Category: Ethics in Government

The New York Times reports that China
pressured Microsoft to take down a blog that mentioned a journalist
strike at a Chinese paper following the firing of a journalist. The blog was hosted on a server in the U.S.

Mr.
Zhao said in an interview Thursday that Microsoft chose to delete his
blog on Dec. 30 with no warning. “I didn’t even say I supported the
strike,” he said. “This action by Microsoft infringed upon my freedom
of speech. They even deleted my blog and gave me no chance to back up
my files without any warning.”

Tacky, to be sure.
But some bloggers speculate this could lead to much worse: Gridskipper
claims the Chinese threatened to convert the whole country to Linux and
Movable Type, e.g., non-Microsoft. That site won’t let me copy and
quote, but here’s the link.

And
I’ve just spent ten minutes trying unsuccessfully to locate the comment
I saw that wondered if MS would be equally cowardly in the face of
illegal requests from our own US government–which, considering all the
stuff coming out about illegal White House-authorized spying, etc., is
not such a big leap.

One of Microsoft’s own most public bloggers, Scobleizer, the “Microsoft Geek Blogger”, had this to say:

OK,
this one is depressing to me. It’s one thing to pull a list of words
out of blogs using an algorithm. It’s another thing to become an agent
of a government and censor an entire blogger’s work. Yes, I know the
consequences. Yes, there are thousands of jobs at stake. Billions of
dollars. But, the behavior of my company in this instance is not right.

He
goes on to talk about moral courage, his grandmother who stood up to
the Nazis in Germany, and his own action contacting higher-ups at
Microsoft about this issue. Good for him!

Meanwhile, a message to all bloggers, and all who rely on any outside hosting for your data: Keep backups on your own system!

I maintain this blog on two different servers–but maybe I should keep a file on my hard drive, as well.

Some historical perspective on spying, as recorded in the New York times obit for Frank Wilkinson, McCarthyite scapegoat and First Amendment activist who went to jail to defend his principles

But
Mr. Wilkinson was not finished with the federal government. When he
discovered, in 1986, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been
compiling files on him, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request
for their release.

He was sent 4,500 documents. But he sued for
more, and the next year the F.B.I. released an additional 30,000
documents, and then 70,000 two years later. Eventually, there were
132,000 documents covering 38 years of surveillance, including detailed
reports of Mr. Wilkinson’s travel arrangements and speaking schedules,
and vague and mysterious accusations of an assassination attempt
against Mr. Wilkinson in 1964.

Meanwhile, yet
another right-wing extremist, lobbyist Jack Abramoff, has entered a
plea bargain and promised to implicate a number of his buddies in
Congress. He admits to influence peddling–and former Republican
Senator Ben Knighthorse Campbell accuses him of trying to rig elections
on Indian reservations, as well. Abramoff has close ties to former
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, current House Speaker Dennis Hastert,
Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, and other ultra-right honchos. The Wall
Street Journal has said the number of US Representatives implicated
could be as high as 60, most of them on the Republican side, but so
far, only Robert Ney of Ohio has been specifically named. (Sorry, WSJ’s
website structure doesn’t allow me to copy the link)

To me, the most scandalous part of this latest Bush administration scandal–that GWB personally authorized and oversaw illegal spying on American citizens–is
not event he spying itself, though that’s certainly bad enough (and one
more reason why these dangerous and immoral people ought to be
impeached). This program is so “out there” that a lot of prominent
Republicans, including Arlen Spector and John McCain, are deeply
concerned.

But what’s really shocking to me is that the New York
Times apparently knew at least a year ago, and chose to hold back on
the story. Yes, of course, they’d need to thoroughly check their facts,
in case it was another attempt to entrap and discredit journalists, a
la the Dan Rather situation. But once they were sure, I would think the
story of a US President knowingly and deliberately breaking the law
would be considered news.

It’s unclear to me whether the story
was in the Times’ hands before the 2004 election–but surely, if they
knew, going public with that data might have changed the course of
history, given that the results were already not only close but highly
questionable.

The Times utterly failed in its responsibility to
its readers and the world. Is this the same newspaper that was so
active in reporting on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate?

Moral
choices in business lead to business success, says Shel Horowitz in his
award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People
First.

I suppose we should be grateful: this time, it’s not the government who’s paying pundits being. Still, it is disturbing to find out from both Business Week and the NY Times’ Paul Krugman that Tom DeLay’s good friend Jack Abramoff has been paying off think-tankers at the Cato Institute and elsewhere to spin op-eds that benefit his clients. And once again, there was no disclosure. Cato op-ed writer Doug Bandow, who writes a syndicated column for Copley, took payments of up to $2000 for each of at least 12 and as many as 24 columns promoting Abramoff’s clients.

At least he has the good sense to say he made a mistake, as does his boss. What’s truly disturbing is the statement by another of Abramoff’s beneficiaries, Peter Ferrara (a noted architect of Social Security policy), who is completely shameless: “I do that all the time. I’ve done that in the past, and I’ll do it in the future.”

Oh, and Ferrara’s boss at the Institute for Policy Innovation, Tom Giovanetti, hasn’t figured out the problem either. Giovanetti accuses critics of a “naive purity standard…I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have similar arrangements.”

Ugly, ugly, ugly.