Respectfully Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)-Guest Blogger
When it comes to the Second Amendment and guns, it seems that President Obama can’t make anyone happy. Ever since Obama announced his candidacy for the Presidency, the NRA has screamed that Obama will be taking away the guns. This scare tactic continued when Obama defeated John McCain for the Presidency. Just what has Barack Obama done to make the NRA and gun owners frightened for their guns? The simple answer to this question is nothing. The head of the National Rifle Association, Mr. Wayne LaPierre actually admitted recently that Obama has done nothing to attack gun owner’s rights to bear arms, but claims Obama’s inaction against guns is actually a conspiracy to take away guns!! ‘ “[The Obama campaign] will say gun owners — they’ll say they left them alone,” LaPierre told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday. “In public, he’ll remind us that he’s put off calls from his party to renew the Clinton [assault weapons] ban, he hasn’t pushed for new gun control laws… The president will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he’s actually been good for the Second Amendment.” “But it’s a big fat stinking lie!” the NRA leader exclaimed. “It’s all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and destroy the Second Amendment in our country.” ‘ Raw Story
Now, before anyone thinks I am making this stuff up, the linked site includes a video clip wherein Mr. LaPierre verbalizes this alleged reverse conspiracy. Mr. LaPierre makes a point of throwing in the necessary names of alleged liberal co-conspirators to rev up his base. ‘ “Sotomayor, Kagan, Fast & Furious, the United Nations, executive orders. Those are the facts we face today… President Obama and his cohorts, yeah, they’re going to deny their conspiracy to fool gun owners. Some in the liberal media, they are already probably blogging about it. But we don’t care because the lying, conniving Obama crowd can kiss our Constitution!” ‘
The lying, conniving Obama crowd as Mr. LaPierre labels them has not done anything to harm the Second Amendment rights that the NRA claims to be at risk. I was interested in the last few words of LaPierre’s quotation above. The phrase “kiss our Constitution” appears to lay claim that the NRA and its followers own the Constitution and its protections. I could have sworn that my law school Constitutional professors taught me that the Constitution protects all citizens, but maybe I heard them wrong. But, I digress.
As the Raw Story article suggests, President Obama has actually taken heat from his own supporters over his alleged conspiracy to not take away the guns. NPR Does Mr. LaPierre provide any evidence of this bizarre claim? None that I could find. Maybe you will have better luck than me in finding evidence of presidential actions to hide President Obama’s intentions and/or actions of stealing legal guns from their owners.
I have to admit that if you read the comments section of the NPR article that details how the Left is disappointed with Obama’s inaction on gun control, you will read almost nothing except gun owners claiming that Obama’s words of inaction are actually code words that the End is Near and the Sky is Falling for gun owners! Just what will it take gun owners to ask Mr. LaPierre for evidence of his wild claims? I, for one would love to hear his answer to that question. I understand that candidate and President Obama may have stayed away from the 2nd Amendment issues for political reasons, but where is the evidence of this alleged conspiracy? I would think Fox News would be sending Bill O’Reilly’s reporters all over the country to uncover such a heinous conspiracy.
If Mr. Obama has not written any executive orders or supported additional legislative steps to control or take away guns since he has become President, just what is the basis for these wild claims? I realize that the NRA has a financial interest in getting gun owners scared into buying more guns, but are there other, underlying reasons why the gun owners are frightened so easily, when the facts do not support the NRA’s claims?
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)- Guest Blogger
Additional sources: Gun Owners of America; NRA-ILA; Pajamas Media;
An anonymous dipshit said:
[yammering deleted]
Let’s break this down:
you say: gravatar has a leak
I say: gavatar is entitled to their business plan (which depends on mining massive amounts of data) – if the leak bothers you, then don’t post on any gravatar-enable blogs (incidentally, on most forums you need to put your gravatar’s URL in your personal profile before it shows up…).
