Mitch Wagner's Blog

Company Argues For Right To Read Ex-Employee's E-Mail

A finance company is arguing in court that it had a right to read an ex-employee's personal e-mail. Sounds crazy, right? And yet, in this world where we carry BlackBerrys to access work e-mail from home, and handle personal business over the company Internet connection, it takes a crazy person to figure out where personal life ends and work begins.

The New York Times has the story. Structured Settlement Investments fired Scott Sidell, who formerly headed the company. He filed an arbitration claim over his lost job and, in a lawsuit filed last month, he says that executives at Structured Settlement read e-mail messages that he exchanged over his Yahoo account with attorneys about strategies for winning the arbitration claim.

How was it possible for Structured Settlements to access Sidell's personal Yahoo account? Sidell said in court papers that he may have left his office computer logged in to Yahoo Mail. But the company says Sidell returned to the office after he was fired and used another employee's computer.

Years ago, I wrote a column arguing that companies ought not to to read employees' e-mail. At least one IT manager scolded me for being childish. What you do on the company's e-mail system, using the company computers, and the company's network, is the company business, he said.

My logical brain says that's right. You can certainly make a similar argument here: Sidell used a company-owned computer to access his mail. He left that computer logged into his account. Therefore the company had a right to access the e-mail on that account. QED. Sidell doesn't have a case.

And yet, intuitively, the situation seems deeply unfair. It wasn't the company's e-mail -- it was Sidell's personal account. He no longer worked for them. The company eavesdropped on communications between a former employee and the employee's attorney -- discussing a case against the employer. How can that be right?

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Belmont Park, Mission Beach, San Diego

View the rest of the set (3 images).

Firefox 3 Video Tour: Phishing And Malware Protection

Firefox 3 includes built-in warnings designed to protect you against those bad guys who want to trick you into giving up your credit card numbers, or download software infections to your PC. The browser throws up a warning when you try to visit a known crooked Web page. Take a look at how it works.

Interestingly, when I wrote, "Review: Firefox 3 Burns Up The Web" just last week, the feature worked pretty badly. I tested Firefox against some obvious phishing e-mail and links to malware in my spam folder, and Firefox failed to trigger a warning most of the time.

But this week, when I tested Firefox again to make this video, it worked quite well -- Firefox set off the warning every time.

Did the protection improve that much in a week? Or were my tests bad? I'm looking into that.

For a look at another feature of Firefox 3, check out the previous video in the series: The Awesome AwesomeBar. Watch this space for two more installments.

Second Life Artist Faces Setback in Struggle For American Citizenship

The U.S. government recently denied a green card application by a well-known Second Life artist, declaring her two-year marriage to an American citizen to be fraudulent. The news isn't all bad for her, though -- the denial gives her an opportunity to appeal and prove that the marriage was legitimate.

However, she says she's growing weary of trying to untangle the red tape, and is preparing for the probability that she'll be forced to abandon her adopted home in America.

Irena Morris, known in Second Life as "Eshi Otawara," married an American citizen who died while her application for residency was still in progress. A provision in U.S. immigration law called the "widow's penalty" says that, in that situation, an alien's green card application should be rejected if the marriage lasted less than two years. The Morrises were married one year and 10 months when Glenn Morris died suddenly.

We wrote about Morris's immigration problem two weeks ago.

Morris, 27, said in a phone interview this week, "The last few days I've been bouncing around whether I should leave or fight this." She can't legally get a job in America, and since her husband died, she's been living off of the kindness of friends, and the small amounts of money she can earn as an artist in both Second Life and real life. "I'm packing. I don't know what to do. I have limited financial resources to fight this." She's also working on a motion to re-open her case with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. "They can stretch this out for the next two years. What am I supposed to live off of?"

She doesn't want to leave America, but she may have to, and return to her native Croatia. "I don't think I belong there. I don't want to go there. I'd feel like an American in exile," Morris.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is looking for evidence that Morris and her husband had a legitimate marriage. Generally, they look for joint bank accounts, bills, property and leases in both their names, according to Mike Castlen, a former immigration counselor who's helping Morris with her case. However, because Morris's husband supported her while she was waiting for her green card and work permit to clear, all their financial records were in his name only.

So Morris is assembling e-mails that she and her husband exchanged, as well as a few photos taken of them together (although she doesn't have many of those -- as an artist, generally she was the one behind the camera). And she's collecting affidavits from all their friends who can swear they were really married.

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Should The US Nationalize The Internet?

The Internet faces many problems from companies looking to maximize profits at the expense of the public good. Greedy businesses threaten innovation by trying to put an end to net neutrality, media companies want to control every Internet-connected device in an effort to lock down distribution channels, and spammers and other fraudsters have pretty much taken over e-mail. Now, TechCrunch is reporting that Vint Cerf, the so-called "father of the Internet," says maybe we should think of the Internet as being like the highway system -- a public good that should be nationalized.

