Before long, I could tell why I was chosen. It was a civil case, and practically all the character evidence was in the form of email, Facebook and Myspace posts. That's all we had to juxtapose with the in-person testimony and figure out who was telling the truth. It was a bit embarrassing at first. What did this have to do with justice? But that became clear. There are lots of new lessons to learn about being civil in an online society, and judges and juries are how we common-law countries work that stuff out.

It was fascinating to watch these former colleagues testify for and against each other's character. We had to be judges of performance. We had massive binders full of of printed online exchanges to weigh against the testimony, and that was how we were to make our judgment.

This was a lesson in how the Web has become a part of our character in both our professional and personal lives. Too much overlap, especially online, can dissolve the work/life boundary altogether. And here we were, 13 jurors tweeting, Facebooking and emailing on breaks, doing our best to reassure our networks that we weren't just AWOL for a whole week.

I mostly used Path to document the experience, an awesome answer to all my questions about that app. The plaintiff and the defendant were more into Myspace.

I learned so many lessons about the Web on jury duty last week. Here are just a few.

Write Like What You Say Will Be Read To A Jury

I'm not speaking abstractly here. If you document your life dramas online, and if those dramas end up in court, the lawyers will dig it all up. Work emails are one thing, but people in this case admitted private Facebook messages as character evidence.

The plaintiff deleted one message that would have been a key part of the testimony, and the very omission was damning. After so many of these people's emails and wall posts had been read to us in the courtroom, we knew what that message said.

Your Online Life Is Your Character

More precisely, if you share your life online, that life can substitute for your character. If these people hadn't waged so much email war, we would have had to use more traditional methods of assessing their testimony.

Instead, we could weigh their spoken testimony against the words they wrote and sent to one another years ago, when the events of the case were taking place.

You see why they wanted a tech blogger on the jury? Most of us were tech-savvy people. One guy read the New York Times on his Nook Color tablet every morning. I had never held one of those before. On breaks, many of us were tweeting or IMing, and if not, we had to talk about anything but the case. So we talked about what we had been reading, watching and listening to lately. By and large, that meant we were talking about the Web.

This case required the jury to understand and extract meaning from online communications. That was all the evidence we had. And these were not super-nerd early adopter people in this case. They were just people who worked in an office together, and they sometimes used Myspace and Facebook to flirt and fight with each other.

Work/Life Imbalance Online Makes A Mess

We should all know this one by now, but we don't. The people in this case brought their work dramas home and their social dramas to the office, and email and social networks tied it all together. Ranting about work on Facebook is not smart. Remember, your rants can be read to a jury, and if you delete them, the jury will notice that, too.

Likewise, if you have personal problems with someone in the office, emailing your other coworkers about it is not a great way to handle it. What we saw on the jury was lots of lost productivity and wasted time, as well as unnecessary and damaging tribalism in the office. That's nothing new. What's new is a work email that says "OMG, look what so-and-so said about me on Facebook last night."

Don't Friend Your Colleagues... Unless They're Your Friends!

This is the bottom line. I read an illuminating interview with Tiffani Jones Brown in Contents magazine about her work on the content strategy team at Facebook. These people choose the words you see on Facebook very carefully.

The word "friend" could be any number of things. It means something very different from "follower." Contrast "friend" with Google+, which doesn't have a word for your connections. It just says "in your circles." What do you call people, then? Circlers? Encirclements?

Whatever. That's Google's content strategy problem. Facebook chose "friends." It did so early on, when the only users of Facebook were college friends. Facebook has hundreds of millions of users now, but the word "friends" is still there.

Suffice it to say that, after a while, the people in this case were no longer friends. They didn't "unfriend" each other until it was too late, though. They ranted in status updates, taking passive aggressive stances they each knew the other would see. It screwed up their whole lives, both socially and professionally.

After seeing what transpired on the witness stand last week, I know this: Facebook is for "friends." Twitter is for "followers." LinkedIn is for "connections." Those words are hints. These networks facilitate our lives now, if we're the kinds of people who read (or write) tech blogs. We need to use them with good judgment.

