ARTS & FARCES internet

It’s hard to tell from Dan Gillmor’s open letter to the Bayosphere community, but it appears the highest profile citizen journalism experiment in the US may be folding. Gillmor lists the various plausible business models for the endeavor—ranging from consulting and trade publishing to advertising networks and tagging systems—noting that in the end he and his partner opted for publishing a single “citizen media-driven” website. One gets the sense that Gillmor just didn’t much like the role of entrepreneur, but I suspect there’s more to the story.

The only part of the Bayosphere website I perused was Gillmor’s weblog, and therein may lie the fatal flaw of the Bayosphere model: the website was perhaps too closely tied to Gillmor’s personality. This is something that other citizen journalism efforts—including Twin Cities Daily Planet—need to be cognizant of and work hard to avoid. (Disclosure: I’m the Twin Cities Daily Planet’s Saint Paul editor.)

At any rate, Gillmor takes the time to bullet-point ten exceptionally important lessons learned that are required reading for anyone working in journalism, professional or amateur. These lessons alone provide ample evidence of Bayosphere’s success in particular and the promise of citizen journalism in general.

The broadcast flag—the darling of the US corporate entertainment cartel—has reared its ugly head yet again. This time in draft legislation from Senator Gordon Smith (R-Oregon). The proposed legislation limits digital media devices to “customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law and that prevents redistribution of copyrighted content over digital networks.”

If this legislation passes, say goodbye to fair use exceptions to US copyright law. And say goodbye, too, to any new technology developments that aren’t approved by the corporate content cartel. This legislation makes it illegal to do anything new—anything not customary—with digital content.

As Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) points out:

“Had that been the law in 1970, there would never have been a VCR. Had it been the law in 1990, no TiVo. In 2000, no iPod.”

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig has published a wiki—called the “Anti-Lessic Reader”—to “build a collection of content that criticizes” his work. The concept, according to Lessig, is essentially a “but see” citation system. This is a highly laudable project and one that I hope catches on among other academics and thought leaders.

In a story broken by Howard Mintz in the San Jose Mercury News, we learned Thursday that the US Justice Department has demanded the search records of millions of Google users.

“‘This is exactly the kind of case that privacy advocates have long feared,’ said Ray Everett-Church, a South Bay privacy consultant. ‘The idea that these massive databases are being thrown open to anyone with a court document is the worst-case scenario. If they lose this fight, consumers will think twice about letting Google deep into their lives.’ ‘The government can’t even claim that it’s for national security,’ Everett-Church said. ‘They’re just using it to get the search engines to do their research for them in a way that compromises the civil liberties of other people.’”

The demand comes as a part of the government’s attempt to uphold the Child Online Protection Act. Google, the online search and advertising giant, has so far refused to comply with the subpoena first issued in August 2005. The bigger story is that three of Google’s competitors—America Online, Microsoft, and Yahoo—have complied with the demand, providing information about the search activities of their users.

The US Supreme Court, in 2004, blocked the enforcement of the online pornography law as overly broad. It’s ironic—or, maybe not—that the government would use overly broad subpoenas to try to revive a law that was struck down as being overly broad.

Search analyst and author John Battelle saw this coming more than a year ago.

As it turns out, President Bush’s once-clandestine warrantless wiretap progam is pretty much a bust. All of the leads provided by the National Security Agency (NSA) were fed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and virtually all of them “led to dead ends or innocent Americans.” To make matters worse, the information flow was so daunting that it prevented the FBI from following up on productive leads of its own. So says Lowell Bergman, Eric Lichtblau, Scott Shane, and Don Van Natta Jr. in today’s New York Times.

The Times reports that FBI director Robert S. Mueller III “raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants.”

General Michael V. Hayden, who was NSA director when the administration’s warrantless wiretap program began, contradicted the FBI accounts, telling the Times, “I can say unequivocally that we have gotten information through this program that would not otherwise have been available.”

Also in today’s Times, Eric Licthblau reports that the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights both plan to file lawsuits against the Bush administration over the program. Both organizations believe that the domestic surveillance program was used to monitor “defense lawyers, journalists, scholars, political activists, and other Americans with ties to the Middle East,” and seek an immediate end to the warrantless surveillance program.

Both organizations believe that the domestic surveillance program was abused to stifle dissent, similar to the ways in which domestic surveillance was abused in the 1960s and 1970s—abuses that resulted in the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), intended to specifically stop such abuses.