How unfortunate that you got all loaded for bear and then go and shoot yourself in the foot.

I assume you have a telephone; I assume you still know to use it; however, if I'm wrong about that, please correct me.

I call your telephone skills into question because I don't remember getting a call from you in an effort to actually find out if we at the Center for Democracy & Technology are just paid hacks for the likes of Ask.com.

Having been a reporter for more than 20 years (go ahead, Google me, I assume you can do that), I can tell you that picking up that phone and having a five minute conversation can get give you some great perspective.

So, let me have a crack at this. CDT's involvement with Ask.com PRECEDES any kind of monetary support from them by nearly a year. They came to use early on to get our opinion of their AskEraser product. It needed a lot of work; they were open to suggestions, they made changes, many changes.

And in fact, they even addressed some of the points that EPIC, et al, made in their complaint after EPIC first alerted them about the issues. However, EPIC never bothered to check if any of their concerns had been addressed... sort of like you not having bothered to make a phone call, just bad form.

If you had bothered to call, I'd have told you that we don't think AskEraser is the end all, be all, of privacy solutions. It's not perfect, but it goes a hell of a lot further down that privacy path than any of the other search engines, so credit where credit is due, is all what we're saying.

I can also assure you that there was no quid pro quo going on here. We never said to Ask: "Pssst, hey, you give us some money and we promise to have your back should those other pesky privacy groups gang up on you." To think we'd trade our reputation like that is specious. To believe we'd trade our reputation for ten grand is certifiable, which is more that Ari meant when he talked about 10,000 being a small amount.

It was AFTER Ask rolled out its product that they decided to join a working group we've formed and to throw some support our way.

Other companies support us, Google being among them. We have not always lined up and played lapdog for Google; they haven't been happy with some of things we've said and positions we've taken... but according to your thinking, we're just a mouthpiece for them, trading quotes for currency.

Bah.

And bottom line, if you think for a minute that I would risk my reputation by joining a group that's merely a shill for the industry, you're sorely mistaken, again.

Hi, Brock,

You raise some good points. I think I misdirected my irritation over the reporting, which is bad.

"I call your telephone skills into question because I don't remember getting a call from you in an effort to actually find out if we at the Center for Democracy & Technology are just paid hacks for the likes of Ask.com."

This item implies that, and it shouldn't, so I'm going to correct it to direct my disagreement where it belongs, with the reporter who wrote the piece I linked to.

The issue I've got isn't so much with the CDT's behavior in this matter. I personally disagree with the CDT's stance on AskEraser and I don't buy Ari Schwartz's incrementalist defense of the service. Not so much because I'm against incrementalism, but because my perception of Ask's marketing of the service is such that I don't think it's appropriate to sweep the complex tangle of commercial relationships Ask is engaged in with players like Google under the rug. I don't find Ask's disclosure adequate on that score, so I don't think EPIC's complaint is as meritless as Mr. Schwartz is on record saying it is.

"If you had bothered to call, I'd have told you that we don't think AskEraser is the end all, be all, of privacy solutions. It's not perfect, but it goes a hell of a lot further down that privacy path than any of the other search engines, so credit where credit is due, is all what we're saying."

I don't think the CDT believes the service is the final word in privacy. That's plain from public statements. I didn't assert that your organization believes that.

"I can also assure you that there was no quid pro quo going on here. We never said to Ask: 'Pssst, hey, you give us some money and we promise to have your back should those other pesky privacy groups gang up on you.' To think we'd trade our reputation like that is specious. To believe we'd trade our reputation for ten grand is certifiable, which is more that Ari meant when he talked about 10,000 being a small amount."

I believe you. I don't think anyone who's been a reporter expects that every source an accommodating flack pushes toward a hassled reporter is on the take for the flack's boss. Again, I'm going to change the entry and note the change along with a pointer to the comments here.

