Slashdot Mirror
EFF Guide To Blogging Anonymously
jacksonwest writes "Annalee Newitz and Kurt Opsahl just published a great how-to on blogging anonymously. How To Blog Safely About Work (Or Anything Else), covering both the legal and technical aspects of blogging about your job and staying truly anonymous. A must read for those blogging from or about their office."
that this person didn't see this article earlier
Most useful in Iran, China and may be in USA
Quote: California has a law protecting employees from "demotion, suspension, or discharge from employment for lawful conduct occurring during nonworking hours away from the employer's premises.
Posting pictures of yourself isn't illegal, but it didn't help the Queen of the Air...
is to bash on a co-worker and then send the link to everyone at the office
Pubcrawler.ca
.
We always 'google' our perspective new-hires. People have been not hired because of the content discovered.
Just be careful in what you do, and it should be good.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
If free speech is to mean anything, it must be done with a name and responsibility attached. Anonymous speech is really worthless, consider the quality and substance of AC posts on this site.
If you have something to say about your company, then say it. Have some balls and do what it takes to make change. Unless you're willing to put your name and reputation on the line, why should anyone take your speech seriously?
So you have a choice, skulk around in the shadows like you are some kind of lowly criminal looking to the world like you're trying to get away with something, or stand up and post proudly and make a big noise. If you want to be treated like a criminal, then act like one. The EFF has just posted your guidelines. If you want to be treated like a human being with something important to say, then post without fear.
Applies to restrictions on speech by the government. It does not mean your employer has to allow you to say anything you want about them and still retain your job. Speech can still have real consequences.
Don't do it!
It's way too easy for your employer to get any network traffic. My employer had a keylogger installed on one cow-irker's computer. Well, I suppose you could get away with it as long as you only speak in glowing terms about your employer.
We had a case recently where a bunch of stock brokers were fired (and sued as I recall) because the sms messages they thought were safe; weren't!
I don't see how you can stay anonymous and say anything really interesting about your office. Of course you can say "my office has cubes" and nobody will smell you out, but if you say "I know all about the shape of the new iMac" there are only a few people that could have known that, and they will figure you out. Certainly there are variations within those two extremes, but the more unique and valuable your knowledge, the more likely they are to nail you.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Not sure if I2P has been mentioned in any of the slashdot headlines yet.. most likely in a month or two after the UDP transport has been implemented and most of the bugs ironed out.
I2P is basically the network layer anonymized, apps like apache/jabber/irc/etc work fine over it with sometimes only minor mods (to ensure anonymity is preserved.) And no, it's not freenet replacement as some have thought.. different beasts they are.
I'd plug my own eepsite but that would defeat the purpose of using i2p wouldn't it....
Don't use your real name? Don't mention the name of the place at which you work? Wow! I should be writing all of this down, right next to my "How Not To Drown While Doing Dishes" instructional.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Googling someone does not a background check make. If you googled my name you might get the impression that I'm an Irish athlete and mountain climber. Not so.
Forget google.
You need to do a background investigation on your hires - criminal and civil - check job history, references, and do a skills assessment.
I don't care if someone mouthed off on Slashdot, Boing Boing, The Well, or wherever. I care about whether or not I can trust them to do the job and play well with others. Googling someone won't tell you these things.
How about a guide to using some common sense?
I blog my ass off, but I sure as shit don't mention anything I shouldn't. I know the limits of the law in my area and what I could potentially get in the shit over. Occasionally I tread a pretty fine line between kosher and not-so-kosher (a recent issue over feral animals comes to mind), but I know where the line is that you just shouldn't step over.
What's so hard about just not being a dumb-ass these days? If you want to keep your job, don't blog about work. Simple.
Just tick "Post Anonymously"
But there are many ways to write a negative web log that still tries to be completely fair and see things from the other person's point of view. I read a number of these (I actually started reading their logs for some tech project they were on but kept on after finding out that they have lives that don't revolve around first person shooters). They seem to write out of a need to get some sort of honesty about what's going on.
One fellow in particular that I enjoy reading writes about his boss, problem clients, assertive sex partners, and demanding family members. He's fun to read because he's figured out that in most cases he is the "problem" rather than all of these people he writes about. He is, after all, the only common link between all of these problematic things. When he writes about a stressful change at work he's not bitching about "the worst decision his boss ever made" but rather "a change his boss made that eluded his understanding".