Coincidentally, Dan Benjamin and Andy Ihnatko released this awesome podcast about documenting our digital lives last week. I was listening to it when I took the picture above. I highly recommend it.

Have you served on a jury before? Did the Web factor into the case? Share your experiences in the comments.

Now, the Twitterverse has no such law. I think you can figure out what happened next. Although newspapers have been fighting against superinjunctions for some time, with one, the Sun, even kicking at the boundaries, one Twitter user just up and pegged it right in the gear.

Now, according to Forbes, the Twitter scoop is "forcing British lawmakers to think about whether such a thing is still feasible in the age of social media, and if it is, how to enforce it."

What the tweets have done, I think, is given the British press a legal pretext for reporting on the injunctions. They are, the logic goes, not reporting on the material the injunction covered, but on the fact of the injunction being blown.

The first news organization to take this tack is Glasgow's Sunday Herald. They've put a photo of the soccer player, Ryan Giggs, on the front page of their newspaper with a twee black bar over his eyes. It snowballed from there.

The article, an indictment of the superinjunction system and its hypocrisies, attracted enough traffic to crash the Herald's site. (It's up now.)

Giggs is pursuing a suit to force disclosure of the Twitter account holder's name. (He tried to press the suit anonymously but was found out, which seems to be a theme with him.)

Whether the reality of social media will force a change in British law is certainly beyond me. I feel confident, however, in saying that people, like it or not and regardless of the law, will continue to use social media tools like Twitter to tell tales out of school.

Other sources: Technology Review

Under the new rules, anyone who objects to content online will be able to effect that content's immediate removal. The justifications for removal are so extensive and so vague that virtually anything will qualify for removal.

Photographers killed in Libya. Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed in Misrata, Libya, covering the uprising there. They were only two of the 192 who have died in the line of duty since 1992.

Syria. In addition to widespread casualties during the ongoing uprising in the streets, the battles against the Assad regime have been active online as well. This report from Global Voices outlines the high- and low-lights.

Sri Lanka photo by Bertrand Hüe

• Touchscreen finger signatures: Valid? Legally-binding? http://bit.ly/ghCWFa @betanews
• Q&A with Al Jazeera English's online producer Bilal Randeree: http://bit.ly/dNIcQ7 via @kdmc
• Truth in advertising: When was the last time you stopped to question some of the fundamental truths in digital media? http://bit.ly/gAf1Fp via @jasondpg
• "Last week we had a cyberlaw-fiesta in the Silicon Valley, the likes of which have been rarely (if ever) seen before." http://bit.ly/eKq6ti via @ericgoldman
• Augmented reality for the totally blind: http://bit.ly/dWgIKd via @seeingwithsound

What links did we miss? Let us know in the comments.

Before we go on, you should understand two things. First, I am Son of Regular Navy. Second, I am not a fan of Wikileaks. Both of these things are relevant to my understanding of what has happened to Manning.

As regards putting the lives of military people in danger, anything which does that leaves me absolutely arctic. You cannot understand what it's like to go through an entire year not knowing, each day, whether your father has been killed unless you have in fact gone through it. And unless you have, shut up. Try not to forget, by the way, that the overwhelming majority of the men and women who risk their lives in the service are poor people. I don't mean people who can't afford decent weed. I mean people who know what it's like to go hungry.

As to the notion of Wikileaks being a journalistic organization, well, being someone who cavalierly plops into a web page a bunch of stuff they were handed by a person who actually took a risk without adding any value to it seems to strain the definition of journalist. (That's the definition of a blogger.) The arrogance and disregard for simple fellow feeling repeatedly evinced by the knuckleheaded Little Lord Fauntleroy of the left, Julian Assange, leaves me red-hot.

(Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.)

So, both of those things established, I would not hesitate for a moment to cheer a death sentence for PFC Manning if he had passed the information he allegedly stole to a foreign government or armed group; especially one like Al Qaeda, which has unequivocally announced its continued desire to kill my fellow citizens. Manning has simply not done this. Because he has not, these charges come off as politicized revenge by politicians who have been made to look stupid simply by showing the world what they actually did!

Actions vs. Theatre

Last June, Manning was initially charged with four counts of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice's Article 92, for disobeying orders, and eight counts of violating Article 134, a general misconduct charge, for disclosing classified information.