You say: I exploited this leak unethically
I say: It is implicit in gravatar’s business plan that they are exploiting this leak on a scale that makes what I did look utterly trivial – and, in point of fact, my actions have brought this to the attention of the patrons of a noted civil libertarian’s blog…
You say: What I did could expose whistleblowers
I say: Only stupid ones – if you want to be a whistleblower and think that making a post with a different handle and the same email protects you, then you are a fool. Anyone who wants to leak something anonymously should go to Wikileaks…
You say: I should destroy my work.
I say: It is my work and I wont destroy it unless you pay me to do so (if you want to control someone else’s work, you’ve got to pay for it – or don’t you understand basic capitalist economics?). I get to decide the price for which I will sell my work – you can decide whether or not you want to buy it.
You say: I should write a paper (and, by the way, the $200/hr figure was for the work I’d need to do to remove someone from the database, not write your stupid paper…
I say: I don’t see the point of writing a paper regarding a known issue that is a part of gravatar’s business model (if they fix this “leak” as you suggest, they cripple their business…[I expect you to support me on this point, Bron – otherwise you are being a blatant hypocrite]) on a topic that is already understood by every expert and most people well-versed in the internet. I think that I would make myself look stupid by writing and publicizing such a paper and in addition, I don’t find the issue very interesting (my interest does not now and never did have anything to do with mining gravatars – that was just some low-hanging fruit so I picked it – and as the article you posted points out, I’m hardly the first…). I am not willing to write the paper you suggest for any amount of money – it would be an unacceptable waste of my time. If you think it’s important, you should do it – if you aren’t willing to do so, then stop suggesting I do it. Anything else is hypocrisy.
anon, outing sockpuppets, trolls and zombies is a pastime at almost all blogs. If you have sockpuppet names, that is NOT the same as identifying who you are, where you are or your email address. Revealing or ‘outing’ identities is not considered appropriate. There are some obvious exceptions, such as where the person uses a clearly identifiable name or link in the username–on this blog that would be the usernames in blue typeface, or for example Slarti’s gravitar which has his name listed.
It is not considered unethical to reveal the alter egos of users who register under different names. As you know, there are numerous ways to do this, only one of which is to mine the background of photos, links and Gravitars. I have managed to catch a few zombies and sockpuppets by analyzing writing styles. Everyone is unique and to me, writing style is like looking at a fingerprint. Also, use of language tells me a lot about the person if I want to devote the energy required to do the analysis.
There was one zombie on Daily Kos recently who was outed as having well over a dozen usernames and kept coming back after being banned repeatedly for inappropriate and inflammatory behavior. It was not unethical to reveal the multiple usernames under which that zombie had registered.
As for what I do, just out of curiosity I put my (real world) name into Google Scholar. Got almost seven hundred hits. Go figure. Somebody out there must like me.
Kevin’s defense and the defense of Kevin has been this is public information, anyone can do what they want with it.
So one day the folks at Microsoft scrape all the Gravatar sites. The hidden web bug is merely an md5 computation of the email address. Microsoft’s Hotmail is a great source of email addresses. So Microsoft can put together a nice database of email addresses and the blogs they comment at.
Google can do the same thing with gmail addresses.
Yahoo with yahoo addresses.
AOL, and so on.
So your blogging tendencies, political, left right, gay, cancer, religious, all of that can be trivially added into the profiles that Microsoft, Google, WordPress, etc., build on you. And that can be sold to insurance companies, or anyone. And Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, AOL, will know what the email address is. So it’s a pretty big email privacy leak.
And the various ad networks can also do this. And it might be worth it for them to do that too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/technology/30adstalk.html
Retargeting Ads Follow Surfers to Other Sites
By MIGUEL HELFT and TANZINA VEGA
Published: August 29, 2010
The shoes that Julie Matlin recently saw on Zappos.com were kind of cute, or so she thought. But Ms. Matlin wasn’t ready to buy and left the site.
Then the shoes started to follow her everywhere she went online. An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” said Ms. Matlin, a mother of two from Montreal. “It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it’s a little creepy, especially if you don’t know what’s going on.”
People have grown accustomed to being tracked online and shown ads for categories of products they have shown interest in, be it tennis or bank loans.
