
 Responding to Wired's ad hominem hatchet job - wglb
http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2012/08/responding-to-wireds-ad-hominem-hatchet.html
======
nopassrecover
Without a lot of prior context, this seems like a clear-headed rebuttal to an
otherwise pretty low ad hominem attack.

On a specific note, to characterise someone as sexist because they disagree
with someone who happens to be a woman is in my opinion itself one of the most
egregious examples of both sexism (for reasons I'll detail) and libel (for the
damaging political and social impact of being branded with such a label).

First, throwing the term 'sexist' around carelessly undermines genuine claims
of sexism. Second, it attempts to not only target an individual as sexist, but
often the male gender as a whole as being part of a "misogynistic boys-club",
in turn implying that masculine identity itself is inherently wrong. Third, it
undermines genuine gender equality - if people are concerned about their
criticisms being perceived as sexist they will refrain from open and honest
critique which is the hallmark of colleagues and equals. Fourth, it assumes
(paternalistically) a gender role for women as "poor persecuted girls" who
need protecting from criticism and attack. Consequently, sexual inequality is
perpetuated - after all, if this same criticism had been targeted at a male
journalist would we expect to see responses such as "you're only picking on
him because he's a man"?

There are plenty of genuine cases of sexism (against male, female, and other
gender identities) which emerge out of the obsolescence of traditional social
roles. Leveraging the political sensitivity of this important issue to attack
an opponent is pretty low.

~~~
rimantas

      > First, throwing the term 'sexist' around carelessly
      > undermines genuine claims of sexism.
    

The same goes for rasism. We are at the stage, that merely acknowledging
someone's sex or race will earn you these labels. Too bad.

~~~
crag
An the same goes for antisemitism. In America, [publicly] write anything
critical of the Israeli government and you are labeled an anti-Semite.

~~~
philwelch
Criticizing the actions of any government is what it is, but many critics of
Israel go so far as to say there should be no Jewish state, which in effect
means the Jews should be a people without a homeland, forever vulnerable to
extermination by the Gentiles they are forced to live amongst as an eternal
minority. That alone is suspicious as it carries the shadow of antisemitism,
but once you throw in explicit support for groups like Hamas, the picture
becomes clearer.

Except for a brief moment of shame after World War II, the general attitude of
the West has always been antisemitic. Those seeking to criticize the actions
of the Israeli government _should_ have to work harder to distinguish
themselves from the antisemites who merely disguise their attitudes as
criticism of Israel.

~~~
pessimizer
Criticizing the entire idea of a theocracy, and that a religion should (of
course) have a homeland to dominate, does not make you an antisemite, nor
covered with antisemitism "shadow." More an antisemitism smear.

Now, I am suspicious of the people who are irate about Israel as a Jewish
state, but are all about the Dalai Lama. I don't see how that makes sense
unless you have something against Jewish people.

~~~
philwelch
The child of a Jewish mother is Jewish regardless of their religion, and this
applies recursively, so you can have generation after generation of secular
Jews as long as there's an unbroken matrilineal line. So Israel is not a
homeland for a religion, it is a homeland for a nationality.

Sure, a convert to Judaism is also a Jew. But Judaism is explicitly not a
religion for everyone, it is only a religion for the Jews. So if you believe
in Judaism but have no desire to be a Jew yourself, you can just follow the
Noahide laws. Actually becoming a Jew entails an extra step beyond that,
namely the intention to join the Jewish nation. So not even in the case of
conversion can the Jewish nation be equivalent to Judaism.

In practice, Israel is also just as secular as any Western country. No
theocracy to be found there. This is more than you can say for, say, England,
which has a state-established church with the monarch at its head.

~~~
pessimizer
>The child of a Jewish mother is Jewish regardless of their religion, and this
applies recursively, so you can have generation after generation of secular
Jews as long as there's an unbroken matrilineal line.

So it's just racist? I prefer to think of it as a theocracy that preserves a
culture that has been historically very endangered. That, I don't feel as bad
about.

>it is a homeland for a nationality.

If you, by law, make being a member of a religion a sufficient qualification
for citizenship in a nation, this is self-fulfilling.

~~~
philwelch
A theocracy is a government that governs based upon the dictates of religious
doctrine. The Israeli government does not do this in any way, shape, or form.
It is as secular as most Western countries.

Most nationalities are passed down by descent. If this constitutes racism,
then so does the citizenship law of every nation that grants the right of
citizenship to the children of a citizen. Nearly every country does this, so
there is no reason to single out Israel unless you are trying to enforce a
double standard.

Some nationalities allow outside individuals to join, and the Jewish nation is
one of these. Like any nation, the Jewish nation has steep requirements of
cultural belief and assimilation in order to join, namely conversion to the
Jewish religion. But this is not merely a matter of belief. A Gentile who
merely believes in Judaism is still not a Jew until they formally convert
(i.e. joins the nation), just as an otherwise qualified foreigner who can pass
the US citizenship exam is still not an American until they take the test and
swear the oath to become a naturalized citizen.

------
jerrya
There is nothing I can find in Soghoian's two posts that are any sort of
criticism of Patterson, the security expert. It seems to be a huge and false
claim of Wired's that there is any criticism of Patterson.

Soghoian does criticize the reporter, who is a woman.

Apparently for Wired, when you criticize one of their reporters, and their
editor it's all out war to the death and here they played the gender card.

It was either that or admit their mistake.

