Feral Jundi

    I know, I know, this is ridiculous and far to immature to pay attention to….. Or is it?  We see PMC’s continue to try and hide stuff, along with politicians and celebrities and a multitude of other types of organizations and individuals, and that evil internet just keeps facilitating the discovery of wrong doings.  The Streisand Effect (SE) is a prime example of how trying to hide stuff is sometimes not the best idea.

   I wanted to put this together for the readership, to emphasize how important it is to the true Jundi-ist to ‘have the courage to do what is right’ and ‘be the guy that does it right, when no one is looking’.  Especially for the companies out there who claim to have cleaned up their act or try to sweep under the rug any kind of wrong doing.  Pay heed, you will be found out, and it will get all over the net, and especially if you didn’t want it to.

    Companies have to know, that at one point or another, what comes around, goes around.  If you treat an employee bad, or screw over another company, or damage the reputation of a customer, all because of your lack of Kaizen/leadership/customer service and satisfaction, then of course someone is going to tell the world about your crap.  And the way they do it these days, is through the internet. You may want to censor it, but unfortunately for you, the internet usually finds a way.  That is not a threat from myself or anything, that is just the reality of what we are talking about.

   From youtube, to Twitter, to blogs or forums, all of it are a means of information flow and exchange.  Even Facebook and Myspace, two of the largest social networking sites on the internet, are prime examples of extreme information flow and exchange.  To ignore that, or to think that you can somehow defeat it, is a joke.  Please read John Gilmore’s quote, and go through your head to the multitude of examples of how companies have tried to cover up wrong doing, and it just didn’t work.  So how do you deal with this reality?

    Easy, read Feral Jundi and get your dose of Jundism!  lol.

    Really though, it is all about what I continue to hammer on here at the blog.  You must apply Kaizen to every aspect of your company, and strive to be the company that employees and contractors want to work for, that the public respects, that the state feels is legitimate, and that customers want to do business with.  Your leadership should believe in your company and trust that you will support them, and you should be able to trust that they will do the right thing.  In other words, in order to stem any kind of SE in the future, you must first be the proactive company to defeat that in which causes embarrassment. To be a ‘moral company’, you have to live the life of a moral company.  To actually invest in the quality of your company, and truly make it the best.  Once that happens, I really believe the profit will truly follow, and the potential for SE diminishes.

   Now of course a company should work hard to implement OPSEC and PERSEC, and I am not advocating giving up that stuff to the public.  And for the most part, the rational public and media understands the importance of that–someone’s life depends on that.(although sometimes even that is difficult to hide)  The enemy though is working hard to create an SE, but still, you should not have the full force of the internet pounding on top of you.  Once you go down that route of immoral or unethical activity coupled with a coverup or censorship, then the public will decide for you what is more important and they will find a way.  Even if you are not guilty of anything, if you have a past of covering stuff up, you will fall victim of false SE.  The point is, if you think you can do the dance and cover that stuff up, then roll the dice, but the odds are against you.  So please, do it right out there.

   Also, if you read into Bab’s case, she really screwed the pooch by not seeing the big picture or realizing the power of the internet.  In the end, the internet won and pictures of her home spread throughout.  It was impossible to stop the spread of the release of it, and posters like ‘anon’ were motivated because it was such a big deal to Bab’s.  Now if she wanted publicity, it worked, but in regards to hiding anything, she lost. Companies would be wise to ‘do it right’, so that they do not fall victim to the Streisand Effect as well. –Matt

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“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”-John Gilmore 

This was quoted in Time Magazine’s December 6, 1993 article “First Nation in Cyberspace”, by Philip Elmer-DeWitt. It’s been reprinted hundreds or thousands of times since then, including the NY Times on January 15, 1996, Scientific American of October 2000, and CACM 39(7):13.

In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn’t like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don’t redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)

The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.

From John Gilmore’s Website Called Toad

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Streisand effect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Streisand effect is an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized. Examples of such attempts include censoring a photograph, a number, a file, or a website (for example via a cease-and-desist letter). Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks.

The effect is related to John Gilmore’s observation that “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”.

Origin

Mike Masnick originally coined the term Streisand effect in reference to a 2003 incident where Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million in an attempt to have the aerial photo of her house removed from the publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns.  Adelman stated that he was photographing beachfront property to document coastal erosion as part of the California Coastal Records Project. As a result of the case, public knowledge of the picture increased substantially and it became popular on the Internet, with more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the next month.