If I were a future employer and came across his blog, the level of maturity he displayed would go a lot further than whether he mentioned someone by name. Not everyone's that way, but jeez, if you are completely anonymous writing stuff seems like a waste of time.
If you want to leak a secret wrongdoing, send it to a reporter's email address. If you want to write about your stresses and successes, do so in a mature way. If you want to bitch and moan and try to assasinate someone's integrity, be prepared to take the consequences for your juvenile tantrums.
While there are some good tips in EFF's suggestions, the guide is alarming in its willingness to chill free speech.
By the time you finish following all the guidelines, there would be little point in writing at all.
The best advice surely is to consider that you may lose your job for voicing your opinion -- and that as the EFF points out, a little bit of vagueness will generally not be enough to hide your identity.
Beyond that, weigh seriously the importance of your job versus the importance of publishing your thoughts.
Advice to Chinese dissidents: If you are going to be anonymous, use a pseudonym and digitally sign your stuff .. so that others know it's actually you and/or your dissident group .. that way you can build credibility with a reduced chance of being screwed.
Being totally anonymous isn't very effective, unless what you are saying can really stand on it's own (that is, it's stating provable logic rather than facts/events).
Snap back into reality and you realize that almost nobody is capable of making a decent living and maintain 100% of their principles. The society we live in generates the opposite.
It isn't human nature. It is the system we live in. Until that system might change you will always have the problem where your reputation in the business world changes significantly simply because you stand behind what is right. You see, there are too many potential haters out there which have the power to (and will!) ring your neck on a whim simply because they are religiously or politically against your ideas. The repurcussions(sp?) are limitless.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
You can't lawfully do that. If someone found out, they could sue you and whoever posted the information for defimation. It is the reason why former employers never can say anything bad about a former employees.
Likewise, my personal opinions have nothing to do with my ability to do a job. Googeling to find out what political party a person belongs to, their world views, and the like is a bad practice. I know of a guy who sued a company because they asked for his social security number on an application, then did not offer him work. According to state law, that is illegal. The only reason to ask for a social security number is to pay taxes, and an employer that asks for it is implying they have offered you a job. Same thing goes for asking about marital status, or age.
People should know thier rights and sue when violated. Otherwise corporations will keep crapping on people, paying less money, forcing people to get work as contractors, hiring temps, and the like. It all means the death of good paying jobs with health care and job security.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
How do you know the search results pertain to your prospective employee? Both of the search results I get when I search for my name in quotes are about someone else with the same name as me. I believe he also happens to live pretty close to me.
Let me be the first to say that I, and many others, within the information gathering business use blogs including slashdot to collect information about our competitors. Competitors can be from business to government agencies.
Passive information gathering from open sources goes on all the time especially here on slashdot where certain people give away pretty useful information about the current state of where they work including technical and operational matters.
Some of this information might seem innocuous to many of you but for us 'in the know' we realise that some of you posters provide us with a goldmine of competitive intelligence because we recognize its context. It's basically reverse social engineering in action and it works because humans are social beings who want to 'connect' with their online social peers. We don't even have to resort to using 'recruitable weaknesses' like ideology, money or sex. Some of you people just blurt it out just because you want to be accepted.
Here this bloggers who work in sensitive environment: Awareness of your surroundings can be a wonderful thing.
Given the situation you've described above (and I certainly empathize, I have three children of my own), I think we must ask ourselves, how free is our speech? For many of us who live paycheck-to-paycheck, getting fired is as grave a threat as jail time. Is our speech free while our employer is permitted to exercise such authority, even while that same authority is denied to elected officials?
For all those who are going to jump on me, I'm not talking about blogging WHILE at work-your employer has a right to expect that you are working while they are paying you. What I dispute that they have is a right to expect that you will live by their rules for your entire life, even while "off" of work. If that is the case, they should be paying you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year-otherwise, once they stop deciding that your time is worth their pay, they have also decided to relinquish any form of control.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Seriously, that lady is just so cool. I have yet to read one of her opinion pieces with which I disagree with her perspective. A woman can be forgiven so many faults with so much going on between her ears.
i versary_03/ci mg0171sized.jpg
Mom, Dad - this is my girlfriend:
http://joi.typepad.com/photos/cc_ann
That's her first google hit under the images tab. Classic.
