New Yorker reveals Aaron Swartz-inspired system to protect sources - FT.com

Security by obscurity and encryption.

Four decades after Deep Throat met Bob Woodward in a Washington parking garage, news organisations are scrambling to find ways to protect their confidential sources in the digital age as they push back against government attempts to identify whistleblowers.

On Wednesday, the New Yorker unveiled a nine-step process for sources to send documents and messages to the Condé Nast-owned magazine, saying the system could offer them “a reasonable degree of anonymity”. Called Strongbox, it involves the use of multiple computers, thumb drives, encryption codes and secure networks

New Yorker reveals Aaron Swartz-inspired system to protect sources - FT.com

Redacted Text Message Memo - NYTimes.com

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The American Civil Liberties Union wanted insight into the Obama administration’s policy on intercepting text messages. So it filled out it submitted a Freedom of Information Act request. The Justice Department complied with the law by releasing 15 pages—but these were entirely censored.  Every single word except the subject of the memo was shaded over in black.

Redacted Text Message Memo - NYTimes.com

Backsliding on the 'death panels' myth : Columbia Journalism Review

Journalists who want to be appreciated for the fair-mindedness will bend over backwards to cover both sides of a story, even if one side is delusional.  This post from CJR calls it “He said, She said” reporting.  For previous posts on this topic, see here and here.

Unfortunately, the board is best known as the current vehicle for the false claim that Obama’s health care plan would create “death panels,” which spread widely after Sarah Palin’s August 2009 Facebook post coining the term. As a result, journalists face a conundrum. The pervasiveness of the myth is part of the reason the partisan dispute over IPAB appointments is now newsworthy—but as I warned back in January, credulous coverage has the potential to reinforce the misperception.

…

It’s important for journalists to adopt best practices in reporting on myths like “death panels” rather than backsliding into the “he said,” “she said” style-reporting that was frequently observed during the initial “death panels” controversy. Though IPAB’s cost-cutting process has been delayed for at least a year, the demagoguery surrounding health care cost reduction strategies isn’t likely to go away any time soon.

Backsliding on the 'death panels' myth : Columbia Journalism Review

Language Log » What use electrolytic pickling?

The source includes some real doozies, including “Repulsive Tory” for “Repository.”

My point here is not at all to make fun of Google's speech recognition capabilities. I've long been a staunch defender of current ASR technology in general, and Google's implementation of it in particular. And in fact, the overall quality of the Kagan transcripts is very good — there are stretches where nearly all the words are correct.

Still, errors of the kind illustrated above indicate some of the… shall we say, areas for potential improvement.

There are some cases where the transcript is a plausible rendering of the pronunciation, but is not very plausible as English-language content, e.g. "the searched ford general …" in place of "the search for general …", or "like adams molecule selves and tissues" for "like atoms molecules cells and tissues". I'm surprised that the recognizer's n-gram language model, which is contemporary ASR's approximation to what makes sense, made these choices. And there are a few things that are just bizarre, where I can only imagine that some obscure bug has short-circuited Google's language model entirely:  "became evermore phadke" for "became ever more vague", or "tutsi you can write" in place of "to each new generation".

Language Log » What use electrolytic pickling?