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch writes:

Should the Internet be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways? Vint Cerf, the “father of the Internet” and Google’s Internet evangelist, made this radical suggestion while he was sitting next to me on a panel yesterday about national tech policy at the Personal Democracy Forum. Maybe he was inspired by the presence of one of the other panelists, Claudio Prado, from Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, who kept on talking about the importance of embracing Internet “peeracy.” (Although, I should note that Mr. Cerf frowned upon that ill-advised coinage). But I think (or hope, rather) that he was really trying to spark a debate about whether the Internet should be treated more like the public resource that it is.

His comment was in the context of a bigger discussion about the threat to Net neutrality posed by the cable and phone companies, who are making moves to control the amount and types of bits that can go through their pipes. It was made almost in passing and the discussion quickly moved to other topics.

The case for letting the government run the Internet is tempting. Rather than letting telcos, media companies, and spammers fight to control the Internet, we could just let the government run the pipe to ensure its continued fairness.

But would nationalization actually solve problems, or make them worse?

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A tender conversation between me and Julie

ME: You were asleep so soundly this morning you were perfectly still. Even the cat jumping up on the bed didn't make you move. I couldn't hear you breathing. I watched very carefully for a long time because I was afraid you were dead.

JULIE: That's sweet.

ME: But then I figured if you were dead the cat would have been eating you.

Firefox 3 Video Tour: The Awesome AwesomeBar

We're kicking off a series of videos showing off the top features of Firefox 3. This time, we're taking a peek at the AwesomeBar, an updated version of the good old browser location bar, designed to make it easier for you to return to your favorite Web pages again and again. The Awesome Bar is controversial -- many people love it (including me). But others hate it, and for those people, we've got tips for how to disable the AwesomeBar.

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Me & George Carlin

I bought his AM&FM and Class Clown albums when I was in junior high, and listened to them over and over again with my friends. We loved it. We were a bunch of goody-two shoes kids, Carlin helped us cultivate a self-image that we were actually harlequins thumbing noses as impotent, pompous authority.

I think by the time I was in my late teens, I'd already started seeing a decline in Carlin's work. Chicago Window Box and later albums just weren't as good as his earlier work.

On the other hand, I remember one of his early HBO specials in the 1980s, where my brothers and I laughed until our heads nearly exploded at a routine he did about the differences between dogs and cats. The cat runs into a glass door at top speed and just walks away, saying, "I meant to do that." Then it crawls under the couch and sobs. "Fucking meow. Fucking meow, man," the cat says.

But, still, I haven't been able to watch his later stand-up. He seemed to have become mired in cynicism. I'm really turned off by cynicism in famous entertainers: You've got millions of dollars, millions of fans worldwide, you do popular shows on cable, you've done movies, you're a cultural icon, you have no right to be cynical.

I thought he was a good character actor. He played a gay next-door-neighbor in Prince of Tides, starring Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte. He was in a couple of Kevin Smith movies. In Dogma, he played the archbishop who wants to update Roman Catholic dogma with a friendlier, more upbeat image of Christ -- the Buddy Christ. He was in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back as a hitchhiker who explains why it's not gay to give blowjobs for rides.

But I really liked him in Jersey Girl, Kevin Smith's attempt at a romantic comedy, starring Ben Affleck. Jersey Girl is a deeply flawed movie, true, but it's got some great moments in them, none better than George Carlin at the end of the movie, explaining matter-of-factly in seven words (no, not those seven words) why he's allowed his widowed son and granddaughter to move in with him.

I interviewed George Carlin about 20 years ago; he was doing a concert in Sussex County, New Jersey, where I worked for the daily newspaper, the New Jersey Herald. It was a phone interview. I thought even then that he had become cynical, but he was also very gracious and polite. I asked him about an earthquake that was in the news, and he told a couple of jokes about it; I suspect he was trying out some material on me and our readers. This interview was soon after he went into rehab, I asked him if he planned to do any anti-drug spots. He said, no, if he did any, kids would just think he was another old man telling them what to do.

The logistics of the interview were unusual in two ways: One was that he called me, usually when I interview celebrities (not that I do it that often), I have to call them.

The second was that he asked me to tape-record the interview. No one has ever done that before or since -- asked me to record the interview. I presume that was to ensure accuracy, and it was a clever trick. The mere presence of a recording makes it more likely that the interview will be accurate, even if the journalist doesn't use it. The interview subject can record the interview himself, but that's a hassle. How would Carlin know that I actually made the recording, and didn't lie about it? I presume he didn't care that much. I don't like to record interviews as a rule, but I was happy to oblige for him, and I kept the tape as a souvenir for years. I don't know what happened to it.

Carlin re-invented himself a few times: From working-class Irish kid in Philadelphia to successful suit-and-tie Vegas stand-up comedian to hippie comedian to self-described old fuck and curmudgeonly. He wasn't exactly successful as an actor, but he had a steady trickle of roles over several decades, which isn't exactly easy. He was an authentic voice, he left us too soon, and we're poorer for his absence.

