Members of the Fourth Estate should honor the idea of privacy when there is no compelling public need to know.
The massive hack into Sony and Columbia Pictures’ computers at the end 2013 was recently made worse because of a decision by WikiLeaks to catalogue and release 30-thousand company documents and 173-thousand employee e-mails. The original cyber-attack, which included theft of the sophomoric film, The Interview, is sometimes credited to North Korea. Others who follow these things aren’t so sure.
What is apparent is that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has decided that the presumed confidentiality for communications we all expect as a functional necessity in organizational life means nothing. His rationale for releasing the documents is generic and lame: Sony is “newsworthy and at the centre of a geo-political conflict.” And so—with too many hangers-on within a compliant American press—we can all be voyeurs to the health documents of employees, their social security numbers, their phone numbers, and their private communications. Apparently Assange is determined to “fence” this stolen data to the rest of us. His egregious decision is made even worse by his decision to set up a separate website to display the material and make it fully searchable.
Sony has a right to expect that its internal affairs—which apparently involve no violations of any laws–are private. This is simply an unauthorized peek into someone else’s business that is really none of our business.
What makes the theft and publication of these materials even worse is the willingness of many news outlets to mine this stolen property to pander to its readers. It’s still early, and already the New York Post, CNN, the Associated Press, the New York Times, The Verge, Gawker, the Daily Beast, New York Magazine and others have published gossipy stories from these memos. To my knowledge no major news organizations outlets have editorialized against the practice, even though the fig leaf of legitimate “news” keeps slipping out of place with every innocuous story ginned out of the celebrity e-mails.
This gossip won’t be repeated here. But you get the idea if you remember the temptations of news sites who carried images of an unclothed Jennifer Lawrence stolen from Apple’s ‘cloud.”
Too few journalists have taken the principled position of Slate’s Jacob Weisberg:
“News outlets should obviously cover the story of the hack itself, the effect on Sony, the question of how it happened, and who’s responsible. This is a big and legitimate news story. But when it comes to exploiting the fruits of the digital break-in, journalists should voluntarily withhold publication. They shouldn’t hold back because they’re legally obligated to—I don’t believe they are—but because there’s no ethical justification for publishing this damaging, stolen material."
Federal courts have ruled that the press can publish most kinds of material stolen by a third party. There is understandable value of immunizing journalists against governmental sources that would like to suppress evidence of failed policies or simple malfeasance. There is no question the nation was well-served by the unauthorized release and publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. But nothing so grand is at risk here. This is the equivalent of opportunists looting a store that has been torn open by an earthquake.
Assange’s efforts to frame his voyeurism in the language of “public service” is an abuse of the term. His error of judgment should also be apparent to members of the Fourth Estate, who must honor the idea of privacy when there is no compelling public need to know.
Many of us owe the completion of at least a few big projects to the caffeine that the brain needs more than the stomach.
New Yorker Cartoonist Tom Cheney obviously loves coffee. A lot of his cartoons have featured the stuff. My favorite is entitled the “Writer’s Food Pyramid,” with a food-group triangle of “essentials” for scribes that would give most dietitians severe heartburn. His pyramid was a play on those dietary charts that usually adorned classroom walls in the 80s. At the wide base of Cheney’s chart are “The Caffeine’s” of cola, coffee and tea. They anchor the rest of a pyramid of necessities which include “The Nicotines,” “The Alcohols” and “Pizza” at the very top. Together they make the perfect fuel cell for a cultural worker.
Cheney obviously knows a lot about writers, which movie mogul Jack Warner once hilariously dismissed as “Schmucks with Underwoods.” But there’s actually some method in all of this madness. Communication—at least the process of generating ideas—is clearly helped the spur of this addictive substance. We have more than a few studies to suggest that writers and others who create things can indeed benefit from the stimulant. Notwithstanding a recent New Yorker article suggesting just the opposite, caffeine is likely to enhance a person’s creative powers if it is used in moderation. I’m sure I’m not alone in oweing the completion of at least a few books to the sludge that now makes my stomach rebel.
It turns out the stimulant has a complex effect on human chemistry. As James Hamblin explains in a June, 2013 Atlantic article, caffeine is weaker than a lot of stimulants such as Adderall, which can actually paralyze a person into focusing for too long on just thing. It’s moderate amounts that do the most good. Even the New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova concedes the point. Caffeine
“boosts energy and decreases fatigue; enhances physical, cognitive, and motor performance; and aids short-term memory, problem solving, decision making, and concentration ... Caffeine prevents our focus from becoming too diffuse; it instead hones our attention in a hyper-vigilant fashion."
To put it simply, the synapses happen more easily when that triple latte finally kicks in. A morning cup dutifully carried to work even ranks over keeping a phone in one hand. If only momentarily, its the paper cup that has top priority.
But there is an exception. A person facing a live audience in a more or less formal situation probably should avoid what amounts to a double dose of stimulation, given the natural increase of adrenaline that comes when we face a public audience. For most of us a modest adrenaline rush is actually functional in helping us gain oral fluency. It works to our benefit because it makes us more alert and maybe just a little smarter. But combining what is functionally two stimulants can be counter-productive. They can make a presenter wired tighter than the “C” string at the top of a piano keyboard. We all know the effects. Instead of the eloquence of a heightened conversation, we get a jumble of ideas that are delivered fast and with too little explanation. In addition, tightened vocal folds mean that the pitch of our voice will usually rise as well, making even a baritone sound like a Disney character.
All of us are different. But to play the odds to your advantage, it is probably better to reserve the use of caffeine for acts of creation more than performance.
