is closing and privacy is drawing it's last breath.
In january 2007, there was the AACS encryption key scandal. For those who don't remember, a code that allowed one to hack certain HD DVD's was posted to the blogging site Digg. The Motion Picture Association of America requested that it be removed and threatened about 300 bloggers who had propagated the code with legal action. Owning the key was not illegal, simply the act of using it. The MPAA ordered the removal of the key and all bloggers who posted it from the Digg site.
The blogging world went into a so called 'cyber-riot'. Appalled at the attempt of an authoritative body to silence something that was in essence perfectly legal, and left the user of the key with more of a moral choice than a legal one, the key was propagated wildly. In 24 hours, the amount of google hits for 'AACS key' went from about 500 to over 700,000. That day, the MPAA ordered Digg to once again remove all the content, to which the users almost unanimously rebelled and demanded dig not fold to the MPAA. The owners of Digg posted this;
In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Digg on,
Kevin
The MPAA rescinded their demands and the situation settled. Legal opinions on the AACS phenomena were almost unanimous, believing that a new political and social framework meant that action would simply spread the code, others were concerned by the actions of the MPAA, with Michael Avery, the top lawyer for Toshiba, commenting;
If you try to stick up for what you have a legal right to do, and you're somewhat worse off because of it, that's an interesting concept.
Anyway, where we were progressing, we're now being dragged back 2 steps. Bloggers no longer have the right to legal privacy. Here's the current AACS code as of March 2009;
Come and get me lawmen, Habeas Corpus.
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