Ever hear of Deep Throat and Watergate? It doesn't take much imagination to think of scenarios where disclosiing your name is not an option and the alternative to being anonymous is being silent. You appear to be in confortable circumstances where this isn't an issue. Not everyone is so fortunate.
Bit surprised nobody has mentioned Tor.[0] Tor is a way for individuals, groups to source and share information but avoid some of the pitfalls. Tor is a useful tool for making your data (somewhat more) anonymous. Tor allows users to better hide the source or destination of their activities on-line. Tor unlike conventional encryption focuses on the header component of TCP packets so it makes it harder to determine the source or destination of your packets and ultimately your data. You can read more about how it works [1] and the Tor Protocol Specification here [2] and how it works here [3]. Tor should be another essential tool in your security kit.
Reference
[0] Tor, EFF Overview: http://tor.eff.org/overview.html
[1] Tor, How it works: http://tor.eff.org/howitworks.html
[2] Tor Protocol Specification: http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/tor-spec.txt
[3] Tor: How it Works: http://tor.eff.org/howitworks.html
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I feel the same way (about being open and honest), but then I have to remind myself that the world is mostly cowards trying to get in the way. Standing by your principles is a hard thing to do. I won't bother asking if you're genuine or hypocritical because it doesn't matter. What does matter is: what's wrong with being anonymous? If it helps people who are less courageous to speak up then isn't it a positive thing? All you've done is rail them without explaining why you think it's a bad thing.
Heya, Beka... What if you've been raped by your dad and you want to let people know about the hell it's put you through, but you don't want all the attention and bs you'll have to deal with if you post it under your real name?
What if you work for a government agency, or corporate entity, etc, that is engaged in all sorts of chicanery? Would you post with your real name, and be fired on the spot, or would you post anonymously so you can be a "voice from the inside"?
What if you are an atheist in a strictly Muslim country? Or a drug user in a country currently engaged in a "War on Drugs"?
What tripe. What complete unadulterated tripe.
Empty words, since you didn't back up your opinion with any logic or reasoning.
Or are they not really thoughts worth standing up for?
What you fail to understand is that just because something is worth standing up for that doesn't mean that there won't be negative, unjust, or undesirable consequences for posting something. The world isn't fair or just, and until it is (ie: never), there will be a need for anonymity.
I was curious as to what Slashdot's IP logging policy is, particularly for AC posts. From the faq, fyi:
We log the usual stuff (IP, page, time, user, page views, moderation, and comment posting, mainly). A few other odds and ends too, but mostly the data is used to make moderation possible. We keep the logs for 48 hours.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
I agree with you Rebeka Thomas. IF that is your real name.
Wow, today my friend got fired for blogging about the Nintendo DS. He was working for Guillemot in NYC and didn't say anything that hadn't already been made public by Nintendo, and Guillemot OK'd that he could blog about it so long as he didn't reveal anything proprietary or whatever, but then after some DS hacking site linked to his blog as a source of "insider information" (their words), Nintendo caught wind and sent a notice to Guillemot about it, and they considered it a breach of contract (after they'd already said the blog posts were okay), and had to fire him. Oh well, he hated the job anyway.
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
He said the software industry, not the litigation industry. SCO moved on from software long ago - they're on to bigger and... well, bigger things.
Remember to encrypt your blog. Don't hand out the public key to anyone.
How do they know who a person is if they arent from their ISP or computer? What if you use wifi? what if its a college network? The NSA does not have unlimited tracking powers. They are good but lets be serious, there are ways to be annonymous online and offline. We all know the ways and we all know why its nearly impossible to stop.
Invisiblog lets you post blog entries via the anonymous remailer network.
I reason that as long as my employer isn't named, there's no real clue that identifies them in what I write, I can write as much as I want about what bugs me without it impacting on my employer or back on me. As my employer has a strict policy about public statements, it's also the case that pseudonymously or anonymously is about the only way I can comment about my life in general.
It's a straight choice - either speak without anyone realistically connecting events to my employer, or be fired. Some people, yourself, and a few opinionated but out-of-the-real-world F/OSS people, etc have recently suggested this is cowardly. You'll excuse me if I avoid taking advice from these groups as you have no idea of the precise circumstances I'm in.
