Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Journalists could learn a lot about source protection from drug dealers.

“Go watch The Wire!” Oliver Day  told a session at Byte B@ck, the Society of Professional Journalists recent conference. “Figure out why the drug dealers are using burner phones [cheap cell phones that can be thrown away, protecting anonymity].  Extend that to notebooks.”

Chromebooks and other cheap notebooks aren’t at the $20 per device level of some cell phones, but MicroCenter’s latest flyer has a Windows 8 laptop for $220 and Amazon is advertising a ChromeBook for $199. If you have an important story, is $200 too much to spend to guarantee secure communications with a source whose identity needs protecting?

Of course, you want to be careful about what email you use. Fake Gmail accounts were scorned by Day and his fellow panelists, Andy Sellars of the Digital Media Law Project and Cara Rubinksy, the New England News editor for the Associated Press.

“Email is dicey,” Rubinsky said. “Fake email accounts don’t protect you.” You’re likely to use them from your main computer, which means the IP address used to create them will lead back to you (hence the burner notebooks). “If you’ve got a source you don’t want revealed, don’t email about your story and create a paper trail.”

Hence the use of ‘burner’ phones, quickly discarded. The AP recommends reporters use these phones and give them to specific sources whose jobs might be endangered for talking with the press, as well.  “If you can’t protect your sources, people are going to stop telling you things,” Rubinksy said.

I wouldn’t seem to be the type of person who needed this session. Most of my reporting now involves explanatory features. I went to this session because you never know when you might need to protect a source, and it has clearly become more difficult to do since I was a working beat reporter.

Rubinsky offered some other tips: if you’re going to call sources at work, call them all the time. Every day. Better, though, is the burner phone. “Go to Wal-Mart or 7-11. Pay with cash. Don’t give them your real name. If they ask for your name, say your name is Eric Holder. Use the phone for three months and throw it out.” She also advised against using WiFi while in coffee shops and corporations, especially if you aren’t using encryption.

Day, who runs Securing Change, a non-profit that helps non-governmental organizations create secure communications, says the landscape for hacking is radically changed from just a decade ago. “There are more hackers than there were and more commercialized hacking tools. You don’t need skills, you can just go buy the stuff.”

Governments are also more willing to hack. He related stories about the Ethiopian government spear phishing a U.S. citizen, and the NSA’s hack of Al Jazeera.

• Day loves OTR, an encrypted instant messaging service.
• He also suggested journalists consider using GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard),
• the Tor Browser Bundle, which protects against monitoring.
• Tails Amnesiac is a privacy-loving operating system journalists could think about.
• He also cited TrueCrypt, for encryption software, though he warned that passwords “will not get you past judges or the rubber hose decryption method.”

He also warned that security and convenience do not go together. These tools are for the most part either not simple to use, or much slower than conventional, unprotected means of communicating.
Andy Sellars of the Digital Media Law Project talked about the twin challenges journalists face. One is hackers and bad actors, but a potentially more potent and insidious one comes from the powers that be. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have the legal right to come after journalists for information. Ask yourself questions like “Who has my data? Who has access to my data? What requirements do they have to give up data if law enforcement asks? What incentive do they have to fight back if law enforcement asks for my data? ”

Using encryption and burner phones can help, he said. It reduces risks of cloud storage providers, telecom providers and ISPs giving up your sources. Above all, he said “don’t write sensitive stories on Google Docs! Google has access to them and can be subpoenaed.” He suggested SecureDrop for document submissions.
He said journalists should consult the Committee to Protect Journalists’ extensive Journalist Security Guide. He also said the Digital Media Law Project will later this year release a guide that spells out what rights journalists have. He said the law is evolving; some journalists have been able to avoid giving up their crypto keys by invoking the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination.

During Q&A, I asked about the safest way for Bob Woodward to communicate with Mark “Deep Throat” Felt if he were working on the Watergate story today. “I would still prefer a garage,” said Sellars, “still prefer going offline.”

Time for me to go watch The Wire.

