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  • My friend Conan died at the corner of poverty and for-profit healthcare. Now is the time to support single-payer.

    Californians: back Healthy California.
    US Citizens: back Medicare for All.
    UK Citizens: support the NHS.

    My friend Conan Soranno died on 24 August. He was 39 years old, a gifted photographer, technologist, motorcycle aficionado, and self-described ‘mad scientist’. He was brave and strong and smart. He died two days after being forced to choose between paying his rent or going to the emergency room.

    Let me make it plain: he died because the health care he required cost too much money. He died because people pile cost on top of cost to maximise profits in the US healthcare industry. He died young, and broke, and had plenty left to contribute, and all so companies can charge $27 for an aspirin when we don’t have a choice how much we pay.

    Conan had to turn to crowdfunding to cover whatever expenses he could. He had no choice — there was nowhere else for the money to come from. And he’s not alone, on US-based charity-focused crowdfunding sites about half the solicitations are for medical costs. And more than a quarter of US adults told pollsters that they have trouble paying outstanding medical bills. Conan’s family have now had to turn to crowdfunding to pay funeral expenses.

    We’d known each other for a long time — easily 25 years. We were geeks, coffee nerds, punks of more than one type. He was part of my life, and I was part of his, even if we didn’t sit together often. I moved to London full-time more than 12 years ago, and 7,000 miles puts off any casual get-togethers. But we kept in touch, through the magic of the Internet.

    The last time I saw Conan I was home in Morro Bay — a little seaside town in California. My grandmother had just died, and he was about to move down to Los Angeles to get access to better healthcare. He was already on dialysis, but hadn’t had his heart operation yet. We ran across each other in the supermarket by the tortillas. I spent the rest of the trip filling a container with junk furniture and arranging housing for my Dad. I wish, like we all do in these times, that I had done something different – made some time for Conan. But I didn’t, because we’re all going to live forever.

    Except we don’t. Especially if we get sick, then we get poor because we’re too sick to work, then we can’t afford to go to the doctor because we don’t have a job. Then, it turns out, we don’t live nearly long enough.

    Those of you who are US citizens, I challenge you to come up with a reason to not support single-payer healthcare, or at the very least a public healthcare option.

    In California, SB 562, Healthy California, is a state single-payer initiative backed by the California Nurses Association. It’s not a perfect bill, but it’s the job of legislators to refine it — which they’ve been forced into doing by grassroots supporters. Without those grassroots activists, the bill would be dead in the water — but it’s not. Learn more, and join the movement to bring healthcare to all Californians: http://www.healthycaliforniaact.org/

    Across the US, Bernie Sanders will soon bring legislation forward for national single-payer health insurance that he calls ‘Medicare for All’. The national campaign will begin soon. Stay up to date: https://berniesanders.com/medicareforall/

    Please, for the sake of Conan, and those many out there in similar circumstances, don’t accept no for an answer. We’re all in this together.

    Read Conan’s last FB post from August 22 — https://www.facebook.com/conan.soranno/posts/10213979044579526 — no one is far enough away from that position to be invulnerable.

    PS — Liberals out there who say single payer healthcare isn’t possible — it’s not only possible, it’s wildly successful across the world. It is our moral imperative to care for those who cannot care for themselves. We must stand up to the insurance, drug, and ‘health’ industries and we must be bold — we will prevail.

    PPS — Fiscal conservatives out there against single payer healthcare: you make no sense. It will lower healthcare costs for the self-employed and small businesses. It also ensures education and training is not wasted on a workforce that could be brought low by preventable or treatable illness. And that coming tax-crunch as Baby Boomers go full-time into Medicare as all the unions also build huge retirement costs, yeah, it deals with that, too.

    PPPS — Lest we forget, those of us in the UK have to work to preserve the National Health Service. We are not the US (yet) but privatisation is the watchword of Jeremy Hunt. Write to your MP — especially if they are a Conservative — and tell them to fund the NHS.

    Conan’s last three public FB posts:

    If you’d like to contribute to Conan’s funeral expenses:

    References:

  • Memories of San Francisco

    The early Summer Sun is flashes on City Hall’s golden dome — a beacon for the West — as I step inside, moving along the long marble staircase, in the heart of our secular Vatican where we paid $75 to be married all those years ago.

