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I posted an acerbic comment last night at EmptyWheel. I warned months ago that there would be an attempt to apply the laws of war to the internet. I warned even earlier that the freedoms people take for granted on the internet were poorly secured and that civil rights lawyers should focus on securing them. That would be the freedoms of speech, religion, the press, assembly, and lobbying, as well as the right not to have military ‘quartered’ in our homes in the form of viruses planted on our machines, and 4th amendment rights to privacy not to be watched. Some of those rights are already lost in hacker laws, some in corporate interpretations of data, some in data placement, some because of failure to write opinions and public documents. Customary international law depends on ‘publicists’ to write opinions and public documents in its early stages, international standards depend on such documents as source material where experts don’t attend conferences and meetings. The corporate and governmental machine that churns forward creating the internet depends on legislation to regulate it to keep it from becoming a place where people can be controlled.
Acerbic comments are never taken well at emptywheel. The “moderator” there, bmaz, first said my comment was a steaming pile, when I defended it, he called me a “whiny petulant liar” for my claims that the data warehousing shown in the SJC rollback provisions argument in the FISA debate had been ignored and that only pow wow had noticed Scott Macintosh’s treatment of people as disk drives, claiming that he and Marcy had been at the forefront of these issues.
I did a google search and presented him with rebuttal that neither had been covered. Specifically, google rollbacks or “Scott Macintosh” site:emptywheel.firedoglake.com and you will not produce said posts by either bmaz or Marcy. Unfortunately, at this point bmaz began deleting my rebuttals.
If you call someone a liar, that is defamatory. You had better be right, and the person you’ve called a liar has the right to rebut, if you delete the rebuttals and make sure your accusation is the last word, you are defaming, and you are misusing your privilege as a moderator.
If you go to the “Contact Us” tab at EmptyWheel, the message is “Sorry!” It’s unimplemented, but invites you to contact firedoglake. If you go to the “Contact Us” tab at FireDogLake” you contact firedoglake. I did so, demanding that bmaz’s privileges be publicly reviewed. I pointed out that just two days ago, another commenter had written a post also complaining about the moderator at EmptyWheel deleting comments there and not allowing a rebuttal.
I got a response from Jane Hamsher saying that EmptyWheel is a separate site that is under its own management. And apparently not able to be contacted or reviewed or accountable to anyone. Quite a statement about a watchdog site that demands accountability of others.
18 Comments
Contacting Emptywheel
Send all tips and suggestions to emptywheel [at] gmail.com
Above is from “Send us your tips” on the emptywheel ‘sub-site’ of FDL.
I went to Contact Us. It says to go to firedoglake [at] gmail.com which is what I did. Nevertheless, I stand by what I wrote. bmaz should not be a moderator if he is going to use his privileges thus, and a watchdog site should implement their contact page and be accessible for accountability. I wasn’t really sending them a suggestion or a tip.
Understood; all I was pointing out is how to contact marcy and where the contact point was on the EW site.
That’s been my experience at emptywheel.com though I didn’t know that bmaz is the moderator there and he was the one deleting comments.
Though I generally agree with much of what Marcy Wheeler writes there I would like to know if someone in the comments has a different view or opinion.
In my opinion emptywheel.com has lost it’s credibility and will ignore it until they address this serious issue.r
Ondelette, may I suggest that you get a life.
Your comment suggests that what’s written at emptywheel.com is not important and irrelevant?
This is the exact statement by Ondelette in our comments section I vehemently objected to:
There were other accusations and insinuations directed at “the lawyers” and at the people at Emptywheel as well, not to mention that the whole process started as a harangue of another commenter, one who had made a fairly innocuous comment that should not have gestated Ondelette’s pointed and angry diatribe. This has been an ongoing and recurring problem with Ondelette’s participation with us for quite a long time; she has a history of being aggressive and bullying to others, including me. I let her plead her case and then told her to stop. I gave her fair warning that enough was enough. But it never is with Ondelette.
For the record, there are few, if any, places on the internet or in the specific area of discussion that have been more on top of the state of surveillance activity, abuses of law and authority, inappropriate use of exceptional modalities such as National Security Letters, wiretapping and wholesale databasing and datamining on American citizens, as well as the legal underpinnings and infirmities thereof, than Marcy Wheeler and the Emptywheel blog Ondelette’s attempt to say that simply because she picked two unusual search terms that nowhere near represent an honest attempt to find our coverage, and appear designed for that reason, is silly, scurrilous and laughable.
emptywheel not emptywheel.com
bmaz, it’s about time you learned that neither your bar card nor your moderator position entitle you to stifle criticism or expression. If people have a problem with you or with the commentary at your blog site, they are allowed to express it, or should be. You just throw adjectives around and delete them. “neurotic”, “liar” “whiny”, “petulant” and a host of others. Those aren’t arguments, those are insults.
In the future, you confine your moderation to disputes you are not a part of, and there won’t be a problem. But if you decide to enter a dispute, which you did when you called everything I had written a steaming pile of shit, then you are no longer entitled to delete. And you are certainly no longer entitled once you have called someone a liar and you are deleting every rebuttal to that charge the person makes.