I would agree it would show a lack of integrity if I published private information publically about my employer, attacking them, and ensuring everyone associated this private information with them (ie, if I worked for IBM, I wrote something like "My dumbass boss told me to cancel the XYZ project I've been working on which is going to totally fuck up our customers who were depending on this to deal with the bugs in XY. IBM sucks! Don't work here!"), then that'd show a lack of integrity. But writing generically, or commenting on what's public - stories in the news, etc - is hardly a sign of a lack of integrity.
What I will say is people who make sweeping attacks on entire groups of people without regard to their circumstances, ignoring the obvious, expecting people to value some third party's opinion about them more than their careers, has a seriously screwed set of values.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Breeding a group of people who are convinced they're doing their thing for the world, yet who write anonymously behind the safety of a pseudonym or "Anonymous Coward" moniker?
Get some integrity people, and write with your real names. Stand up for what you believe in and put your name next to your thoughts.
I suppose you've never heard of the Federalist Papers.
must... stay... awake...
See, the "you're the only link" guilt trip only applies when one really is the only link. I.e., when it's about people _you_ chose to interact with, and interactions _you_ had some control over. Simplifying the awfully complex graph of social and corporate interactions at work into "you're the only link" is an _awful_ over-simplification and just plain old false.
Example: a lot of the people you meet daily (including on the street, in the train, at the restaurant where you "did lunch" with a client, etc) are below average IQ. About half of them in fact. That's why it's an average. Does that make _you_ the only connection between stupid people?
I think you can see the problem by now.
Again, that kind of thing doesn't really apply for things that weren't under one's control to start with, and when indeed there was no other external common factor. E.g., if the 5th girlfriend just dumped you, yeah, you're the common link. E.g., if the 5th customer brought to you by the company's marketer is a clueless PHB, then chances are you're _not_ the common link. The common link is the marketter that brought them. E.g., if it's the 5th project which where you're asked to do overtime to implement changes, because the boss can't bring himself to tell the client "nope, we need more time to implement those", then you're _not_ the common link. The common link is the boss. Etc.
So just to clearly summarize it, in the case of an average employee:
- For the co-workers he's _not_ the "only common link". The real common link is the manager or HR person who hired them. Those decided the level of competence they wish to pay for, so, yeah, sometimes you're stuck working with incompetent or lazy people.
True story: I know of one department where they actually did a reverse auction for employees. No, it's not an urban legend. The ones who wanted the least money got hired, regardless of qualification or credentials. Needless to say, much to the existing workers' grief, their new coleagues were about as sharp as a bowling ball. Even if a really cheap bowling ball.
And methinks there it's a bit unfair to blame it on any team member as "you're the common link." No, the common link was the manager who had that stupid idea, in a misguided attempt to cut costs.
- For the clients, the real link is the marketting department that brought those.
- For the tools or technologies one has to use, or to support, again it's a tad unfair to blame the team member or tech support guy. He's not the one who chose them. The real common link is invariably a manager there.
Etc.
And in some cases the only honest thing to say is that someone is incompetent or lazy. It has nothing to do with "assassinating someone's integrity". Some people just do an awful job, and that's that.
Sure, you can pretend to be in some Wonderland where everyone is competent, noone makes any mistakes, everyone gives 100%, and half the corporate decisions aren't an equal split between ass-covering, brown-nosing, ego trips, corruption and nepotism. Quite a happy wonderland is that.
Unfortunately the real world doesn't work that way.
No ammount of soul-searching, seeing the other's point of view, or "maybe I'm the link" guilt trips can really explain stuff like: Coworker A needed 3 years to write the same module that Coworker B wrote in 6 hours. And Coworker B's version had far less bugs (we only found 1 so far, and it was in a library he used, not in his code), and ran 50 times faster. Actually benchmarked on very large real-world data sets, so no micro-benchmarking effects apply.
There's also the fact that Coworker A doesn't even know the very basics of the language he's paid to program in. No, seriously. He hadn't even heard of "call by value", so I had to help him debug his trying to assign a value to a parameter in a method, to change the variable used as a parameter to the method. Also hadn't ever heard of "linked list", "hash table" or the other absolute basics of computer programming.
So please tell me: how should I see that situation. What point of view should I see for him, that makes that one a perfectly competent and productive co-worker? It's not even a flame. I'm genuinely curious by now.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
(On a side note, in BareBones' BBEdit, if you ROT13 some text, it pops up a warning that "this operation can not be undone". Either some programmer is having fun, or someone doesn't quite understand the concept.)