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Blog standard

Jun 26th 2008

From The Economist print edition

Authoritarian governments can lock up bloggers. It is harder to outwit them.

WHAT do Barbra Streisand and the Tunisian president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, have in common? They both tried to block material they dislike from appearing on the internet. And they were both spectacularly unsuccessful. In 2003 Ms Streisand objected to aerial photographs of her home in Malibu appearing in a collection of publicly available coastline pictures. She sued (unsuccessfully) for $50m—and in doing so ensured that the pictures gained far wider publicity.

That self-defeating behaviour coined the phrase “Streisand effect”, illustrated by an axiom from John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of the internet, that: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” But the big test of the rule is not whether it frustrates publicity-shy celebrities. It is whether it can overcome governments’ desire for secrecy.

In November 2007 Tunisia blocked access to the popular video-sharing sites YouTube and DailyMotion, which both carried material about Tunisian political prisoners. It was not for the first time, and many other countries have blocked access to such sites, either to protect public morals, or to spare politicians’ blushes. What was unusual this time was the response. Tunisian activists and their allies organised a “digital sit-in”, linking dozens of videos about civil liberties to the image of the presidential palace in Google Earth. That turned a low-key human-rights story into a fashionable global campaign.

It was the same story in Armenia in March, where the president, Robert Kocharian, ended his term in office with a media blackout that, supposedly, extended to blogs (self-published websites which typically contain the author’s personal observations and opinions). Like all other outlets, the authorities said, blogs could publish government news only. The result was a soaring number of blogs hosted on servers outside Armenia—all sharply critical of the authorities.

Some countries still think that the benefits of censorship are worth the opprobrium. China unabashedly blocks foreign news sites, with state-financed digital censors playing an elaborate game of cat and mouse with those trying to elude them. Saudi Arabia makes a positive virtue of the practice, warning those trying to access prohibited websites of the dangers of pornography: sources cited include the Koran and Cass Sunstein, an American scholar who argues that porn does not automatically deserve First Amendment protection.

Such authoritarian countries are increasingly co-operating: Chinese software for finding keywords and spotting dangerous sites is among the best in the world. But international co-operation cuts both ways. If Egypt, for example, buys Chinese web-censorship technology, the Egyptian bloggers may learn ways to bypass it from their Chinese colleagues before the technology arrives.

That may keep information flowing fairly freely. But it does not keep bloggers out of prison. Security officials who once scoffed at blogs, or ignored them completely in favour of bigger and more conspicuous targets, are now bringing their legal and other arsenals to bear. A common move is to expand media, information and electoral laws to include blogs. Last year, for example, Uzbekistan changed its media law to count all websites as “mass media”—a category subject to Draconian restriction. Belarus now requires owners of internet cafÈs to keep a log of all websites that their customers visit: in a country where internet access at home is still rare and costly, that is a big hurdle for the active netizen. Earlier this year Indonesia passed a law that made it much riskier to publish controversial opinions online. A Brazilian court has ruled that bloggers, like other media, must abide by restrictions imposed by the law on elections.

The chilling effect of such moves is intensified when governments back them up with imprisonment. From Egypt to Malaysia to Saudi Arabia to Singapore, bloggers have in recent months found themselves behind bars for posting materials that those in power dislike. The most recent Worldwide Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders, a lobby group, estimates their number at a minimum of 64.

International human-rights organisations have taken up their cause. But the best and quickest way of defending those in prison may be with the help of other internet activists. Sami ben Gharbia, a Tunisian digital activist who now lives in exile in the Netherlands, says that this beats traditional human-rights outfits when it comes to informing the world about the arrest of fellow bloggers. He co-ordinates the campaigning efforts of Global Voices Online, a web-based outfit that began as a collator of offbeat blog content and has now branched out into lobbying for free speech.

Such issues were expected to be in sharp focus at Global Voices’ annual summit in Budapest this week, where hundreds of bloggers, academics, do-gooders and journalists from places like China, Belarus, Venezuela and Kenya were due to swap tips on how to outwit officialdom. The aim, says Ethan Zuckerman, a Harvard academic who cofounded Global Voices, is to build networks of trust and co-operation between people who would not instinctively look to the other side of the world for solutions to their problems.

That is a worthy if ambitious goal. Doubtless, authoritarian governments are in close touch too, sharing the best ways of dealing with the pestilential gadflies and troublemakers of the internet. But they will not be posting their conclusions online, for all to see. Which way works better? History will decide.

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