You should relinquish your moderator position immediately, you are unqualified to hold it. Fairness and freedom of expression are alien concepts to you.
I picked the search terms that were appropriate to the topics I said were missed. You picked the terms you thought were appropriate to your coverage. I didn’t lie, that is a very strong term. You shouldn’t have used it. You defamed me, and until you retract those words you are unfit to moderate anywhere at all.
And there is no “she”. Ondelette is french for ‘wavelet’ a finite wave used to approximate functions. You’d know that if you knew something about datamining.
I would have let the dispute go eventually but for the “whiny petulant liar” comment followed by the deletions. That was so far out of line it merited seeing what I could do to see bmaz knocked off his high horse and hoisted with his own petard. I had similar treatment from another lawyer on another blog and it led to 6 months of stalking by one of his admirers.
Believe it or not, these places, for all the talk about them being privately owned and operated, have public visibility and are very much public venues. They are open to search engines and data gathering services. They affect peoples’ reputations. So people who make statements like that are making very public comments that affect peoples reputations, even if pseudonymically. And in the previous experience, due to the stalker, with the encouragement of the owner of the blog, six months of repetition led to quite a log of negative comment. I’m not going to let such comments happen again, and it always seems that it is lawyers who make them. If you make such a comment about a lawyer, just sit back and see the sparks fly and the reaction.
NO. People who combine deletions and defamations should not be allowed to be moderators on any blog. And a watchdog blog that aspires to be respected? Should be accountable for such action and such people.
I don’t really know what the issue is between ondelette and you but I just skimmed over some of his comments and he’s correct about a few things.
One: I don’t think you or most members of FDL understand the internet or it’s technology. It’s apparent in the posts you and others write about the internet and it’s technology.
Two: he’s correct that operating systems, except for GPL ones like Linux and other open systems, and software and hardware are being re-written to take freedoms away from users and consumers. Some of it is by legislations and some by coercion or threats of lawsuits.
X2…!
That would be Ditto to what Twain had asked…! 8-(
so what? Opposing points of view should just STFU and get a life? Is that the way progressive sites run things? By junta of the correct?
And bmaz, while you’re dishing out accusations, I have no history of bullying. You, on the other hand, do have a history of bullying, censorship, and high-handedness in your dual role as attack dog and moderator cum censor on Emptywheel. It’s quite a projection to say that others are the ones being aggressive and bullying.
Now why don’t you stop? You’ve about laid out every negative adjective you can on me in public and without proof. You are going to stop, and you are going to retract, and if you are still going to both attack people and simultaneously “moderate” by deleting their attempts to rebut you, this site is not worth anyone’s time, effort, or monetary contributions. I hope Jane and Marcy understand that latter point. You are a cost center just by showing up with your vindictive personality and your authoritarian moderator’s delete button.
Thanks. If I had known that, I might have found it. I didn’t so I found her unreachable. At this point, she can just as well show up here. bmaz makes her site intolerable, and I don’t think anyone who cares that people get treated properly when they go to web sites should go to her web site until she attends to her personnel problem.
The search terms were picked as follows: The Leahy proposal, the SJC FISA bill, generated a whole rebuttal by the Bush White House, centered almost entirely on the issue of rollbacks. Hence the search term “rollbacks.” If you don’t understand why rollbacks indicate that the FISC must have ruled that the 4th amendment is violated when the data is searched and not when it is collected, you didn’t understand my warning on this when I made it, and you didn’t report on this issue, as I had said, something you called me a liar for saying you didn’t report on.
The second search term was “Scott Macintosh”. He’s the name of the Bush DoJ’s head of counterterrorism, continued on into the Obama administration. He argued part of the Brandon Mayfield case, flagged by pow wow, the one which I had said only pow wow understood the import of. He was the one with the theory that people were repositories of information like any other repository, in essence, living disk drives, which he argued in the tape that pow wow pointed to. If you search these terms you will find out that the quote you just cited above, bmaz, is in fact not a lie, because you two did not cover either of the topics in my rant in that paragraph, as evidenced by those search terms, which are not “silly, scurrilous, and laughable” but actually the precise search terms needed to perform the most accurate datamine to determine whether your epithet “liar” is accurate.
Oh, I see the source of the misunderstanding. Apparently you believe that the 5 years in which almost everything I’ve written about collection has implicitly meant there were databases that infringed on the 4th Amendment of citizens don’t count because I didn’t use two words you felt were the only valid words to use. I can see how that would lead to misunderstanding. At its core seems to be your insistence that only your paradigm for this is valid.
I hope you can see how from my perspective, the entire comment appeared to be boorish, even if 5 years of my writing didn’t include that implicit assumption. And to then have your response to an aggressive response to boorishness be demands? I can’t say that approach makes me all that predisposed to respond to your “demands.”
We have all just shifted moderation again at FDL. As we move forward from that, I am certainly happy to review the standards at EW on moderation, particularly as regards the deletion of comments. To that degree I’m happy to listen to your concerns.
But I would be much more interested in hearing concerns rather than demands from people.
Thanks for raising your, um, concerns.