~~~
johngalt
Seems simple to me. If you call us out for terrible reporting, we'll slander
you as a sexist. Welcome to my hosts file Wired.

~~~
heretohelp
>Welcome to my hosts file

Would you mind sharing your hosts file, or some sanitized subset of it?

------
hexagonal
Another response: <http://c1qfxugcgy0.tumblr.com/post/28976190142/oops>

    
    
      [Wired's rebuttal is] kinda annoying. Ryan Singel, old white guy, repeats 
      Quinn Norton’s gender (female) five separate times (she is a girl) 
      because Sogohian, dirt-poor terrorism suspect, is apparently the 
      chairman of the Patriarchy.[1] Hey, you know who else has white male 
      privilege, Ryan? Editors at old-media print magazines.

------
shiven
Reverse-sexism undermines and hurts the anti-sexist and female-friendly
atmosphere that most of the tech community would like to foster. Gender
discrimination and sexism need to be called out and stopped everywhere, but
"crying wolf", without reason, weakens the very moral ground we purport to
defend.

~~~
objclxt
Indeed - I find Ryan Singel's attitude to be completely and utterly baffling.
From his Wired post:

"Soghoian suggesting that if Quinn Norton ever wanted to write about about
encryption tools in the future, she ought to “step back, take a deep breath,
and pull the power cord from your computer” isn’t just rude and obnoxious,
it’s border-line sexist"

Out of context, I can't really see what he's getting at. In context, the idea
it's 'border-line' sexist makes no sense at all. Singel has chosen to infer
sexism under the mis-guided impression it's targeting one of his writers, but
in fact the quote is pretty clearly intended to be read as a criticism of
_all_ technology journalists.

~~~
jlgreco
"Borderline" _anything_ does not make any sense to me. It seems to be nothing
more than a way to call somebody something with plausible deniability, I guess
to protect against libel/slander suits?

The way I see it, being "borderline" to something means that it is "close" to
something, but not _actually_ something. I guess an octagon could be a
"borderline" circle? The issue here though is that if you are pointing out
that something is "borderline sexist", you are basically saying _"it is not
sexist, but it is close to it"_. What the hell does _"close to sexist"_ mean?
Is being _"close to sexist"_ wrong? If yes, why isn't it just called
_"sexist"_?

------
Nrsolis
I know csoghoian personally. I found the rebuttal article from Wired to be
absolutely abhorrent.

I do not speak for him, but I think you can safely assume that the vitriol
reserved for Chris is somehow co-incident with his preference towards working
with the WSJ to bring cogent computer security reporting to a wide audience.
My impression is that Wired sees this as a US vs. THEM kind of thing.

Delivering secure solutions to an audience that is unaware of the risks is
always a dodgy proposition. Better informed customers would improve the market
for those solutions and keep vulnerable persons from over-trusting a flawed
product. We all benefit when this happens.

Chris is asking for better reporting, not male reporters. A very big
difference indeed.

------
andrewcooke
There's an interesting post at Cryptome that mentions crypto.cat -
<http://cryptome.org/2012/07/chile-comments.htm> (apparently the Chilean
police have some transcripts of conversations, and it's not clear how).

------
robertskmiles
I decided a while ago to stop reading Wired, after some ridiculous piece of
hack journalism I can't even remember now. This makes me want to stop reading
Wired again, but I can't do it twice.

This is like Sony all over again. I've been boycotting them for the past few
years, and they _just keep doing things that make me want to boycott them_.
When will someone invent the double boycott?

~~~
chris_wot
Dunno, but I've all too often had a Clayton's boycott - the boycott you have
when you aren't having a boycott. Perhaps we could email each other to
exchange ideas?

------
tomp
Being sexist is bad.

Accusing a man of sexism just because he doesn't agree with a woman is worse.

~~~
ajscherer
This statement makes no sense to me. "Being sexist" encompases an absolutely
huge range of behaviors. It could mean something as small as making a dumb
assumption about what type of aesthetic preferences someone has, to something
as large as making hiring decisions that can permanently stunt someone's
career growth. It could even mean promulgating laws that legitimize violence
against people.

Sexism is thus a category of bad behaviors, some of which are worse than
anything I could imagine stemming from being accused of sexism. I am not
saying that being falsely accused of sexism is nothing. It certainly would
make me angry and frustrated to be so attacked. I just think false accusation
of sexism is worse than the least severe forms of sexist behavior, and better
than the most severe forms of sexists behavior.

Asserting that false accusations of sexism are always worse than sexism seems
obviously false.