    I pause next to the statue of Harvey Milk. We took photos here, Julia’s little boxy TLR making the whole thing so retro, and Sebastian’s weird digital camera pulling us down the Peninsula into the future. We were Bladerunner-Poets, beatniks from the future sent to kill each other.

    It’s quiet inside. Saturday, skeleton crew. There’s the room where we said our vows. I did, I’d swear. Nothing’s changed, even with so many differences.

    I walk back to the staircase and sit down, palms on the cool, wide steps. We went from here to Tommy’s Joynt, just up the road, for a beer and pickles reception. We could just about afford a cash bar and choice of hot meal from the line — most of our friends stuck to the free but technically illicit pickles. The bartender turned a blind eye, and even bought a round of well shots. Someone told him that this was his place in history, and he played along.

    I pass it as I walk up the street. It’s nice that it’s still there — so much of San Francisco has gone missing. But I won’t go in — I don’t drink like that any more. The Sun is beating down — merciless. It’s quiet at this hour, even if the streets around here are never totally quiet. People are hung over, or hiding from the heat.

    The Cable Car is waiting for me when I reach California. It was expensive then — thankfully we had Fast Passes; if we’d had to pay cash I suspect you’d refused my touristy obsession — too cool, too local, too Native to love the Cable Car the way I do. I don’t have a Fast Pass now, but I pay cash. How could it be even more expensive?

    The little car is mostly empty. People have other things to do, I guess. It’s not the prettiest part of town, the west side of the Hills, but it doesn’t take long to get to the Fairmont. And then the Bay is there, Bridge and Tunnel still carrying a Jersey-like connotation. But it’s beautiful; it still takes my breath away.

    I step off and walk up into Chinatown. You hated that I loved the tourist spots, no matter how long I lived in the City. It’s still tacky souvenirs, strange groceries, and mixed illegally imported goods — all designed to take the money of tourists who think they’re getting a deal. I’m thinking about Vesuvio, North Beach, long Summer nights at tired neighbourhood dives, late meals of ethnic food — Burmese, Ethiopian, Indian pizza, whatever was trendy.

    The corner opposite Old Saint Mary’s is where it all came to an end. My Emperor left me here, a lifetime ago. You were always such a drama queen.

    ‘Why are you crying, Daddy?’

    The face of a six year-old shouldn’t hold that kind of concern.

    ‘Daddy knew a man, darling. He died here.’

  • What just happened? Lessons from a ‘free’ Iraq. or: Just what do you think we did, anyway?

    After seven years of constipation, Sir John Chilcot finally released his report into the Iraq war1. We have officially been told what a lot of people expected all along: the Iraq war wasn’t necessary, was probably illegal, definitely poorly planned, had no post-war plan, and did not achieve the goal of a stable democratic Iraq.

    For anyone who spent any time in Iraq during or after the invasion, I’d just like to say: no shit! Was there really anyone left with a reasonable doubt that the war in Iraq was a bad decision? If you’re not already convinced of that, 2.6 million words of analysis aren’t going to convince you. Neither can I, probably, but I will try.

    A woman cursed me in Arabic the other day when I was shopping at my local Iraqi market, and I couldn’t even say she was wrong — her message was pretty clear, so translation wasn’t a problem. I am quite often embarrassed at the actions of the United States government, and the UK isn’t much better these days. That’s depressing, and we have to do something about it.

    Unlike a lot of other people, I spent time in Iraq. Following the invasion I worked setting up satellite communications in-country: mostly in Baghdad and in the Kurdish region. We connected Iraqis and US military (and their contractors) to the Internet. For Iraqis, it was their first taste of the worldwide information superhighway, and for US-allied folks, it was their lifeline back to their families. In the early days everyone was positive, and I went to places like Samarra, Mosul, and Kirkuk without problems. I worked with Iraqis every day, and still have a lot of Iraqi friends, most of whom aren’t in Iraq ant more.