Increasingly, however, the ads tailored to them are for specific products that they have perused online. While the technique, which the ad industry calls personalized retargeting or remarketing, is not new, it is becoming more pervasive as companies like Google and Microsoft have entered the field. And retargeting has reached a level of precision that is leaving consumers with the palpable feeling that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores.
In the digital advertising business, this form of highly personalized marketing is being hailed as the latest breakthrough because it tries to show consumers the right ad at the right time. “The overwhelming response has been positive,” said Aaron Magness, senior director for brand marketing and business development at Zappos, a unit of Amazon.com. The parent company declined to say whether it also uses the ads.
Others, though, find it disturbing. When a recent Advertising Age column noted the phenomenon, several readers chimed in to voice their displeasure.
Bad as it was to be stalked by shoes, Ms. Matlin said that she felt even worse when she was hounded recently by ads for a dieting service she had used online. “They are still following me around, and it makes me feel fat,” she said.
With more consumers queasy about intrusions into their privacy, the technique is raising anew the threat of industry regulation. “Retargeting has helped turn on a light bulb for consumers,” said Jeff Chester, a privacy advocate and executive director of the Washington-based Center for Digital Democracy. “It illustrates that there is a commercial surveillance system in place online that is sweeping in scope and raises privacy and civil liberties issues, too.”
Retargeting, however, relies on a form of online tracking that has been around for years and is not particularly intrusive. Retargeting programs typically use small text files called cookies that are exchanged when a Web browser visits a site. Cookies are used by virtually all commercial Web sites for various purposes, including advertising, keeping users signed in and customizing content.
In remarketing, when a person visits an e-commerce site and looks at say, an Etienne Aigner Athena satchel on eBags.com, a cookie is placed into that person’s browser, linking it with the handbag. When that person, or someone using the same computer, visits another site, the advertising system creates an ad for that very purse.
This is what the Gravatar code does.
This is why that attorney, and so many other developers and users call it a privacy leak.
What Kevin did was no different than any other third party, except Kevin didn’t do this to sell shoes, Kevin did this to break anonymity.
@OS I don’t know what your expertise is in, and I don’t know how you can defend Kevin’s behavior.
I would be interested in learning how you do that.
Thank you, all, for the non-technical explanation. Nobody need tell me the OPFAC number of their ORTUPS unit.
(goodness in the above clip starts at 4:30)
(Okay, that’s Felix telling the Court.)
Because all of us (our age more or less) remember Felix telling Oscar…
anon, do not assume too much about my areas of expertise or capablities. There is a lot about me that is not public knowledge.
Just be careful with assumptions.
Otteray Scribe, we look to you for various aspects of your experience. Your experience with aviation for one, guides us and helps us understand issues surrounding the Reno crash, or the Obama helicopter.
When others with other sorts of expertise and interests come here to discuss the clash of civil liberties, free speech, privacy violations, and web bugs, something that seems afield from your expertise, well, I dunno, you may wish to just listen and ask questions that help you learn.
You can trivialize my concerns, but I linked to the same exact concerns coming from the EFF as well as to other developers as well as to some random guy calling himself a lawyer and expert on these matters.
It is commendable and understandable you wish to defend Kevin’s behavior, but you should not minimize what he did, and nor should I, or have I, exaggerated it. That way lies partisan hackery.
If you don’t understand, all you have to do is ask.
As Harry did.
If you were commenting on a blog anonymously where you felt you needed your anonymity, and you felt the majority of the site opposed your views, would you view a similar scraping to out your anonymity as a lot of todo about nothing, or as evidence the right wing will take any step it can to repress the people?
If a right wing site had systematically attacked the Huffington Post in a similar way, what would be the reaction at Salon, or Mother Jones or Think Progress?
I think the questions I have asked are pretty much par for this sort of privacy leak and scraping.
Harry………….
See what I meant. 🙄
Harry,
The other thing you should know is that whenever you enter a comment at a site that has Gravatars, that regardless of whether you have ever registered or logged into Gravatar, regardless of that, the email address you enter into the comment field will be turned into a web bug that anyone in the world can see at any time.
Harry, a clarification, …
“He then went over several days or weeks or months of posts, and built up a list of which email addresses were being used by which names.