~~~
tomp
Mostly, I agree. Except with the part about (laws that legitimize) violence
against people. In this case, the problem, IMO, is not sexism/discrimination,
but violence as such.

I wrote the above mostly because I wanted to make a statement, and I wasn't in
the mood for writing lengthy arguments. Also, from a purely philosophical
point of view, where we analyze not the actions, but the motivations and
principles behind them, the statement holds true, because accusing someone of
being sexist is both sexism (belief that people of different sex differ in
more than their most basic biology (which they maybe do, but that shouldn't be
generalized)), and ad-hominem, which is (philosophically) worse than being
just sexist.

------
wmeredith
As usual Wired's brand of journalism is skin deep, at best. Any time they
report on something I have a bit of expertise in, it's wildly inaccurate.

OP's tale sucks, but does not surprise me.

------
0x36
Unfortunately, a lot of "tech journalists" are amateurs with exaggerated
notions of self-worth because they have some readership. Like the hacked guy
at Wired who was so clueless as to keep important data in one place (his Apple
acct), but blames everybody else for his loss.

If you keep all your data on your MacBook and believes Apple will take care of
the rest, you are not an expert, you are a fanboy that has no right to state
your opinion publicly.

------
ceol

        > Today, Ryan Singel, the editor at Wired's Threat Level 
        > blog responded to my blog post, but incorrectly frames
        > my criticism as if it were solely directed at Quinn 
        > Norton and her coverage of Cryptocat.
    

Considering about half of your original article was strictly discussing
Norton's coverage, I can see where he got that idea. Then your original piece
includes this bit:

    
    
        > It isn't clear why Norton felt it wasn't necessary to 
        > publish any dissenting voices. From her public Tweets, 
        > it is however, quite clear that Norton has no love for 
        > the crypto community, which she believes is filled 
        > with "privileged", "mostly rich 1st world white boys 
        > w/ no real problems who don't realize they only build 
        > tools [for] themselves."
    

That's an attack on the author, don't you think? You just implied she
neglected to include any criticism of the tool because she hates the crypto
community. Not only does this illustrate your lack of understanding the
concept of privilege, but it's rude and unnecessary, so I don't blame Ryan for
taking offense.

For starters, Quinn wasn't trying to bury facts— the paragraph about how
Cryptocat is an experiment is directly above the screenshot of the app, so
it's fairly noticeable.

Second, your section titled "On the issue of privilege" _doesn't actually talk
about privilege._ It talks about how two white men were stopped at the border
to the US and one who had some of his devices seized. Her tweet was stating
that maybe tools made by white men in first-world countries might not be able
to adequately address the needs of less fortunate individuals under oppressive
regimes.

So sure, it's great to call out projects that seem Too Good To Be True™, but
multiple times you drew attention to Quinn's specific article, and even once
needlessly quoted a few of her tweets. I don't see that attention paid to any
other reporter, so Ryan's rebuttal is mostly on point.

~~~
CamperBob2
_That's an attack on the author, don't you think?_

(Shrug) Quinn effectively attacked and discredited herself by posting that
Tweet. It's fair to bring it up when suggesting that she might not be the most
qualified person to write articles on subjects related to cryptography and
information security.

If there are _any_ subjects that don't benefit from uninformed opinions posted
by dilettantes, cryptography and security would be near the top of the list.

~~~
ceol

        > Quinn effectively attacked and discredited herself by 
        > posting that Tweet.
    

That comes off rather victim-blamey. Nothing about what she tweeted paints her
as ill-informed. In fact, quite the opposite: I would argue the crypto
community is _very_ privileged. It requires higher level education in a STEM
field and access to modern computers.

~~~
revelation
Since we have that sorted out, can we then come to the core point of your
argument here? Namely, what does this have to do with bad or good crypto?

Cryptography is math. Its no soft science where someone can push his agenda
through careful interpretation of statistics. The background of the people
researching it is irrelevant.

But none of that is important. Important is what happens when you use terrible
crypto in a terrible country: your data will be siphoned off at the backend
and western IT people with the same high level education will trivially
decipher it.

And that is why its necessary to criticize people pushing magic crypto
systems. It literally kills!

~~~
ceol
Well, the background of crypto researchers was core to Quinn's "privilege"
tweet. That's one of the points the OP author touched on in his response-
response, so it was relevant here.