    The positivity of those early days deteriorated quickly. There was no post-invasion plan to reconstruct even the basic infrastructure of Iraq, which the US and UK military thoroughly destroyed. The West gloried in the invasion, the quick and complete destruction of resistance. The only thing neocon hawks gloried in more was the cut and run out of the country — somehow the job in Iraq was done in just seven years, while we have military presences in Germany and Japan some 60 years later2. To think that the situation in Iraq was any simpler than the end of WWII is misguided.

    Now, 13 years after the invasion, electricity is still sporadic — even in Baghdad3. Municipal water networks have failed and brought cholera outbreaks in the capital4. Floods have overcome unmaintained Saddam-era civil works5. In a twist of gallows humour Iraqis have been killed by electrical discharges from power lines in times of flooding6. The security situation is so bad that Iraq is by far the leading victim of terrorism in the world7: more than 17,500 people died from violence last year, and nearly 8,000 have already died in 20168. The prosperous, largely secular, and generally pro-West Iraqi state has been destroyed wholesale, and its population abandoned by those who sought to bring freedom.

    Throughout all of this, it was clear that the driving reason behind the invasion — that Saddam’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and would use them against the West (or by proxy Israel) at any moment — was a complete fabrication. There was no nuclear programme, no stockpiles of chemical weapons, no biological agents. They’re not buried in a cache in the desert, known only to a handful of Ba’athist loyalists. And we knew they weren’t there — Hans Blix, the UN’s weapons inspector, said as much9. So did a British mercenary to me directly, in Baghdad, in 2004 — he said WMDs didn’t exist, and it didn’t matter, getting rid of Saddam was the important thing.

    I’m no Saddam apologist. Saddam was a brutal dictator, and his sons Uday and Qusay were probably even worse. Yes, there were massive problems in Saddam’s Iraq — the state perpetrated war crimes against its own people. But the line we were fed on how we would solve that problem was a simpleton’s answer. If it was possible to simply unseat a ‘bad’ guy and put in a ‘good’ guy, that would be the right thing to do. But intervention is never simple, and our lack of thought and care has plunged the entire region into chaos.

    Let’s be clear about this point. Our governments invaded Iraq, and tipped an already unsettled region over into anarchy. The body politic of the US and UK — that’s you and me (doubly) — bear responsibility for the actions of our representatives. If they lied to us, we need to hold them accountable. But for the actions of our governments, we are ultimately responsible — that’s what democracy is all about — both for the positive and the negative.

    Both George Bush and Tony Blair have said that the world is better off without Saddam. Well, that’s total horseshit — the world is most definitely not better off. Nor is Iraq.

    Iraq is in near-complete anarchy, with world-leading corruption10. ISIS has a well-known connection to former Ba’ath officers11 — just who do you think was trained to fly US-made military helicopters that ISIS took from Mosul’s military airbase? That ISIS exists at all is a direct result of post-invasion instability and our treatment of prisoners12. Our governments — the US and UK — bear the responsibility for this, and as the body politic we must recognise that and hold them (and ourselves) accountable.

    After the first Gulf War — operation Desert Storm, as it was known — Saddam’s Iraq was under crippling sanctions, with a devastated infrastructure. Yet, within months, there was reliable power and security in Baghdad — with no ability to raise funds or legally import any parts. I used to make a joke that the Iraqi Summer was the real aggressor post-invasion — first Summer, it’s hot, there’s no air conditioning, but there’s no Saddam; second Summer, it’s hot, there’s still no air conditioning, but there’s no Saddam; third Summer, it’s still hot, there’s still no air conditioning, when we had Saddam we had air conditioning; fourth Summer, remember when it was hot, but we had air conditioning, wasn’t Saddam great at getting things done? It’s tongue-in-cheek, but the average Iraqi’s life is worse off because of the invasion, and there’s no solution in sight.

    If this were limited to Iraq, it would be terrible, but not as awful as the situation we find ourselves in today. But the reality is that by destabilising Iraq, we created a power vacuum in the Middle East, and our treatment of prisoners, both after 9/11 and in the military actions of Afghanistan and Iraq, have allowed anti-West sentiment to grow to unheard-of proportions, and have led directly to the creation of ISIS.

