I was following up on exsimo2’s Daily Kos diary on the pressure tactics the RIAA has been using against the soccer mom who fought back, and I realized there are some horrifying implications for privacy. This destruction of privacy has the power to reach out and touch YOU and YOUR FAMILY, since the strategy involved can be used by any large organization with a raft of lawyers and a PR team. This strategy hinges on the fact that it’s too expensive for regular people to defend themselves, and the press and the court system have been actively helping corporations succeed in this mode of attack.

First, read these two articles about how the RIAA told the press about a new lawsuits against the Defendant’s children before they even served the papers: press manipulation and gathering private info. The Press Manipulation article explains why the RIAA would go through the trouble and expense of filing a fake lawsuit for PR purposes:

Is the supposed court document the RIAA leaked to the media no more than blatant flim-flam - a way to once again manipulate mainstream reporters to act as Big Four threat bearers to intimidate defendants before they’ve been anywhere near a court?

And does it also mean that, having served its purpose to publicly harrass and humiliate the defendants in the on- and offline print and electronic media, it need never be submitted to a court?

The article, however, does not cover the Privacy loophole. And I want to make sure that every individual with an interest in preserving the U.S. as a country built on civil rights understands the danger here.

When someone files a lawsuit, the name of the person sued becomes part of the public record. That means that the press , which may have previously been respecting someone’s wish to remain anonymous, is now free to publish the names of anyone involved. The lawsuit can be filed for any bogus reason, and the victim will be followed around forever by Googleable headlines that say something like, “Jane Smith Sued For Heinous Act.”

Let me repeat: the victim of this PR strategy hasn’t necessarily done anything illegal. They may have just been making anonymous complaints about customer service in Internet forums. There is nothing stopping an organization from filing a lawsuit against you or your family, and it may be worth the money for them to do it if they think you’re a thorn in their side and they calculate that you don’t have the resources to defend yourself. Hey, if they make the accusation heinous enough, no pro bono lawyer or political representative will help you because they don’t want to be caught up in bad press. They may even actively help the company if the accusation relates to one of their hot button issues, and they know soapboxing will get the media’s attention.

There have now been successful precedents - companies KNOW this tactic will work if they strike quickly.

You may wonder how the company gets a person’s name if they’ve acted anonymously. Well, the Hewlett-Packard situation has shown the lengths corporate investigators are willing to go. However, if you file a complaint with a federal agency about a company, they might give your name to the company as part of their investigation process. Or the company just might pick a name from a list of malcontents and guess.

Companies can file a lawsuit against any person for any reason. YOU can be NAMED and SMEARED all over the press and the Internet just because the accusation itself makes a good story. And if the victim can’t afford an attorney, they might actually end up going through months of court process, at their own expense, because Judges apparently don’t yet get the fact the court system is being used this way.  

The thing people have to realize is that this tactic isn’t limited to the RIAA. The RIAA may have even taken their cue from other corporations who have successfully used the lawsuit-as-PR-tactic to discredit whistleblowers.

This privacy loophole must be closed and soon, because it’s a form of domestic terrorism wielded by corporations and a major stepping stone toward a fascist state.

This post refers to a tragic situation that occurred on Daily Kos - I’m not going to rehash it or add juicy links because I’m worried that the person used her real name, and I don’t want to add to her problems by feeding the Google monster. The first thing I saw when I revved up Daily Kos the next morning was another moving plea for help in the rec box, this time by a fairly high profile diarist. I truly empathized with his frustration at having to advocate for himself. His situation sounded horrific: I hope he will find the help he needs, and I’m grateful he’s using his writing gifts to illustrate the impact of a widespread problem on relatively helpless individuals.

The reason I wrote this follow up is I’m concerned that people have to be “amplified” to be heard, or otherwise they are allowed to fall through the cracks. Many people just on Daily Kos are living on the edge. I’ve been mostly unemployed (a little under-the-table work) for three years. I won’t go into my litany of problems (but feel free to read through my diaries if your curious) - the point is that I read diaries and comments from people in similar extreme situations every day. They, too, have been going without help they need for a while. They, too, have gotten to the point where they are going on the web and shouting their problems, hoping that someone, anyone will start listening. All the cries for help create a lot of noise, so people who could help just tune out.

