Contempt charges for video blogger

Posted by Martin Stabe on 19 September 2006 at 09:51
Tags: Blogs, Contempt of Court, Ethics, Journalism, Sources, Vodcasting

A video blogger in California lost his appeal over contempt charges after he refused to turn over video he shot at a demonstration. Joshua Wolf, 24, had filmed a G8 demonstration in San Francisco which turned violent. Wolf is currently free on bail, but federal prosecutors have filed a motion to have him jailed while the appeals process continues.

Update: Wolf’s bail has been revoked.

Constructive Criticism…

Posted by Julie Tomlin on 3 May 2006 at 14:44
Tags: Ashley Cole, BBC, Blogs, Journalism, Libel, Newspapers, Sources, Television

Blogger Guido Fawkes has been on the case of BBC political correspondent Nick Robinson. Last week he picked up on his claim in his blog that the Mirror’s Prescott story was a “bombshell”.  This week he sets out some questions in response to Robinson’s 29 April entry “I’m not covering up for Prescott”
Firstly, he asks does Robinson know now of any other Prescott mistresses?

Secondly, if he does, what is the public interest in witholding her name from the public if she turns out, like Tracey, to be paid out of the public purse?

Thirdly, if he doesn’t know of any other mistresses and another subsequently comes out of the woodwork, will he feel he has done his best for the British public?

Robinson does seem to be partly entering into the spirit of blogging - unlike some newspaper (Trevor) correspondents who have launched their own blogs, Robinson does allow comments to be posted. And in his blog he does respond to allegations that ave been made that the BBC censored the Prescott story and that the reward was an exclusive with PM Tony Blair

Guido notes with satisfaction that Robinson is a reader of this blog and that he “took the hint” and clarified his “bombshell” comments. But he committed a “major breach of netiquette” says Guido for failing to link to the site despite quoting from it liberally.

“Since the Ashley Cole Case the Dead Tree Press (and the broadcast media) have become nervous about referring to, or directly linking readers and listeners to writ-risky websites,” writes Guido. “Hence the vague references to “political websites” rather than Guido or Iain Dale. Journalists are actually ringing Guido up for quotes, which they then attribute to an unnamed “controversial political website”.

Guido blames media lawyers for scaring media executives into restricting journalists from referring to risk taking bloggers. As with the Ashley Cole case it seems the relationship between “msm” and new media needs working on.

Protecting confidential sources online

Posted by Martin Stabe on 27 February 2006 at 11:57
Tags: Newspapers, Online, Sources, United States

The Washington Post may have accidentally burned a confidential source by publishing on its web site a photograph that included hidden data about where it was taken, according to eWEEK.

The source was was “0×80″, a young hacker who agreed to explain his computer crimes to a Post reporter Brian Krebs on the condition that neither his name nor his hometown would be revealed. After the Post published the story on its web site, users of the technology bulletin board Slashdot discovered that an accompanying photograph contained metadata apparently created for archiving purposes by the photographer:

SLUG: mag/hacker
DATE: 12/19/2005
PHOTOGRAPHER: Sarah L. Voisin/TWP
id#: LOCATION: Roland, OK
CAPTION:
PICTURED: Canon Canon EOS 20D
Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh 2006:02:16 15:44:49 Sarah L. Voisin

So much for not revealing the hacker’s home town.

Roland, Oklahoma, is a village with a population under 2,000. Using details from the Post story and Google Local and Google Maps, other members of the Slashdot discussion even pinpointed the approximate location of the hacker’s home.

The Post has removed the photograph from its web site and and Krebs understandably declined to comment to eWEEK:

Krebs declined to discuss the issue. “I would like to talk with you about this. However, due to confidentiality agreements I have made with my source, I’m not at liberty to do so,” he said in an e-mail exchange with eWEEK.

Many types of computer files contain “metadata” — information such as filetypes, creation- and modification dates, creators, and sometimes, detailed revision histories. Usually invisible to the ordinary user, metadata can easily be uncovered by those with some basic computer forensics skills. An enormous amount can be learned from metadata by anyone with sufficient knowledge: Most infamously, metadata in the Microsoft Word version of the dossier released by Number 10 in 2003 revealed that Alistair Campbell’s team had revised a PhD student’s work on Iraqi WMD.

Journalists will have to get smart about online information security if we want anonymous sources to continue to trust us to protect them.

(Via Mark Schaver.)