    Many people thought the the Arab Spring, and the ouster of dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya would replace repressive regimes in the Arab world with democratic states. Make no mistake, we in the West were involved — through intelligence services, funding, and in some cases air strikes. It seems unlikely that ISIS could be as strong as it is now without intervention against Assad’s government in Syria.

    A Kurdish friend of mine is from Halabcha, and was gassed by Saddam as a child. He went blind, eventually recovered his sight, and now runs a successful dry cleaning business in London. We were discussing the state of the Middle East the other day, and he stopped for a minute, considered, and said that even he would prefer that Saddam had stayed, and that the world was safer. Not fair, not right, but safer.

    What we have to do now — all of us — is to resist the idea that we can (or should) wash our hands of the situation. We, whether through false representation or not, are collectively responsible not only for the collapse of Iraq, but for the rise of ISIS, and the ensuing Syrian refugee crisis. We must stand with refugees, who are in the majority honest, helpful, friendly, and hard-working. We cannot turn our backs on these regular people — if they’re from Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, or anywhere else. At the same time, we must press our allies in the region for additional civil rights reform. And we must hold those who took us into war, with no plan for what comes next, responsible.

    There is no easy or quick solution to the problems of the Middle East. If we shy away from difficulty and retreat into xenophobia, punctuated by occasional interventionist streaks, we abandon our chance to bring peace to the world and endanger ourselves and our friends. We live in a world that is more closely connected every day, and we must live up to our responsibilities. After seven years, if no member of government is held accountable, we should all hold our heads in shame and ask forgiveness of the Iraqi people.

    References:

    1 The Iraq Report
    http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/the-report/

    2 Spiegel International — Ex-US Intelligence Chief on Islamic State’s Rise: ‘We Were Too Dumb’
    http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/former-us-intelligence-chief-discusses-development-of-is-a-1065131.html

    3 Wikipedia — Electricity Sector in Iraq
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Iraq

    4 New York Times / AP — Rare Storms and Floods Bring Iraq to a Standstill
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/world/middleeast/floods-paralyze-iraqi-capital-and-the-rain-continues.html?_r=1

    5 BBC — Iraq cholera outbreak caused by sewage in water
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-34635633

    6 Business Insider / AP — Outrage builds as dozens of Iraqis electrocuted in floods
    http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-outrage-builds-as-dozens-of-iraqis-electrocuted-in-floods-2015-11?IR=T

    7 The Independent — The 10 countries where terrorist attacks kill the most people
    http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/the-10-countries-where-terrorist-attacks-kill-the-most-people–ekK-zVZl_g

    8 Iraq Body Count
    https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/

    9 UC Berkley News — U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix faults Bush administration for lack of “critical thinking” in Iraq
    http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix.shtml

    10 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2015
    https://www.transparency.org/cpi2015/

    11 PBS — How Saddam’s Former Soldiers Are Fueling the Rise of ISIS
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-saddams-former-soldiers-are-fueling-the-rise-of-isis/

    12 The Guardian —  Isis: the inside story
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story?CMP=fb_gu

    Further Reading:

    Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
    http://amzn.to/2a5wXZm
    Probably the most telling book about post-invastion Iraq. Adapted into the instantly forgettable film Green Zone. Read the book!

    DC Confidential by Christopher Meyer
    http://amzn.to/29QnKo4
    First-hand account by the UK ambassador to the USA during the run-up to the Iraq War. Damning of the Blair government in the extreme, it foreshadows publication of ‘with you, whatever’ by years.

    Generation Kill by Evan Wright
    http://amzn.to/2a5wwOQ
    Evan Wright accompanied First Recon Marine on the intial assult into Iraq. If there’s any better account of the lack of planning by the US military in the Iraq war, I don’t know about it. Made by HBO into a very good series.

  • HP C7000 Bladecenter: awesome new test lab in one unit!

    Last year I picked up a surplus HP C7000 Bladecenter (generation 1, complete with BL460c and BL480c G1 blades, fibre channel, Cisco switches, etc) to run Openstack test loads. At about 150 KG, I paid just under £3 per KG, which is pretty damn good for a self-contained test lab (near scrap metal prices, actually).

