The NSA isn’t the only one
by digby
This is a very creepy story about an app called Whisper which promises anonymity to its users so they’ll share their secrets. Guess what?
A team headed by Whisper’s editor-in-chief, Neetzan Zimmerman, is closely monitoring users it believes are potentially newsworthy, delving into the history of their activity on the app and tracking their movements through the mapping tool. Among the many users currently being targeted are military personnel and individuals claiming to work at Yahoo, Disney and on Capitol Hill…
Separately, Whisper has been following a user claiming to be a sex-obsessed lobbyist in Washington DC. The company’s tracking tools allow staff to monitor which areas of the capital the lobbyist visits. “He’s a guy that we’ll track for the rest of his life and he’ll have no idea we’ll be watching him,” the same Whisper executive said.
Oddly, it seems some journalists are upset that the Guardian reported the story since they came upon the information in an on the record business meeting between the two companies. I get that reporters need to protect their sources. But this was a business meeting in which the Whisper executives were bragging about spying on people, not a whistle blower in a dark garage trying to get a story out to the public. Jesus. As CJR noted:
The questions focus on whether The Guardian somehow tricked Whisper into giving it the information or whether it violated an understood compact of business secrecy. This is absurd. What The Guardian did was entirely ethical. Whisper told its reporters highly newsworthy facts about its own service. The information was all on the record. The Guardian reported it. It would have been a journalistic lapse for the paper not to have told readers what it had learned.
Sometimes I think the biggest problem with the journalism profession is that they cannot see the forest for the trees. Their job is to serve the public interest. I suspect that if you keep that in the forefront of your mind the rest is a lot less complicated than they think. Certainly, the idea that if you find out that if a company your newspaper is in business with does something tremendously unethical means you can’t report it (an “understood compact of business secrecy”!) is so twisted that it worries me that journalists were confused about it. Actually, if you stop and think about this a little bit, it may just explain a few things …
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