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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
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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.
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"?
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.
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Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
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.
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.
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."
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.
"Free speech" is a nice little term that gets bandied far too often in a nonsensical way, by people who don't think about rights concepts in a particularly rigorous way.
If an employer's decision to censure or fire an employee based on work-related blogging is an infringement of free speech, then what about a person/group who decides to boycott a company because they disagree with that company's decisions? Or how about when there's a demonstration outside my window and I shut the window because I don't agree with them and don't want to hear it?
"Free speech" becomes an *abusive* concept when you deprive people of their rights to avoid associating with people they don't like, or to take otherwise legal actions (like not shopping at a particular store) based on their opinons about an entity. After all, isn't the constitutional guarantee of freedom of association embedded in the exact same amendment as the right to free speech?
"Free speech" cannot mean "speech without consequences from anyone". That would just be silly. I'll say what I want, and you'll decide whether you want to associate with me based on how you feel about it.
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
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
Invisiblog lets you post blog entries via the anonymous remailer network.
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...