    It took me a while to get somewhere, because my super-cheap home-friendly rack wasn’t deep enough. Eventually I acquired a second-hand Kell Systems 24U silent rack (now called the APC Netshelter SX) and plopped it in the corner of the living room (after taking the front door to the flat off the hinges). Now I’m building up a new routing and switching core for the house, and enabling the C7000 at the same time. The rack also came with a rackmount APC SmartUPS with external battery pack, which is a nice addition.

    I know the C7000 isn’t new, but let me tell you, from someone used to bootstrapping with generic white boxes, it is a pretty cool piece of hardware. I just spent an hour going through basic technical documents to get ready to put everything into service, and I have to say I’m impressed. For the price of two rackmount servers I’m putting 10 machines online, complete with remote management, Cisco switching, high-speed interconnects, and full redundancy. HP clearly knows what they’re doing.

    Total cost so far — Bladecenter, Blades, Switching, UPS/PDU, silent rack, spares — including shipping, about £1,200. I’ve paid more for a laptop. Resale value (if I wanted to) probably three times that. But seeing as the newer HP BL servers are the same form-factor, and second-hand prices for something slightly older are extraordinarily reasonable, incremental upgrades aren’t expensive. So my test lab is set for the next several years.

    HP engineers, my hat’s off to you. The architecture of the C-Class (or whatever your marketing wonks call it) is amazing, especially at second-hand prices. For anyone who is looking to test or startup with some in-house hardware (yes, I know, ‘the Cloud’, etc), take a look at a second-hand C7000.

    When I get it all running, I’ll post some pictures. But, since the rack looks like decent office furniture, nothing is exciting until you open it up.

    Now, anyone have a stack of HP driver DVDs they need to get rid of?

  • Little Mouse

    Little mouse

    A hundred years
    of evolution have
    made you the
    colour of the
    platform.

    Does it help you see
    the point of the Tube?

    Sometimes, you see,
    I have doubts.

    ******

    I found this poem stuck into the pages of a book I left at the pub’s new lending library. Good thing I checked, it’s not bad, and I obviously forgot all about it shortly after writing it.

  • Pi-Top First Impressions

    So, my Pi-Top arrived last week. Today I took everything out and put it together. Here are some initial observations:

    Slick packaging, well thought-out, and very professional. It looks like a real product the minute you open the box.

    This is a cool educational device that will help kids tinker, but it is definitely a work in progress. But this is not the Arm-based laptop I’ve wanted for years. When I get some time I’ll fire up my Samsung Arm Chromebook and see what modern Ubuntu looks like on it.

    Each ‘education’ drive seems to want to roll their own UI. Sugar was pretty radical, but Pi OS just seems like a launcher on top of Raspbian, and is buggy out of the box. I haven’t used a Kano, so I can’t comment there. I do wonder if there’s any real benefit in not sticking to a standard interface — they’re not creating value here, and including LIbreOffice would also probably be a good idea.

    The keyboard and trackpad really suck. I mean, really suck. There is no way to touch-type, keypresses often get lost, and the touchpad to the side thing isn’t working for me. I was going to write a review of the Pi-Top on it, but I’m already so frustrated with the keyboard that I don’t think that’s possible. It is the main method of input, so it would be nice if it worked well. Perhaps it will get better the more it’s used. For the record, the OLPC keyboard also sucked.

    I’ll kick the tyres on it for a few days, then write up a more detailed review.

  • The Continuing Adventures of a Newly-Minted Literary Snob (AKA Writing is Hard)

    I was out for a concert yesterday with a friend. He’s working up to self-publishing a book, and I’m excited for him. But I think that didn’t come through in the conversation, because I’m (apparently) a literary snob. You could see how that might mask my excitement.

    Trying to be a fairly open-minded fellow, I asked why he thought that. His points: basically that I am critical of a lot of self-published work (absolutely true), and that I do admire some ‘classic’ authors — Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Murakami — a bit too much for his liking. The take-away, as the kids call it, was that if I want to read his book, I’m going to have to buy it once it’s published. Which I would have done — and will do — anyway.

