Malcolm Gladwell has an article in this monthâs New Yorker that dismisses Edward Snowdenâs claims to legitimacy and legal protection, while elevating Daniel Ellsbergâs Pentagon Papers breach to an act of heroism; Gladwell sets out criteria for legitimate whistleblowing that treats Snowden as a âradicalized hackerâ and Ellsberg as a âgood leaker,â and says that Snowden should have gone through official channels, rather than disclosing to journalists.
Like many establishment figures who seek to (literally or figuratively) assassinate Snowden, Gladwell puts the âgood leakingâ in the safe and distant past, and insists that modern leakers are just doing it wrong â they should be like Ellsberg, a Harvard-educated DC insider who rubbed elbows with Kissinger.
The problem is that the Ellsberg method that Gladwell invoked is a gross misrepresentation of what Ellsberg actually did; and itâs also a denial of what has actually happened to the whistleblowers who tried the method Gladwell described. NSA whistleblowers who went through channels â Thomas Drake, William Binney, and others â were targeted for legal retaliation and had their lives ruined.
For outsiders, the story isnât much better. In a fantastic essay on the Electronic Frontier Foundationâs Deeplinks blow, executive director Cindy Cohn describes what happened when Mark Klein, a retired AT&T engineer who had been ordered to build a secret spying room for the NSA to use while tapping into AT&Tâs fiber backbone, came to EFF with documentation of what he knew. John Negroponte, then Director of National Intelligence, used his influence to get the LA Times to spike a story on the spying, the US government denied and stonewalled, and the senators whom EFF reached out to strung the organization along, while DoJ lawyers got the courts to keep all of Kleinâs evidence under seal for so long that the press stopped reporting on it.
In other words, Gladwellâs theory of âgood leakingâ is a disaster for actual good leakers. It took Snowdenâs amazing act of courage and integrity to get any kind of public debate and action on the US governmentâs program of illegal mass surveillance.
In Wishful Drinking, Fisher wittily joked about how she would like her obituary to read: âI tell my younger friends that no matter how I go,â Fisher wrote, âI want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.â Read more
You also donât need to say âback slashâ because you are almost certainly not talking about a back slash, unless youâre doing one of these three things:
1. Reading a regular expression aloud
2. Narrating the output of a good password generator
What should happen, as a result of this, is that reporters should just freeze him out on this promotional tour. Simply refuse to interview him and let him promote his film. Make real and meaningful consequences happen because he did this.
The people that think this is OK blow me away. Look, itâs not always awful to tell someone they are beautiful but this is BADGERING her about it. She clearly doesnât know what to do with this and is trying to just laugh it off. Sheâs being as professional as possible and this guy is just NOT giving up. Are there worse forms of sexual harassment, SURE, that doesnât make this ok. This makes me cringe. âHow am I supposed to do an interview with this woman?â Because youâre a fucking grown man and she is a human being trying to do her job, treat her with respect.
So Iâm reblogging what Kitty Pryde said, because I saw an alarming number of replies last night, that were essentially questions about whether or not this is sexual harassment.
Two illustrative examples:
Iâm not posting these to dogpile on those folks, but to illustrate a big reason behavior like Vin Dieselâs above is allowed to happen. One person sees her smiling and uses that as evidence to ignore his body language, his repeated unprofessional and inappropriate comments, and her subsequent comments about how uncomfortable it made her. He is clearly taking advantage of his power in this situation and acting like a drunk frat guy who wonât leave a woman alone, because he knows he can get away with it. Using your position of power to repeatedly tell someone theyâre beautiful when they canât walk away for any reason at all is harassment.
Listen, because I donât think youâre being a shit when you make that observation. I think you just donât realize whatâs happening: any woman will tell you that what she did is a default, learned behavior to try and deescalate a situation just like this, especially for a PR Professional whose job depends on keeping the celebrities sheâs interviewing happy). Just because sheâs smiling doesnât mean itâs okay and that sheâs okay with whatâs happening to her.Â
Now to the second comment: this makes me mad. Clearly this is not just someone saying âhey, I think youâre beautiful. Now, letâs get back to the interview.â This is quite clearly not that, and people who look at what Vin Diesel did, and then excuse it with that sort of comment are a big part of the problem.
Look, people, this isnât complicated: treat everyone with kindness and respect. You are not entitled to anyoneâs attention or approval. Vin Dieselâs behavior here is abhorrent, inappropriate, and inexcusable. I repeat what I said last night: he should be frozen out by all PR professionals on this press tour, and denied the opportunity to promote his movie, unless and until he publicly apologizes to Carol Moreira for this.