Why America needs to be more like Canada

Elsewhere on the Internet, our friend Joe Haldeman, science-fiction writer and Vietnam vet, said:

I, for one, have always thought that being the most powerful military force on the planet is not a good thing. Better to be somewhere in the middle -- powerful enough that other countries don't just walk in and take over, but with a hands-off foreign policy.

Reminds me of a line from the TV show Burn Notice:

I'll take a hardware store over a gun any day. Guns make you stupid. Better to fight your wars with duct tape. Duct tape makes you smart.

I've seen that a few times in adventure fiction and TV shows: Guns are dangerous because they make you think you're invincible and invulnerable. Which you aren't. If you don't have a gun -- if all you have is a knife -- you're afraid of your enemies. And fear is good. It makes you try to avoid confrontation, and try to outthink rather than out-shoot your enemies when confrontation is inevitable.

Now, of course, the real world it not like a TV show or book. Indeed, one of the great failings of the Bush White House and its supporters seems to be the failure to recognize that -- they seem to think that the TV show 24 is a graduate-level course in geopolitics.

But, still, this business about guns making you stupid is a good metaphor for real life.

I've certainly found it to be true in the workplace. In 1995, I was assigned to create a Web news operation for a major IT publication. At that time, many of its editors thought the Internet was a distraction, a threat, and a fad, and that they should just stick to a print pub. I had no staff and no authority. So I worked with the people who supported the Internet, attempted to persuade those who were undecided, and ignored the people who hated it (all the time looking for opportunities to influence the opinions of the haters). It worked pretty well -- probably better than if I'd actually been given formal authority over all those people. Because even if you're the boss, you can't force people to do what they don't want to do. You have to persuade them.

The blog io9.com did an interview with William Gibson. He's an expatriate American who lives in Canada. He said:

Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it's not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.

I think that's very profound - and it's a model that America should be following. It's something that America actually used to be great at, until the Bush administration, and we need to re-learn it and do more of it. One of Bush's greatest sins is that he was too quick to use force. Another great sin is that he used it incompetently.

Certainly, Saddam Hussein needed to be neutralized - he was an evil, poisonous man. I am loath to celebrate anyone's death, but if I were going to celebrate anyone's death, he'd be first on my list.

Still, he could have been neutralized without all the misery we caused by doing it too abruptly and ineptly.

The most effective way to spread peace and freedom is not through violence, it's through commerce and ideas. Look at how that's working in Asia and Ireland. And look at how democracy-through-violence is not working in the Middle East.

The best way to spread peace and freedom isn't with guns. It's with iPods.

Certainly, force is, sadly, often necessary, and military and police deserve our respect. But it's not necessary as often as the White House and its supporters believe. And their enthusiasm for sending other people off to fight and die, while they stay at home with their families in safety and luxury, is contemptible.

Ron Paul said that the Civil War was a mistake, one of the biggest mistakes in American history. This got picked up by his opposition, who said that he is a bigot who supports safety. Which is not what he said at all -- what he said was that just about every other country in the West managed to stop the practice of slavery without having a civil war, so why couldn't we? Maybe the U.S. should have simply bought all the slaves, and then outlawed slavery -- that would have been far less expensive, and less bloody, than the Civil War turned out to be.

AP copyright dispute

AP Tries To Save Face In Blogger Copyright Dispute

I don't blame the Associated Press for refusing to participate in a conversation about its attempts to overthrow government authority and rewrite copyright law its own liking. The AP is like a husband who foolishly told his wife that the new jeans do make her butt look big. The best way to limit damage at that point is to simply shut up and hope the subject eventually goes away.

But this issue isn't going away. The AP is doing nothing less than attempting to unilaterally rewrite copyright law, and also undermine citizens' freedom to criticize the news media. It's just plain wrong, it's un-American, and it needs to stop right now. The American people, through their elected and appointed representatives and judges, have a monopoly on writing laws. The AP doesn't get to make its own rules.

At the center of the controversy is Drudge Retort, a somewhat Digg-like social news site (not to be confused with the Drudge Report). AP issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice to Drudge Retort last week. The AP went far beyond normal copyright claims, stating that the Drudge Retort's quoting headlines and short excerpts -- less than 100 words each -- was sufficient to violate the AP's copyright. Most people on the Internet would consider that behavior fair use -- indeed, it's standard practice for blogs for years -- but the AP says it was ripped off.

The dispute between Drudge Retort and the AP was apparently settled last night. The AP e-mailed a statement to me and other interested bloggers and journalists this morning: "[T]he AP was able to provide additional information to the operator of the site, Rogers Cadenhead, on Thursday. That information was aimed at enabling Mr. Cadenhead to bring the contributed content on his site into conformance with the policy he earlier set for his contributors. Both parties consider the matter closed."

But the bigger issues are far from settled. Cadenhead says on his personal blog, "[W]e're headed for a Napster-style battle on the issue of fair use."

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