    I could argue that I have plenty of pop fiction on my shelves: Practical Demonkeeping, Vish Puri, The Laundry series, A Song of Fire and Ice, the Elric saga (all of them), the Black Company… I could go on, but the contents of my reading lists aren’t really in question, I suppose, as much as my attitude to writing is. It was only after a couple of days that I figured that out.

    Let’s go back to the beginning of this, and talk about me — but hopefully in an honest way. I am (and have been since a teen) a self-professed writer, who writes so infrequently it’s a joke. I’ve distracted myself with lots of travel (excuse: great source material), work (excuse: gotta bring in the money), and computing (excuse: solve that puzzle).

    Truth be told, writing fiction is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s more personal than donating an organ, more intimate than sex, and ultimately expository. Putting words that mean something to you on a page opens your heart to whatever stranger happens to read it. And then, if they don’t like it, you’re — by your own admission — not any good.

    To paraphrase the discussion, at one point I said something like: ‘You might as well work in an office, as write transcriptions of roleplaying games.’ And I believe that, but instead of starting with ‘You’ it should have start with ‘I’ because, for me at least, writing should be terrible, hard, and pull from my soul.

    I’ve written werewolf screenplays, Cthulhiana , Elric fan-fic, and many more less ‘literary’ things. If I could complete, and sell them, I would do so in a heartbeat. But somehow they’re not enough for me. Yes, there are nuggets of truth found in most written work, but to put myself through the wringer every day, I think my intentions should be to shoot for the stars, not just turn over a paycheque. There are a lot of easier ways to make a living.

    So am I a snob? Honestly, I don’t know, because ‘snob’ is a loaded word: ‘A person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people.’ People will read whatever they like: Dan Brown, Harry Potter, Hemingway, Jim Butcher, and I don’t really care (some of those are on my bookshelves, and some aren’t). A lot of it is just not for me, just as Jane Austin, Bram Stoker, and Moby Dick aren’t. Of course, I’d probably struggle, if not fail, at writing any of the above.

    So to my friend, all I can say is that I respect the amount of work you put in. I’ll try and do the same, and hopefully we both come out of it all with something we’re proud of.

    Oh, and, I’m definitely reading your book once it’s published!

  • The Fishmonger of Pike Street Overpass

    It’s an unseasonably hot afternoon in Seattle. She’s leaning on the railing of the Pike Street overpass, psychedelic gypsy skirt, black tank top, Audrey Hepburn sunglasses. Her hair is a long, brunette ponytail. She has a partially-completed tattoo sleeve on her left shoulder. It was started a long time ago.

    The cars stream down the highway, bright shafts of reflected sunlight seeking uncovered eyes. Hundreds of people on their way somewhere, swimming downstream with society at speed. She’s like a statue. I’m standing with a homeless man by his cardboard encampment. Neither of us are doing what we’re supposed to do right now.

    But it can’t last forever.

    ‘Spare some change?’

    I look over, and hand the homeless man $10.

    Of course, she’s gone by the time I turn back. Even my memories of her start to slip away, again. True memories, like fish, are deliberately slippery. They’re hard to keep hold of at the best of times.

  • Moving to the public cloud? Yes, you still need operations staff.

    A quick note, following from news of Google Compute outage yesterday, and outages caused by DNS changes at Amazon S3 slightly more than a week ago, it’s important to remember that moving to the cloud still requires operations (sysadmin, devops, whatever we want to call it).

    There is a belief that moving to the public cloud allows companies to outsource most, if not all of their operations staff. But there is a very real danger in abrogation of ops responsibility.

    If you are outsourced to the cloud, do you have a disaster recovery plan? What happens if the systems that are ‘too big to fail’ do just that?

    I’m not saying the cloud is bad — it enables companies to go to the web with next to no capex investment. But that doesn’t mean it is the end all be all, and if you’re not taking care of operations in-house, it’s very likely that you will regret it.

    Here’s some further interesting reading: TechTarget Cloud outage report 2014.

  • Why Privacy Matters, A Real-World Example

    Earlier this month, someone I went to school with a long time ago was arrested and charged with some fairly serious crimes. I wouldn’t call him a friend in pre-social media terms, but we knew each other a long time ago, and that’s good enough in the era of Facebook. Which is telling.