If you look at the email address field, it says: “Email (required) (Not published)”
Anyway, to most people, that line “Email (required) (Not published)” gives them the reasonable expectation of privacy. It lets them know that Professor Turley and perhaps some authorized agents will be able to see their email address, but no one else will.
Kevin discovered a well known bug that lets people do the following:
1) They can effectively guess and verify the email address a user used.
2) They can verify the author of one post at this blog who may have used a pseudonym of Bob at this blog, actually authored another post using the name Carol, if they left the non published email address the same.
3) They can determine that Bob at this blog wrote a post by the name of Joe at another blog.
Many people consider all of these to be privacy leak that has the potential to out whistleblowers or others that have a real world need to maintain anonymity when writing blog posts.
During the time frame that Kevin was scraping this site, he neither asked Professor Turley for permission to do so, nor disclosed to the community that he had done so.
Instead, he actually did (2) above. He used his tool to out some of, but not all of, the users here who were writing posts under multiple names.
It’s my belief that his actions were:
a) unethical, especially at a “free speech site”
b) borderline illegal given how they may have breached either WordPress’ or Professor Turley’s agreements with site users, but probably not illegal since WordPress knows of the privacy leak and refuses to fix it.
But I also think that Professor Turley *should* warn commenters here that regardless of what the wordpress fields may say, that their anonymity cannot be guaranteed due to problems with the gravatar system.
And I would like Professor Turley to explain his views as a civil libertarian on the various issues, I believe that would be interesting and valuable to us all.
Harry,
Kevin used a privacy leak that is built into Gravatar and WordPress to associate the email address fields with the name field in the reply form.
He then went over several days or weeks or months of posts, and built up a list of which email addresses were being used by which names.
If you look at the email address field, it says: “Email (required) (Not published)”
And so, if you follow my links, you will find many people, including attorneys specializing in Internet issues that point out that the privacy leak, is actually fairly dangerous, and can result in total loss of anonymity.
While it is true that the pages Kevin accessed were publically available, and so the information that he scraped was publically available, it is not actually true that information made public by accident is actually public information. But that’s neither here nor there.
What is more relevant is that this site is the site of a well known civil libertarian, and you can see evidence of course in today’s op-ed.
In that light, it would not be unexpected for Professor Turley to be a strong advocate for speech, including for anonymous speech, include even for anonymous ugly speech.
Kevin broke the trust of the community.
His scraping, while trivial, has the possibility of outing people who needed their anonymity.
Kevin maintains the stance that since the information was available by public scraping, what he did was okay.
But what he did was actually unethical, and even dangerous.
Kevin did not ask Professor Turley for permission to do this, and I have asked Kevin if what he thinks Professor Turley would have said, had he asked for permission ahead of time.
I’ve also asked Kevin to write this up as a blog post or a paper and to make WordPress and Gravatar aware of the privacy leak.
I’ve shown Kevin what the industry standard recommended behavior is when these leaks are found.
And Kevin has refused all of those relatively mild requests, and instead demanded $200 to write a paper, and $50,000 to delete the database.
I find Kevin’s behavior bizarre, and troubling, and I find it curious that at a civil libertarian’s site, one which seems to aim to defend and protect free speech, that Kevin’s acts to counter free speech, his potentially real world dangerous acts to do so, are so well defended by the long time commenters and friends.
I do not believe that had Kevin asked ahead of time, that Professor Turley would have let him crawl and scrape his site with the intent to destroy anonymity.
I regard the various defenses of Kevin as signs of the one way partisan hypocrisy we all get caught up in.
I don’t believe Kevin’s database has any real value, and I think there are more ethical and effective ways to stop sockpuppetry, and I encourage Kevin to delete his database.
Basically I find that Dr. Kevin Kesseler, Ph.D, is mostly a self-absorbed, unethical, free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee, situational ethics kind of douchebag.
Professor Turley can handle the situation anyway he sees fit.
I have stated that I am curious of Professor Turley is concerned with the destruction of anonymity that the Gravatar privacy leak enables, and Ive made suggestions on steps he might take to remediate that.