It’s not just a matter of whether you are articulate enough to communicate your problems. I would say most people who participate in the blogosphere have above-average communication skills: they already have a major advantage over the significant portion of the population that can barely read, who can’t advocate for themselves or interest anyone in advocating for them, and are therefore invisible. At this point, though, you have to scream to be heard. You have to have a following as a writer (a “rec box regular”), media contacts, or access to mailing lists that will get the word out. You have to be willing to do shocking things, use profanity, wave huge multi-colored flags. If you want to hold on to your dignity as the one thing you have left, you’re out of luck. The message the world is sending is give us all a good show, or you aren’t working hard enough to deserve our help.

This state of affairs depresses the hell out of me. I mentioned in a comment before that I was wavering about voting for the Democratic candidate in my state (though the Republican in office is beyond awful), because he gave me the impression that keeping people from falling through the cracks wasn’t part of his platform. Good policy is important, and in theory progressive policy helps more people in the aggregate, but I want political representatives who are also willing to address the flaws in their policy. Instead of worrying that people might “come out of the woodwork” to take advantage of programs, a good political representative should be wondering what is going on with people while they’re still in the woodwork and being ignored. The implication is that the system is okay as long as people suffer and die quietly.

It’s up to us, the voters, to let our political representatives know that there are no “acceptable numbers” of people falling through the cracks. It’s up to us to tell our political representatives that we will vote for the one wants to help real people and seal the cracks instead of just orating about policy.

AllisonInSeattle made an important comment that this is one of the strengths of the Red State outlook. People in the largely red rural areas use small churches and civic organizations to try to cover the cracks, even though they often have meager resources as a community. In urban “Blue” areas, people are often isolated, and while they vote for the party that’s promising to do the right thing, that promise is often empty as far as individual lives are concerned.

In sum, I hope the efforts that Kossacks made that today to help people in dire straits will spark a larger discussion about how to reach out to the people who have no voice at all.

On Daily Kos, Snoopydog’s post about his life as a page brought back some weird flashbacks of how early the class struggle begins - and how chibi-elitism can be fetishized by all the adults around.

I’m not sure when I first heard of congressional pages. I lived in a dismally backward rural area, so it was probably later than most. What I do remember is that in early high school, I associated pages with debutantes. It was something that classy people did, and therefore I wanted to do it, too. For some sad reason I didn’t make the jump from “rich people get to do this” to “patronage position”: I thought I would apply, and that my grades, test scores, and perhaps an essay question would be reviewed by some committee.

My hopes were raised when the daughter of the posh family in town actually became a summer page. Before the likelihood of becoming a page was about as likely as a prince on a white horse trotting up to the porch of my house. Suddenly being a page was something real people actually did.

If I respected the laws of reality, I would have applied to be a page, all my hopes and dreams would have been crushed, and I would have accepted my fate as a Dollar Store check-out girl. However, I found a way to beat the system. Through a weird, twisty, outright outre series of events I got a save-the-po’-folk scholarship to a D.C. prep school for a year, and they placed their students as congressional interns (yep - like Monica Lewinski was a White House intern). So while my hometown’s prissy prom queen was a page for a summer, I was an intern actually doing staff work for a year. It was a “world turned upside down” moment, and it’s an experience I’ve treasured for many years.  

There’s a few things I’d like to underscore here. First, pages aren’t the only kiddies running around Capitol hill.  They’ve achieved a symbolic status, probably precisely because they are beneficiaries of patronage. They’re not just working in the center of political power, they are scions of wealth and/or privilege. Before Monica, did anyone  ever speculate on the sex life of scantily dressed congressional interns? Youth and beauty isn’t enough - pages represent flirtation (pun absolutely intended) with power.  It’s naughty, it’s dangerous, and it possibly has a skull-and-bones-esque sort of elite cultishness.

And who wants to bet the slobbering voyeuristic public is solely interested in the seduction and/or sexploits of pages? Go into the XXX section of any shady video store two months from now, and I’ll be there will be titles like “Pages Gone Wild”.

While I was an intern, I didn’t see anything untoward going on (though it’s possible I just wasn’t anyone’s type). It might be worth casting the net a little wider to all the Congress-kiddies. I have a feeling, though, that the public is just interested in the pages - for the exact same reason  our wayward elected officials are. There’s a romance about being a page, and they’re easy to fetishize.