We go to conferences to glean new ideas and confer, of course, with people about topics that interest us. I got to do both this weekend at the Byte B@ck, the Society of Professional Journalists Region 1 Conference. A side note: the SPJ, the largest journalist organization in the U.S., has 12 regions. Region 1 covers New England, New York, New Jersey and Eastern Pennsyvlania. This conference was fabulous (disclosure: I helped organize it, but just look at the sessions and the speakers)! I wish we had recorded things, because at almost every point there were at least two sessions I wanted to attend, and sometimes three.

I want to highlight some of the things I did attend. I’ll start with Ethan Zuckerman’s session on whether civic news was the future of journalism.

It may be possible to interact with Ethan and not find your mind whirring about something new, but in half-a-dozen engagements I’ve yet to have it happen. He has a gift for bringing into sharp focus something I’m been trying to articulate for myself. His session at Byte B@ck was on civic journalism, and as director of MIT’s Center for civic journalism, he has a lot to say on this. He started by stating the main challenge for journalists today: we are competing for people’s attention in a world saturated by demands for attention. Here’s what he said about why people often don’t pay attention to the news:

I think journalism has a civics problem. My argument is that we talk a lot about the survival of journalism, because we are deeply concerned about what happens if we don’t have a strong 4th Estate.

But I think a lot of our assumptions about how citizens participate in that debate probably could be challenged.

I agree about the civics problem, though I haven’t said it that way. I rarely write about politics per se, but I get angry when I read political coverage because so much of it is what Thomas Patterson calls horse race stories [Informing the News, a book summarized by Phil Hilts at the Byte B@ck session on specialized journalism]: who’s ahead, who’s behind. There is little room in that kind of reporting about the real winners and losers: the people political action affects most directly. I have fantasized about becoming a political reporter and *never* writing a horse race story, focusing solely on how what the candidates and elected officials say plays out in the lives of ordinary citizens.

I’m sure I’m naive to think I could avoid falling into the trap of covering politics like sports, or to think I could connect it to people on the ground in a way today’s political journalists don’t. Honestly, on the few occasions when I’ve interviewed elected officials, what they say actually is so carefully couched that it’s hard to figure out what it means. I can no more connect these people to something practical than I could connect a celebrity to my daily life.

I’ve probably unconsciously fallen into what Ethan calls ‘learned helplessness.’ News coverage is so regularly about something we can’t do anything about that it may make us more passive and withdrawn about being involved politically. This lack of action is a tragedy; democracy works, at least on the local level, because people involve themselves in making it work.

Ethan recommended The Good Citizen: A History of Civic American Life in part as a sanity check; our democracy has gone through different iterations, and the political process is vastly different than it once was. There is room for change. He also highlighted several examples of democracy in action: Carmen Rios and her SPARK Summit combating sexual violence, Pakistan’s Sughar Center, which promotes the involvement of women in civic life in rural Pakistan, the Icelandic entrepreneurs who founded Mailpile to help protect our email from prying eyes, and the Dream Nine immigration activists. Ethan also talked about one of his graduate students, who is writing on civic crowdfunding (note to self: could be a good story there).

These become examples of what he calls “monitorial citizenship.”

My question was whether journalists were even necessary for these kinds of independent political action. The examples Ethan gave of journalists effecting ways to involve people in the news were not satisfying to me (or to Ethan). He highlighted things like the ShoutBack feature now being used by some publications to give people a voice on stories, David Bornstein’s Solutions Journalism and Danish Broadcasting Corp.’s ‘constructive journalism’ movement. That last sounds most promising — no reporting critical stories unless you can find an alternative answer. Ethan’s own PromiseTracker project in Brazil sounds fascinating (note to self: there might be a story there, too).

Ethan said journalists “all need to get over their allergy to advocacy journalism.’ I’m not so sure. I have friends who become so engaged in their stories that they become activists; their stories are wrapped in the context of the cause, meaning they might miss all the reasons why the cause will fail. Advocacy journalism is perhaps better than partisan journalism; I think there would be a thin line between advocating for political change and becoming partisan about a topic, and while there’s a place for partisan writing and reporting, I think we would lose something important if all journalists became advocates or partisans.  Advocates tell stories that matter to them and their cause. Partisans likewise focus on their party’s point of view and advancing it. I don’t think these forms of journalism work well in what Ethan called the pointillist world that is emerging from our vast technological advance. Who will cover that in its context? Not advocates or partisans. They eliminate points of view. At the same time, advocating in some form for those without a voice has long been a tenet of journalism that I admire.

