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?

About | Undercover Reporting

A case study in information responsibility: The site collects some the best undercover reporting alongside some of the most ethically bankrupt. It also cites some of the ensuing discussions and outcomes, which run the gamut from Pulitzer prizes to story retractions and reporter terminations.  Also see this previous post on a related topic.

This collaboration with NYU Libraries collects many decades of high-impact, sometimes controversial, mostly U.S.-generated journalism that used undercover techniques. It grows out of the research for Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception (Northwestern University Press, 2012), which argues that much of the valuable journalism since before the U.S. Civil War has emerged from investigations that employed subterfuge to expose wrong. It asserts that undercover work, though sometimes criticized as deceptive or unethical, embodies a central tenet of good reporting--to extract significant information or expose hard-to-penetrate institutions or social situations that deserve the public's attention. The site, designed as a resource for scholars, student researchers and journalists, collects some of the best investigative work going back almost two centuries.

The material has been gathered into clusters, highlighting award-winning series, exemplary proponents of the practice or recurring themes (such as prison infiltrations, shadowing migrants, work, and gender, class or ethnic impersonation and dozens more.) Included are not only examples of the most outstanding work but also the most serious lapses. There are examples of controversies over the practice, such as those generated by hidden camera investigations, and of the scholarly, legal and journalistic debates that followed. Many excellent digital collections still cover only recent decades so retrieval of much of this material has been difficult, much of it still accessible solely on microfilm.

About | Undercover Reporting

Documents at Anti-Aging Clinic Up for Sale in Doping Case - NYTimes.com

A lurid case study in the information arms race.

Major League Baseball’s investigation of an anti-aging clinic linked to performance-enhancing drugs has taken a new turn, with the commissioner’s office paying a former employee of the facility for documents related to the case. At the same time, two people briefed on the matter said, at least one player linked to the clinic has purchased documents from a former clinic employee in order to destroy them.

The unusual battle, according to the two people, also appears to involve efforts by other players tied to the clinic to buy potentially incriminating documents and keep them out of the hands of baseball’s investigators.

One of the two people said that, in part, baseball, which has no subpoena power, felt compelled to pay money for documents because its officials had been concerned that more than one player was trying to do the same.

Documents at Anti-Aging Clinic Up for Sale in Doping Case - NYTimes.com

Happiness, Beyond the Data - NYTimes.com

This one might not make the team cuts when I moderate the panel “Human Factors in Data Quality” at the 2013 MIT Chief Data Officer & Information Quality Symposium this July, but it’s worth noting the limits—and the overall skepticism about—quantitative studies on human phenomena.

Happiness studies are booming in the social sciences, and governments are moving toward quantitative measures of a nation’s overall happiness, meant to supplement traditional measures of wealth and productivity. The resulting studies have a high noise-to-signal ratio, but we can expect that work with an aura of scientific rigor on something as important as happiness is going to be taken seriously. Still, our first-person experience and reflection can catch crucial truths about happiness that escape the quantitative net.

Happiness, Beyond the Data - NYTimes.com