    I found out about the arrest through his friends posting on his Facebook page, which showed up on my Facebook news feed. Curiosity engaged, a quick search with Big Brother G turned up reports from the local newspaper and television station, which had some pretty gory detail of the accusations. Of course, in the USA, suspects are innocent until proven guilty, right? And these are unproven accusations, right?

    Within an hour, the article text from one of the two primary sources spread throughout at least two dozen sites. Whether they are affiliates, or simply stole the content is irrelevant. The information, including the name of the suspect and all the details of what he allegedly did, are now out in the open. And with tools like the Internet Archive (AKA the Wayback Machine) and Google, they can never be sequestered. His life, as he knows it, is over.

    When I studied journalism many years ago, we discussed the ethics of police log and courtroom reporting at length. The need to balance the public’s right to know and a subject’s right to privacy was central to those discussions. We knew that publishing misleading information could destroy the life of an innocent person. There was a lot of talk about the difference between a private person and a public figure. Simply because something was in the public record didn’t make it newsworthy, and we understood the tenet of innocent until proven guilty; anonymous and alleged references were common.

    Perhaps the new generation of journalists didn’t participate in similar discussions. In the last few years, the local newspaper where I grew up, the San Luis Obispo Tribune, started putting every suspect’s mug shot (for non-Americans, that’s the picture the police take of a suspect when they are booked into jail) online, along with the details of any alleged crime the suspect has committed. While technically legal — the Tribune is not overtly presuming guilt — very few of those on the booking sheets are public figures, and I would argue that there is no public interest served. This practice is little more than gossipmongering, and anyone who purports to be a journalist and participates in it should be ashamed.

    Even worse for my old classmate, and stereotypically so for those of us with a print versus broadcast bias, the local television news station, KSBY, decided to go out on the street to solicit responses to a presumably innocent man being charged with a crime that he denies. They gave airtime to the man’s flustered boss, who didn’t know quite what to say, and a local lady who doesn’t like the man’s house, because his curtains are usually drawn when she walks her dog past it. And, yes, this report was also put up online.

    Perhaps you would argue that the fault here is not one of lack of privacy, but the ethics of the journalists involved. I agree, however, in the interconnected world anyone can push an agenda and watch it spread. The nature of journalism has fundamentally changed, and the role of the journalist as gatekeeper of the spread of news is long over. Now we pull news with search engines as often as we are pushed it by editors. Sometimes the pull, like Google News, is packaged automatically for us. Algorithms will get better, and as more of our personal data seeps out onto the public Internet, we will be hard pressed to control it. Once you do something people seem to find interesting, it will be available for more and more people to see.

    And, there is no such thing as exclusively local news now — as evidenced by the spread of news of my old classmate’s arrest. Memories are stored in the cloud now, not on yellowing newsprint, and the lifespan has gone from years to infinity. There is no way to pull back what has already been released into the wild — the information multiplies like the rabbits outside Stanstead Airport. And a retraction or update, usually buried on an interior page and not even addressed by broadcast news, is much less juicy than an accusation; good luck getting it carried by a dozen more websites.

    The European Unions’s Right to be Forgotten is, at best, a bandage over a seeping wound. Google wasn’t Google 20 years ago, and the next sea-change will be just as profound. Until we realise that our data, our reputation and person, are integral to our freedom, we cannot affect a change in the world. Most people don’t even know why they might want to do so.

    Perhaps the story of my old classmate can serve some purpose there. Without being proven guilty of any crime, his reputation has been ruined for all time. A quick search online will, now and forever, turn up the details of this arrest. Presuming his innocence (as is the law), that is the opposite of American ideals. If he is guilty, a report on conviction removes any need to report on the arrest.

    This both an issue of privacy and of journalistic ethics, so the lines are a bit blurred, but no matter what your opinion on this case, the reality is that there is nothing stopping the same thing happening to you tomorrow. Even if you have nothing to hide, you have something to protect.

    P.S. While I’ve tried to anonymise things as much as possible, there are enough identifiers here to find the case, if you care to.