These charges seem proportionate to what Manning is alleged to have done. Adding 22 additional counts, including a capital charge, is the kind of disproportionate and deadly political theatre I have come to expect from a country like Burma or Iran. American exceptionalism aside, this action flies in the face of every ideal the U.S. claims for itself and promulgates abroad - ideals which I claim as my own.

Did Manning break the law? There seems to be evidence to that effect. Did he "aid the enemy"? Unless there is a raft of information that is currently not being shared even in outline, he certainly did not. And if that is the case, put it on the damned table. Otherwise, to each of the wrinkled, embittered and embarrassed old gremlins who've used this deluded boob as a sweet bit of political legerdemain to disguise their own impotence, I say:

Act like a damned man.

Other sources: MSNBC

The document demands user information for "rop_g; ioerror; birgittaj; Julian Assange; Bradley Manning; Rop Gonggrijp; Birgitta Jonsdottir for the time period from November 1, 2009 to present."

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out on Salon, Appelbaum, Jonsdottir and Gonggrip were three of the producers of the video that showed a helicopter attack that killed Reuters journalists and others in Iraq. The relationship between Wikileaks and the latter two has quieted in recent months. Is the investigation possibly focusing on that incident above others?

Among the information demanded are names and user names, credit card and bank numbers, addresses, "connection records" (showing when they logged in and for how long) and telephone numbers.

Whether or not such a request is "right" it does appear to be legal and Twitter complies with legal requests as a point of policy.

However, the targets of the investigation have received warning, from Twitter, that their information has been subpoenaed. The judge made the subpoena public on January 5, as a result of Twitter's request it be free to inform those of its users who were its targets. The company chose not to comply quietly, and has brought the situation into the open, where it can be debated.

Now, this group of Attorneys General has grown to 38 (plus the District of Columbia). It has scheduled a Friday meeting with Google representatives and today it sent the company the latest in a long list of questions it wants answered.

Here is a partial list of the questions the group of Attorneys General want Google to answer.

• Did Google test the Street View information gathering technology prior to employing it?
• Who was responsible for the code that allowed the Street View cars to harvest private information?
• How could Google have been unaware of the presence of the code that allowed the cars to collect this data?
• How was this code uploaded to the cars?
• In which exact locations was private data collected?

"We will take all appropriate steps," said AG Blumenthal, "including potential legal action if warranted, to obtain complete, comprehensive answers."

Thanks to Simon Owens

"(W)e would appreciate a detailed explanation of the information about Facebook users that your company has provided to third parties without the knowledge of the account holders -- particularly in circumstances in which the user did not expressly opt for this type of information sharing."

"Please explain your prior policies with respect to user consent for information sharing, and with whom any information was shared. Also, please detail how the new policies Facebook is adopting differ from past practices, including whether the burden is on the user to opt in or opt out of the relevant privacy settings."

The blog Inside Facebook interprets the Judiciary Committee's interest like this.

"The first sentence of the excerpt, above, appears to be about the nature of how Instant Personalization works, along with an allusion to the more general changes that Facebook made to General Information in recent months.

The second sentence appears to be about those general changes.

The final sentence appears to ask if the new changes impact Instant Personalization's opt-out setting."

Because of its popularity and its sweeping changes to a default public status for all users, Facebook has definitely assumed center focus in the discussion on online privacy. But other issues, like use of private information in online advertising, has also assumed importance enough to attract the attention of the Congress.

If nothing else, the continued interest in Facebook by the U.S. government indicates that regardless of users' feelings, Congress isn't done with it yet.

"'Internet, virtual, street-level map' means any map or image that contains the picture or pictures of homes, buildings, or people that are taken and dispensed, electronically, over the Internet or by a computer network, where the picture can be accessed by entering the address of the home, building, or person."

"Rep. Henry Burns, R-Haughton, who handled Adley's bill on the House floor, said that if the map is used in an act of terrorism, the legislation requires a judge to impose an additional minimum sentence of at least 10 years onto the terrorist act."

Worries about terrorist use of the Internet, including maps, has never been far from the headlines since the attacks on 9/11.

The additional penalty, according to the bill's wording, is to be served consecutively, not concurrently, with "the sentence imposed for the underlying offense."

Top photo by Byron Gosline
Bottom photo by Ken Lund

Federal livestock-tagging systems have been tried before, most prominently in the wake of the mad cow disease scare. They have all been disastrous. Ranchers disliked the perceived imperiousness of a top-down implementation and resented the expense. Distrustful of federal authority, which has resulted in high-handed dismissal of ranching concerns at times, the centralized nature of a national data bank was also rejected. Organizations that do not exist on the federal level have also tried to encourage a centralized tagging protocol. The same issues inhered.

This is the start of that blueprint for a self-administered, grassroots livestock tagging strategy that is rancher-guided and designed specifically as an anti-rustling measure.

The guiding motto of our strategy is this: THE RANCHER OWNS HIS OWN DATA.

There is no exception to this. Each rancher owns his, and only his (or her) own data. Government authorities are not and never will be involved in, or have access to, a given rancher's data of their own volition. In fact, no one but the rancher has access.

Ranching in the Cloud

In our system, the rancher, and only the rancher, decides that he wishes to tag his cattle. If rustling is a problem and the rancher decides the expense is worthwhile vs. losing X number of cattle at $1,000.00 a head, he sets himself up. The expenses will include buying the chips, tag inserter and scanner (we do not endorse any manufacturer), and maintaining a personal computer and Internet connection.

The RFID tags are inserted on the rancher's property, by either a ranch employee or a vet. The frequencies that the RFID chips produce are set by the rancher. Those frequencies are recorded by the rancher on his own computer, temporarily.

The lists of "correlations" (I term we're using that means which cow belongs to which frequency) will not reside on the rancher's personal computer, nor on a government server or a commercial server. It will, instead, reside in "the cloud." When using cloud computing, the rancher saves data onto, and only he can call that information back out of, the Internet. A protocol decides which servers will contain which packets of data. These packets are not like paragraphs or discrete pieces of information like a given RFID frequency, but rather the coding that eventually comes together to make a word or a number appear on your screen.

Cloud computing is analogous to an electrical grid. When you flick a light switch, the electricity that lights your kitchen does not necessarily come from the nearest source, nor all from the same source. A variable set of instructions decides on the spur of the moment - and with no way to tell beforehand - which sources are free to hand you your power. Imagine the same thing with your information. Can someone "download" or otherwise capture your information? No more than they can capture the light that comes out of your nightstand lamp.

You may be buying online storage from a specific company, much in the same way that you buy electricity from a single electrical company, but they do not have your data in boxes where they could be seized or otherwise compromised.

This will make it impossible for a rancher's information to be seized or intercepted by anyone.

Self-RFID vs. Rustling

Let's say a rancher has 500 head of cattle. He injects each cow, sets the frequency and scans it. He attaches a description of the cow to the frequency, enters this correlation in a spreadsheet and uploads it into the cloud. Additionally he positions RFID wands at the pinch-points on his spread the closest to access necessary for the trailers a rustler might use or a trailer a rustler would have to use to herd the cattle out of the rancher's area.

Several months go by and the rancher notices several dozen cattle are nowhere to be found. He suspects rustling. He checks the stats on his pinch-point wands [tech]. He investigates possible places that cattle might be. If his own investigation does not turns up the missing head, he sends a list of RFID frequencies that belong to the missing cattle to people of his choosing. He is the agent of the sharing of this information and he sends it only to the people he trusts. These may include local law enforcement, cattleyard administrators and buyers. If anything turns up on the wands, he might also communicate the possible point of egress for the cattle.

The most likely people for a rancher to contact would be local law enforcement, cattleyards and fellow ranchers. If a law enforcement authority found an individual engaged in suspicious actions, loading up cattle in an odd place for instance, normally the person would direct the officer's attention to the brands. Brands, however, prove nothing. They are easy to fake. But if the officer knows an area rancher has been rustled, he can scan the cattle in question. If the RFID scans match, the officer has the stolen cattle and probably the rustler. The same thing can be done by a yard owner when the cattle seem off. A fellow rancher can scan stray cattle or scan cattle being offered to him for sale. Again, if the RFID frequencies match, the cattle are found.

In the event that the information becomes part of a court case, it is merely the frequency, and the record the rancher made of that frequency's relationship to a certain cow, that is in possession. The rancher can go straight home after recovering cattle, change the frequency and upload the correlation into the cloud. Even people who had access to the previous correlations could make no use of it to identify specific cattle, again, until the rancher who owns the data makes that decision.

Preservation of individual initiative and data ownership

This system ensures a number of things.

• No one but the rancher owns and can manipulate cattle data
• The data cannot be seized
• Cooperation with anyone else is at the discretion of the rancher
• The information the rancher records is decentralized
• The rancher can keep track of his cattle and use that information to catch rustlers

An experienced computer security expert once said that if a party has infinite time and never-ending money, they can crack anything. The key idea there is infinite and never-ending. No party, including a government, has time and money in those proportions. But all they really need is enough of them to defeat the steps you have taken to guard your data. Conversely, all you really need to do is make sure your methods are two steps beyond what they are willing to do. Then, you own your own data.

That's it, brothers and sisters. It's not a final draft, it's a step. We welcome all input as we refine it. We especially look forward input from ranchers, manufacturers of the equipment mentioned and cloud computing types.

Thanks to Kin Lane for contributing his technical know-how and research skills for this article. That said, he's not to blame for it.

Photos of Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon and San Juan County in New Mexico by @thinkyiddish

In US v. ASCAP, music performance rights publisher ASCAP sued MobiTV a company that provides methods for delivering media over wireless and broadband networks. It asserted that, after the company would not assent to its proposed rate structure, MobiTV subsequently owed ASCAP $41.3 million.

The precedent in this case is likely to influence others involving Internet companies, wireless carriers, cable and broadcast television and radio. In a sense, it is the precedence of precedents. The format for assessing these fees is already in place and the need to create new, more expensive and more complex ones may be a need the court does not recognize.

Thanks to Paige Schoknecht at Prequent and Greenberg Traurig for the tip

Employees that are wasting their time on social networking sites today were gossiping at the water cooler in yesteryear, and the solution is the same: thoughtful policy implementation and vigilant managerial oversight.

While there are clearly some updates to how we manage the workplace, in context I don't think it is as revolutionary as many doomsayers would have us believe. The implications of social networking fall into three categories: pre-employment, during employment, and post-employment. Below is what I see as the key considerations.

Pre-Employment

I recommend against using social media to screen applicants because of the risk of inadvertently obtaining information that cannot lawfully be taken into consideration in the hiring process. However, if you are using social media to screen applicants, consider these steps:

• Do so consistently, rather than pick and choose who to screen.
• Have a low-level, non-decision maker screen first to filter out any protected class information that is inappropriate for decision makers to consider. Then have them report out only what can be lawfully considered.
• Don't friend applicants on Facebook to access non-public information.

During Employment

Consider adding new language to existing policies, such as your technology policy, code of conduct, harassment and discrimination policy, and confidentiality policy. The types of specific modifications to consider include:

• an unequivocal policy statement that abuse of social media can be grounds for discipline, up to and including termination.
• an express prohibition on disclosure of confidential and proprietary information and trade secrets.
• a directive that employees should keep company logos or trademarks off their blogs or profiles, and a request that employees not mention the company in commentary unless for business purposes (and then only with prior approval of the company).
• a prohibition on employees posting or blogging during business hours, unless for business purposes pre-authorized by the company.
• a request that employees bring work-related complaints to HR before blogging or posting about such issues.
• a prohibition on posting false information about the company, its employees, customers, affiliates, or business partners.
• a general instruction that employees use good judgment and take responsibility, personally and professionally, for what they publish online.
• a requirement that all employees who identify the company in their blog include a disclaimer that the views expressed are those of the blogger, not the employer.

Post-Employment

I suggest this not because I thrill at the Big Brother quality of it, but because of the risk of defamation claims for references that go wrong, and the fact that manager statements - even statements not on company letterhead or made through a formal corporate communication - are attributable to the company and may be inconsistent with legal positions confidentially being taken by the employer.

With the addition of some of these common sense updates to existing policies, your company can feel confident that the "revolution" of social networking won't have nearly the devastating impact predicted by most commentators.

Photo by Jason Pratt.

The timing is good for such an announcement given the worry over, among other things, Facebook's recent changes that have caused fresh worry over privacy.

Elements of the draft include the following.

• Disclosure of what information is collected and how, how it is used and who it is shared with


• Opt-outs for consumers.


• Restrictions on collecting financial, medical, government ID information and that of children

Cuba arrests blogger Diana Virgen García. Garcia, who covers issues of free speech in Cuba, and supports the Ladies in White movement, was arrested on April 22. The next day she was "sentenced" to a year and eight months in prison for unannounced "charges."

Twitter takes down a Tweet. Responding to a U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice, Twitter eliminated a user's post on a leaked music album.

Chávez starts a Twitter account. After frothing about how Twitter is terrorism, primarily because opposition members use it to good effect, Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, has started his own account.

China institutes yet another repressive online law. The law is nothing new. It merely "legitimizes" the gun-barrel instructions the state's law enforcement agencies issue to ISPs and others to cooperate with state secrets issues.

Brazil objects to Google government request data being published. Google published government requests and Brazil "won," making the most data requests of any country, 3,663, and the most removal requests, 291. They claimed the number was accounted for by child porn investigations, which doesn't seem to be the case.

Nay Phone Latt, imprisoned Burmese blogger, honored by PEN. The PEN writing group honored the young blogger who is serving a 20-year sentenced after blogging about the 2007 Saffron rebellion in Burma.

Tunisia blocks Flickr. On the 28th, Tunisia added Flickr, the photo-sharing site, to its list of blocked services and sites. Chief among these are individual blogs critical of the government and video-sharing sites.

United Arab Emirates plan to monitor cybercafe users. The country's Interior Ministry plans to require cataloging of cybercafe users under the guise of child porn. "The move to keep Internet-users under observation comes at the same time as a population census is being held in the countries of the UAE along with a standardisation of ID cards for all citizens."

Belarus seizes journalists' emails. A senior Belarus police officer allowed police computer experts to access the email and Skype accounts of independent journalists as part of an investigation for a defamation suit by a former KGB official.

Thailand arrests Facebook user. One of Thailand's favorite tools to stifle dissent is "lese majeste," the law that makes it a crime to criticize leaders, in this case the royal family. Unfortunately, there is no proof that Wipas Raksakultha did any such thing when he was arrested on the 29th.

India arrests man for fake Facebook profile. The unidentified man was arrested by the Dehli police for allegedly creating a fake profile of parliamentarian Rajiv Pratap Rudy. This is reminiscent of the arrest and imprisonment of Fouad Mourtada for doing the same thing for a prince of Morocco in 2008. The same questions needs to be asked now as then: what role did Facebook play in providing law enforcement with private user information? Or is there such a thing any more when it comes to Facebook?

United States Senators fault Facebook. Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) sent a letter to Facebook questioning the company after it made a huge change in its site that enforced a site-wide change in privacy. Schumer also sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission calling on them to enact clearer privacy guidelines for social networks.

Egypt indicts videographer and blogger Wael Abbas. Abbas, who is most famous for posting videos of police abuse, including rape, of arrested citizens, is being pursued by the Egyptian courts. His appeal opened yesterday in Cairo on charges of selling communications services without a license. "Neither he nor his lawyers were informed of his trial on these charges and he was sentenced to six months in prison and fined 500 Egyptian pounds (65 euros) in his absence."

Kazhakstan ISP blocks news sites. State-owned Kazakhtelecom has been blocking two news sites that are critical of government corruption.

Top photo by Andrian van Leen
García photo from World Women International
Abbas photo by Elijah Zarwan

Moses Kahlon, the Minister of Communications, announced the lift in a press release. The original decision to ban the iPad was made without the minister's knowledge, inspiring a governmental squabblefest in Israel.

The Ministry is allowing the importation of only one iPad per person.There is no information explaining this restriction in the press release. If there is no risk, it does not immediately make sense.