And of course it's necessary to scrutinize people pushing crypto systems or
tools that claim to do something no one has been able to do before! That's not
what the Wired post was about, though. It was about _how_ the OP author
_specifically_ targeted the Wired piece's author and made it seem like she was
either too incompetent to write an article about Cryptocat or that she wrote
the article because she hates the crypto community (still don't understand how
he came to that conclusion.)

------
evan_
I'm thinking Singel's -ism meter is just screwed up, here's a twitter post
where he seems to equate the driver-bicyclist relationship to racism, and in a
somewhat offensive way to boot:

<https://twitter.com/rsingel/status/232719063854510082>

~~~
bybjorn
John Lennon, apparently:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_Is_the_Nigger_of_the_World

------
snowwrestler
To me the Wired piece reads like the sort of defensive rebuttal that is
usually best to put in a drawer for a day or two before sending (or in this
case publishing). It's long, wandering, needlessly emotional (appeal to
sexism), and in places reflects an inaccurate reading of Chris's piece.

------
ebbv
Wired really sucks a lot of the time. This is an unfortunate example of just
how bad it can be.

------
cyber
Sadly, there is a growing contingent amongst the computer security/hacker
scene who, instead of actually looking to improve things, are looking to be
indignant about something.

A major conference has recently had to deal with issues stemming from a
complaint about harassment that wasn't actually a complaint. It was never
reported to staff, nor venue, nor law enforcement. Instead, twitter and blog
posts were used.

------
rickmb
I still remember when Wired was relevant. You know, back in the 90s, before
they declared the web dead for the first time.

~~~
smackfu
You mean the Wired who has been getting tons of press for their reporting on
the Apple iCloud debacle last weekend? That irrelevant Wired?

~~~
sn0rd
That whole Apple thing was staged. It started as a thought experiment over
beers and was carried to its natural conclusion in the name of page views and
awareness.

Wired has oscillated between relevant and annoying for many, many years now.

The type of attack they 'documented' is well-known and has been discussed in
many circles. This is part of the reason they've had so many quotes from 'the
hacker'. It's all about pushing the right buttons. Apple stuff is news.

Life is awesome. Enjoy.

~~~
tesseractive
Is this your pet theory, or do you have some way of documenting that it was
staged? And do you have examples of records on the internet where this attack
was discussed before?

I'm not saying that you are mistaken, nor am I saying that you are lying. But
I can't accept an assertion like that at face value without seeing some
supporting evidence.

~~~
sn0rd
I can accept that. I don't have anything that I'm willing to share. To be
sure, I'm not suggesting that any of the companies (Apple, Google, Etc.) were
willing participants.

Likewise, if you're looking for a discussion of this exact implementation of
exploiting the trust relationships created by users of cloud services, you'll
not find it.

That said, exploiting trust relationships that users naturally create in the
cloud, is common. This is just one specific attack, designed to get page views
and raise awareness.

It worked flawlessly. Life is but a dream.

~~~
smackfu
Ha!

>I don't have anything that I'm willing to share.

That's a great phrase than can truthfully mean both:

"I have stuff that I'm not willing to share." and "I don't got nothing."

~~~
sn0rd
I'm going to channel Harry Reid on this one and ask that my claims are
disproved. Let's see the logs. Let's see the communications with "The Hacker".

------
mattbeck
Wow, wired really has hit a low point here.

This feels like little more than linkbaiting trolling, but I suspect that it
was in earnest which is almost worse.

------
void-star
This sort of nonsense isn't surprising from tech media at all. However, I am
genuinely surprised and dismayed to see it coming out of Threat Level.

------
btipling
I hope users of crytpo software in critical situations look to more than Wired
Magazine to evaluate the safety and reliability of their software.

------
incision
I can't say I'm surprised.

I've read some great stories in the Wired print magazine over the years, but
their online presence is typically Gawkeresque.

------
benatkin
The header of the blog post is broken in Firefox. I had to remove an element
with Firebug in order to read the first couple paragraphs.

------
gyardley
If the author's going to complain about hype in news coverage, perhaps he
shouldn't be a leading contributor to one-sided news coverage like the Wall
Street Journal's 'What They Know'.

Or is hype in news coverage only a problem when it's hype the author
personally disagrees with?

~~~
jopt
Isn't that a Tu Queue fallacy?

~~~
gyardley
It would be if I was trying to invalidate the author's argument, which I
wasn't - I was just pointing out his hypocrisy.

~~~
jopt
That's fair I suppose.

------
rdl
He's right that WSJ security coverage is by far the best of any "normal"
publication. I also think WSJ AllThingsD is probably the best general startup
coverage (and also headed by a woman).

------
gavanwoolery
Sexism debate in 3...2...1...

------
franzus
ITT: snake oil people talk about snake oil things

------
ten_fingers
Sorry, Ms. Singel, your sexism card has expired.