And I am frankly curious if Professor Turley is okay with Kevin’s scraping, and would have given Dr. Kesseler permission to perform that scraping had he been asked in advance.
The one step Kevin has done is not to write a paper, not to file a bug report, not to create a blog entry, not to delete his database, but to post a comment on the corrections page.
When I followed up his comment with some analysis, like this, and added other statements Kevin made regarding his belief the data is valuable and he believes he can profit from it, I have been accused of spamming that page and this.
You can read this, you can read the links I’ve posted from wordpress’ bug reports, to discussions of the problem from other developers and lawyers, and you can decide for yourself.
OS,
Please ignore this post… and I am so sorry to hear of your loss – you have my sympathy as well.
Harry,
Last spring I (under the name “Slartibartfast”) wrote code and used it to scrape this entire site and parse the information into a database. With this, I was able to identify which handles were associated with which gravatar ID hash (which are in 1-to-1 correspondence to email addresses) and Buddha is Laughing, Mike Spindell (not a guest blogger at the time), and myself used this information to out sock puppets. One poster who shall not be named (their name is banned – if you use it in a post it gets eaten by the spam filter – but their initials were “NL”), assumed that I have been given his email and/or IP address by one of the guest boggers (rafflaw) and went crying to Professor Turley. I assured the professor that no information from the blog database had been shared – only what was publicly available (for those clever enough to “read” it…) and my story was corroborated by several long-time commenters on this blog. The professor accepted our word (as did NL – grudgingly – though I think he believed that we had hoodwinked the professor). Earlier this week, NL apparently hacked Mike Spindell’s computer and essentially admitted it in a comment on this thread. After being contacted by Mike and offering what help I could, I revealed exactly what was done and how (look at the posts from “Slartibartfast” on this thread if you’d like the specifics). This resulted in pathetic whining from “anon” and “NoWay” along with frivolous claims that I had done something either unethical or illegal. Anon has been spamming the comments page trying to get Professor Turley to address my heinous crimes – apparently in vain. Since anon is a sniveling waste of space, he will probably keep making his idiotic and fallacious accusations, but anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that he’s full of nothing but shit.
raff,
Made you look. 😉
OS,
I am with you. Ignorance is bliss sometimes.
Harry, you don’t want to know. Trust me on that. It made about as much sense as being gone a week or two and coming back to find two respected regulars here sniping at each other; over what, I have no idea. And please, don’t anyone take it upon themselves to explain it to me. I’d rather not know.
Can somebody explain in layman’s terms what happened to cause an argument about identities and scraping and harvesting emails? I don’t understand when one IT guy asks the other to prove his knowledge by asking for the OPFAC number of his ORTUPS unit.
Who me? My mind is not that dirty. ummmm……. never mind.
The anonymous idiot wrote the following on the corrections page:
Now on to responding to people who are more articulate, erudite, and interesting…
AY,
As a natural born (State of) Michigan sports fan (and “Michigan State sports fan” as well – “University of Michigan” is right out…), I root for all of the Detroit teams, but my level of passion for the various teams waxes and wanes. Currently, the rankings look something like this:
0. LIONS
1. Tigers
2. LIONS Offense (Stafford & co.)
3. LIONS Defense (SUH and friends)
4. LIONS Special Teams (led by the 40-year-old Jason Hanson – still kicking 50 yarders…)
5. LIONS coaches! (I’ve got a man-crush on Jim Schwartz…)
6. Red Wings (I’ve got plenty of love for the Wings, it just doesn’t generally start percolating until March…)
[…]
infinity-1: Pistons (generally the Pistons rank #1 or #2, but the current NBA labor situation is giving me flashbacks to the year idiotic NBA labor strife cost me half of Joe DUmars final season…)
Otteray,
Don’t feign innocence with me! Besides…one would think you’d be able to determine whether the redacted word was a noun, verb, or adjective by my sentence construction.
😉
Elaine, was the redacted word a noun, verb or adjective?
One can imagine variants of all three, none of which would be suitable for a family newspaper.