My real issue here isn't with the CDT as an independent actor. I believe that you believe you're acting independently of any monetary inducements from Ask's parent, and I don't have any reason to think otherwise. My issue is with the way that reporter could, in the middle of a week where Ask has been targeted for complaints to the FTC from some noteworthy organizations, manage to completely miss that and, from the looks of it, write a single-source article that reads like marketing copy in the first two grafs:

"Hats off to Ask.com for its new hands-off--or eyes-off--search option. The AskEraser feature will prevent the search company from saving your data in its logs.

"Turning it on is just a click away. Select AskEraser at the top-right of any Ask.com page, and you're prompted to enable the feature, which deletes within hours all of your search data activity, including your search terms, your IP address, and any session identifier. Ask.com cookies disappear from your browser as well, save one that reminds the site that you're using AskEraser."

"Hats off?"

"Just a click away?"

I don't care if Ari Schwartz believes and wants to say the service is "a large leap in the right direction," and I don't need to believe he would say such things because he was paid to do so.

I do care that the reporter didn't get a quote from anyone besides the one privacy/consumer group that's drawn notice for bucking the line EPIC and its co-complainants have put down in their complaints.

I do think it looks like the same thing we see practiced in all sorts of news outlets: Faced with a bad week for his or her client/employer, an industrious flack starts "reaching out" to reporters and offering to provide them with sources available to provide quotes.

It's interesting to me that the article in question arrived a month and a half after Ask announced the availability of the service and provides nothing more than a cursory (and inaccurate) description of how the service works, some even more warmed-over material from last July, and a single quote from exactly the right person to keep things friendly for Ask.

You were a reporter. What do you make of that? Would you read that piece and think "good to see some curious, independent reporting?" Or would you think ";ooks like Ask's doing a little quiet pushback?"

And setting aside whether you think Ask is in the right, don't you think it's better for readers to understand the sorts of mechanisms that provide that kind of one-sided, uncritical, incurious "reporting" on display here?

"And bottom line, if you think for a minute that I would risk my reputation by joining a group that's merely a shill for the industry, you're sorely mistaken, again."

I don't think that and it was wrong to imply such. I apologize for that.

That's what I'm talking about...

I appreciate the clarification, Michael. And you're right about single-sourced reporting. Whenever and where ever it happens, alarm bells should go off in a reader's head. And it's good of you to raise that issue. Certainly the press deserves to have its feet held to the fire, just as organizations like ours deserve it, too. If we can't stand up to that kind of scrutiny, then we're in the wrong business.

I agree completely that readers deserve a better understanding of the "mechanisms that provide that kind of one-sided, uncritical, incurious 'reporting'" as you say.

There is much to be concerned with when it comes to issues such as privacy, security and free speech in the "Internet space." And all sides should be vetted by the media... of course, I will tell you that I think the media worship a false god called "objectivity." There is no such thing as objectivity in journalism, some outfits just do a better job of pretending than others. I held that view for all of my 20-plus years of reporting and was never ashamed to admit it. But one doesn't have to be "objective" to write fairly... it's an art form, but this isn't a journalism seminar.

The issues of privacy,security, free expression, et al, are too important, too precious, to be left to a single group, a single ideology. I applaud EPIC's involvement in this area, even though we tend to disagree with their stance. But EPIC is an icon, as far as I'm concerned. They are the "street fighters" of cyberspace, as I once wrote about them, they are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and duke it out, come what may. And we, as an Internet community are all the better for those efforts.

At the same time, I believe our organization, CDT, also plays a critical and vital role. Many times we are able to bring hostile parties to the table, an admirable feat in and of itself; we are then able to get them to actually talk to each other, again, no easy feat. And, more often than not, we are able to get some kind of agreement out of the two sides. Is that agreement always perfect? Hell no; tell me what is perfect?

But we are able to put a marker down; we are able to get something started, so we have toe-hold, a cyber-beach head, and from there, we can push to better standards, laws, accountability, etc. But we have to start someplace, and that's better than being no place at all.

You have my permission to call and yell at me any time... I may even give you a quote... no charge, of course. :)