I emailed Ethan to see what role journalists play in a world of monitorial citizenship. He responded “I see a huge role for journalists in the politics I’m imagining. Many of the important civic issues aren’t ones average citizens are likely to discover for themselves. My hope is that we might see a bigger role for journalists, as people realize the profound value of having someone knowledgeable investigate issues they care about. My hope is that linking reporting and mobilization will get people to value journalism more, not less. Fingers crossed.”

Fingers crossed, indeed.

One of the bonuses for speaking at a conference is getting to attend the rest of the sessions and learn from them. The Power of Narrative, Mark Kramer’s latest writing fest, features a number of tracks looking at multimedia storytelling. Tonight, I went to see Val Wang talk about the techniques she used to put together Planet Takeout.

She wanted to tell a local story that showed how immigrants adapt to their neighborhoods, and picked Chinese takeout restaurants because they have adapted Chinese cuisine to American tastes in a unique way, and because takeouts become a unique part of a neighborhood. She used digital graphical tools like mapping, did immersive radio reporting, shot a limited amount of video and worked with a documentary photographer to create deep portraits of these everyday places. I found her approach creative, and appreciated little bits like using a Chinese takeout menu as the model for one of her entrypoints into her stories.

She said access was an issue, and that it took her two to three months to secure access to the four Boston-area takeout restaurants she covered. She then spent another two to three months reporting, gathering stories from each of the restaurants and their customers. Then it was another three months or so of producing the pieces.

Val said that she had hoped to spark some participatory journalism through her project, but this has so far been a disappointment. She encouraged people to contribute via instagram photos and stories of take-out places that matter to their neighborhoods. “That was experimental and frustrating,” she said. “It was hard to get people to do.”

I wasn’t surprised; when I was at LatitudeNews, we wanted the site to be participatory, a hybrid citizen/pro journalism model. We also found it hard to get much participation. Val did play a brief story that a listener had recorded, and showed a map with photos of take-out places in other regions. But she said she so far only had a smattering of responses, and not the groundswell she had hoped for.

It was a valuable session not least because I got to see Zeega in action. Zeega offers a simple way to meld photos, video and audio together into story form. I’ve seen Kara Oehler, Zeega’s founder, talk about it both during its development and after the product was introduced. She’s dynamic, smart and inspiring, but until tonight I simply didn’t get why a journalist might use her product. But Zeega was the basis for Planet TakeOut’s multimedia component, and Planet Takeout was in part the basis for Zeega’s features — the two were developed together, in a sense. Seeing how Val used Zeega, I got it and why it matters as a tool for journalists. It may be time for me to experiment with it (hope it doesn’t take me nine months to produce a project!)

Here’s a post about “the best freelance-oriented seminar I’ve attended in years,” by Hazel Becker. She’s referring to a session I moderated at the Society of Professional Journalist’s recent annual conference. The speakers were the wonderful, honest Amy Wallace and her editor, Mark Robinson, a stand-up guy and gifted wordsmith. Hazel gives a great rundown of what Amy and Mark had to say about the dynamics of freelance/editor relationships.

I record people all the time, for interviews. I never much like listening to these tapes; I hear muffed questions, missed follow-ups, interruptions, and of course my own voice, unfiltered by my inner ear and jarring for it. I have found I also don’t like watching interviews I’ve done on stage. I don’t have to go watch those, since they don’t involve paid assignments.
But today I found myself looking at a Google Zeitgeist presentation as part of some research for a piece, and I thought, ‘I should go look at what I did there, even though I was awful. It’s been two years. I’m here. It must be time.’ So I did look at one of them.
It wasn’t as terrible as I thought. I didn’t look as nervous pumped as I remember feeling [the word ‘nervous’ kept popping up after I wrote this, and I thought, ‘it wasn’t nerves, I know how to deal with nerves.’ It was sheer adrenalin and it surprised me, because in years of acting in plays I was always flat before a performance, had to get myself pumped up.] Not that it was great. I needed to spend more time in front of the mirror practicing. I left out a couple of things I meant to say. I wasn’t smooth.

You can see for yourself here: