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Online realism. In real life, dangerous fantasies

Thursday, March 18, 2010

DATELINE - Austin, Texas:  "IS PRIVACY DEAD?" was Jack Cafferty’s all-too-familiar attempt at contentiousness.  CNN’s perpetually sourfaced public opinion-wrangler threw out the question this week, asking viewers as usual to click their online votes in favor or against his proposition.

He seemed, though, an innocent abroad in the twitterverse, since he obviously had no notion that the topic was already – and unsurprisingly – a hot-button issue here at this year’s enormous South by South West interactive conference and festival. Cafferty didn’t even register that several of the fuller responses he quoted (the sharpest and informed ones, indeed) came from viewers in Austin.

It had been the opening keynote speaker at SxSW, danah boyd (yes, the same lower-cased famous name who has featured in this column before as “the High Priestess of internet friendship”, according to the Financial Times) who tackled the issue head-on and decisively.

Her address (photo above left, courtesy of Damon Webster) was delivered to at least 5,000 attendees in a huge meeting hall, plus immeasurable electronic viewers and listeners, and it argued persuasively - at her habitual high-octane pace, too - that it’s simply not true that privacy is dead. Still less, she affirmed, have social media via the internet been its killer.

Citing the recent explosions of user fury over Google’s clumsy introduction of the social utility Google Buzz ...  Facebook’s poorly-flagged changes to its members’ privacy settings  ... and more trenchantly her own wealth of observations as an ethnographer studying people’s web behavior, Boyd demonstrated that notions of privacy may have changed somewhat, but that privacy still matters enormously to us. She also showed how this is also true even (and the world’s Cafferties really don’t get this) for the young adults and teens amongst us.

She realistically acknowledged the growing industry trend of making social communication tools “public by default, and private only through effort.” (Meaning, as I know to my cost, that I have to carefully ‘opt in’ to ensure I get the protections that I want.)  It’s therefore become incumbent on us all, as Boyd was suggesting, to demand of companies who understandably want their products to go viral that they promote them ethically - and ask us to participate and contribute, instead of crudely or even subtly trying to push us into doing so.

What a concept, huh? – Just asking.

 

   

 

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AUSTIN SOMETIMES DOESN’T seem at all like Texas, but it is the state capital after all – and its university ivory towers, its musical obsessions/compulsions and even its deeply ingrained geekdom can’t succeed in keeping totally at bay all those unwelcome events that happen IRL (as I see tweeters tapping out when they mean “In Real Life”). The horrific epidemic of killing on the state’s Mexican border is making its baleful presence felt.

In reaction to the apparently drug-related murders of three US officials just inside Mexico, in Cuidad Juarez, incumbent governor Rick Perry has called for federal Predator drones to patrol the border region from 25,000 feet up. Electorally it’s probably useful to be wanting what Arizona already has (in its case mainly as a way to look tough on illegal immigration) but there’s no doubt that the death-toll along the Tex-Mex frontier, from Nuevo Laredo to Matamoros, represents a real cause for concern.

Whether or not it’s alarmist to urge measures to halt the violence (if that were possible) from making inroads into US territory,  it’s at least educative for Americans – who can be somewhat insular even in border states – to get a better sense of what it’s like for their Mexican neighbors who live daily with such mayhem and social disintegration.

But the journalists whose job it is to convey such understanding are paying a great price themselves. The drug cartels behind the killings are now targeting newsrooms and individual reporters with impunity. Abductions and murders are being tallied - incompletely, for sure - by the Inter-American Press Association, and in Reynosa alone (a border city that’s subject now to outright urban warfare between cartels) the Association reports that eight reporters have been kidnapped, of whom one has been found tortured and dead, while two have been released alive, leaving five still missing. The reign of terror is having its intended chilling effect.

A dispiriting but understandable quote comes from a reporter who once bravely covered crime there: “I’m censoring myself. There’s no other way to put it. But so is everyone else”.

 

AT A VERY DIFFERENT POINT ON the danger-fear continuum, a man who describes himself as “adventurer, traveler and writer” resurfaced this week.

Robert Young Pelton (pictured, above center, in cartoon form by National Geographic’s Adventure magazine) who by any measure must count as a reckless if not fearless operator, was featured in a New York Times expose of freelance spookery in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

My own close brush with Pelton some seven years ago prompted me to describe him then as “the kind of person who gets journalists a bad name”. Nothing has changed my opinion since.

This week’s Times story revealed the existence of, and Pelton’s role in, an off-the-books, for-profit intelligence-gathering business that was subcontracted (to the tune of up to $22m) by the Pentagon, or at least by rogue elements within it. For quotation in the article an anonymous US government official critiqued the operation as a band of fantasists, or “freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond”.

Pelton provided the Times with some of its insider details – after apparently seeing his own deal with the shadowy spy outfit go sour. He complained that he and his business partner, former CNN executive Eason Jordan, “were providing information so they [the US military] could better understand the situation in Afghanistan, and it was being used to kill people”.

That protest comes off sounding a little disingenuous from an “adventurer” for whom danger to other people as well as himself has been a repeated feature of his career. His writings, both articles and books, are characterized by breathless titles like The World’s Most Dangerous Places, Killer Vacations, The Adventurist: My Life In Dangerous Places and Licensed to Kill – this last of which is about mercenaries, interestingly enough.

PELTON’S MOST PUBLICLY noted media appearance came in December 2001 while he was freelancing in Afghanistan on a daily rate for CNN and accompanying a squad of Green Berets. He gained video coverage of John Walker Lindh, the 20-year old American jihad supporter who was captured by anti-Taliban forces at Qala-i-Jangi.  Pelton was rewarded with “World Exclusive” play for this interview, conducted while Lindh was pumped with morphine for his wounds, and the Lindh family have maintained that his material was prejudicial and manipulative of their son, who ended up serving a 20-year sentence in an Indiana federal corrections facility.

Just over a year after the Lindh interview, I happened to be leading a video team in the Darien rainforest region of Panama, near its porous border with war-torn Colombia. Pelton showed up in the same area along with two young and inexperienced traveling companions from California and Washington State.

I had set a limit to just how far toward the border I would take my team, and I erred on the side of caution by returning to the riverhead, Boca de Cupe.  My local guide Diego Alcázar as well as the local police had expressed concern about reported incursions by paramilitary forces from Colombia.

Pelton on the other hand, in evident disregard of warnings, ended up walking his small group right into a force of far-rightist Colombian guerrillas. The three were held captive for ten days, being eventually released after intervention by the US State Department and Colombia’s right-wing government.

They were unharmed, but their guide Víctor Alcázar (my guide Diego's father) suffered severe bayonet wounds and narrowly escaped with his life. Four local villagers - the travelers’ hosts during that part of their trip - were killed. A local tabloid headline (above right) recorded the killings as “Slaughter in Darien”. The victims were beheaded and disemboweled.

A distressed Meg Smaker, one of Pelton’s companions, then aged 22, said afterwards, "Everyone who was killed that day, we knew. They fed us and took care of us."  She reported Pelton to have been euphoric that he had gotten another dramatic story to sell.

 

As I said - not much to journalism's credit.

 

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