> > We understand that nearly everyone who provides material to a reporter is doing so in ways that reflect their worldview, agenda or biases. We have long held that those motives are irrelevant if the information is reliable.
> This is an … insane statement? — both rationally and morally. Truth can't ever be a sole criteria for publishing. It's necessary, but not sufficient. To suggest otherwise ought to flunk someone out of first year journalism school.
This is a misinterpretation of the quoted text. Propublica says that the motive of the source is not part of the set of criteria for publishing (unless it the information is unreliable), not that reliability is the sole criterion for publishing. Propublica's article explicitly says that privacy is a legitimate concern. "One of the billionaires mentioned in this article objected, arguing that publishing personal tax information is a violation of privacy. We have concluded that the public interest in knowing this information at this pivotal moment outweighs that legitimate concern."
>One of the billionaires mentioned in this article objected, arguing that publishing personal tax information is a violation of privacy. We have concluded that the public interest in knowing this information at this pivotal moment outweighs that legitimate concern
I don't see why they couldn't have anonymized the data [bracketed] and have the same impact. Exact figures are less relevant than providing a picture of what's going on. I think the only reason is to doxx and "shame" or whatever unrelated rationale they have.
And why isn't Twitter suspending their account for doxxing --which they appear to apply unevenly but usually not levelled against birds of a feather.
As Arnold says, this stuff has been known for years or decades but it has had little or no impact. It's well known that specific cases are more persuasive than generalities, so it looks like ProPublica is trying to use that effect to spark more discussion about wealth taxes.
Edit: I don't agree with what ProPublica is doing here, but I can understand how the ends might justify the means from their perspective.
I dunno. I don’t think it’s right, if the person has not done something illegal.
What’s next, some news org wants Biden out, they don’t have a legit source, but a foreign source has dirt on him, now that’s cool cuz they want to change public opinion of Biden?
Was the pearl clutching around Biden’s son’s laptop material being illegally obtained just a flimsy excuse? [uh oh, it’s doxxing, it’s doxxing... suspend their Twitter, Jack are you listening?]
> I don’t think it’s right, if the person has not done something illegal
Public interest is the right threshold. Just because somebody has done something illegal, does not mean that their privacy is worthless. Likewise, hypocrisy is not illegal, but documenting the hypocrisy of the powerful is often in the public interest.
You can be a perfectly moral denteologian (that is, a person that believes in moral rules, not in moral objective functions) and be a billionaire.
A second possibility: you can be a utilitarian, and believe that positive sum trades should always be taken (untenable position as this is (1)) and think you are taking one such trade. That is the claim Elon Musk seems to be making: This money today will save human lifes (electric cars reducing climate change) and increase the future number of lifes worth living in the cosmos (spacex)
(1)
On the untenability and self-destructiveness of "always take positive sum choices, even if they harm you"
1) living an American middle class life while children starve might be similarly morally reprehensible
2) Not killing oneself and donating ones organs (saves what? 10 lives?) might be similarly morally reprehensible
>since wealth has diminishing marginal utility, wealth transfer programs are inherently positive-sum -- and thus, accumulation of wealth so far beyond human need is negative-sum.
Retort from first year philosophy: "if this is the case, why aren't you donating most of your disposable to starving kids in africa? Surely that would have higher utility than buying yourself an iphone or macbook?"
> since wealth has diminishing marginal utility, wealth transfer programs are inherently positive-sum -- and thus, accumulation of wealth so far beyond human need is negative-sum.
Is this really the case? The wealth of most millionaires is probably mostly in bank accounts, but only once you have hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in one place are you able to coordinate megaprojects: space travel, vaccine manufacture, clean transport, chip fabs, Stuxnet...
> Since billionaires get that way by being better at investing, the theory that poor people inherently put money to better use is not persuasive.
The claim is that poor people’s use is better for society (positive externalities) not for the poor person. That billionaires are better at assuring that any negative impacts of their transactions are externalized, and insuring internalized gains, is clear, but not the point.
I’m saying that the fact that billionaires get to be billionaires by a combination of ability and inclination at maximizing their personal benefits from transactions, while true, doesn’t provide even slight counterevidence to the claim it was offered to rebut.
These billionaires are significant public people enough that this absolutely falls in the public interest enough to warrant disclosing their identities. Same with politicians. There is legal precedence for this and the norm in journalism.
What? Who says so? A politician politicking or a person trading on their looks or public stage persona certainly can expect some invasion of privacy, but even they don’t deserve illegal means of information gathering[1] even less a person just because they happen to be billionaires.
“Norms” don’t define things as right. I’m pretty sure we can think of some dark examples.
[1]I think I read about something called “The Watergate Scandal” about illegal gathering of information...
Elon Musk isn’t trading on his public stage persona?
That aside, I guess I just don’t have much sympathy. If certain “rules” are gonna apply to billionaires and not normal people, that seems fine by me. It might seem “biased” or “unfair” to some people, but hey: Who ever said we were operating in a “fair” context to begin with? Sure this kind of bias could be turned against more vulnerable people, it already is, it’s about time it got turned against the people at the top.
As someone who works in the field (government not journalism) with similar data (not IRS data) and has watched others have to implement various privacy laws (including the same federal ones the IRS has to follow on the matter), there are also requirements on the minimum number of data-points when releasing information.
For instance, an aggregate number of only 10 data-points is enough for people inside those 10 data-points to band together and out the real information of the remaining people through collective action, as an example. There are thousands of similar contingencies planned for.
So if you publish this data redacted, it's still a violation of the privacy laws because you can figure out easily who is whom since there are only a few billionaires and there's enough information provided to narrow down people's identity by looking at public information.
As for Twitter or whatever, I believe the law technically was violated only by the person who handed the data to the journalists. After that the journalists can't be held accountable unless they aided in some way in obtaining or they directly requested the data from the individual or group or whomever it was that did this.
Honestly, though, this is why people in these positions are held to extremely high standards and it ends up being frustrating when others fall through like this. It's too easy to occur, and these roles are rarely compensated well or have any "backup" for technical tasks since it's all based on who organizations trust, so they can't hire anyone to help and we end up thinly spread.
Add a small dash of political or financial incentive and suddenly the data you have been working to design to protect from Russian hackers becomes technologically meaningless when someone just leaks it who has direct access. I'm surprised there aren't more of these happening given the dire straits many of us are in, out in the wild-west on our own with nobody to even talk to about it and nobody willing to work in government (or to not be assumed to be trustworthy enough to have access).
You can of course disagree with their reasoning, but Arnold—who claims to be, it is worth noting, a paid PR flack for tech companies—is being disingenuous* to suggest that ProPublica claimed their "sole criteria for publishing" is "truth".
* By which I mean, to be perfectly clear, he's a liar.
lol at "paid flack". Brb gonna update my LinkedIn.
Anyway, I awarded a correction bounty here. I'd said in the same piece "if your only criteria for publishing are some measure of verification and some measure of newsworthiness", but used poor phrasing in saying "sole criteria" prior. I don't think it was likely to mislead the fair reader. But a mistake is a mistake, and I'm happy to own it.
Flack is a pejorative, and really speaks to spokespeople, which I'm not.
I write all the time about what my day job is, and I regularly disclose it whenever there is even an vague intersection with a story I'm writing. It's not a secret!
Lots of people drift between comms and public writing. When there's a perception of conflict, they disclose. As do I. Pretty routine.
"Delaying a tax is not avoiding a tax. Tax avoidance is a term of art (distinct from tax evasion) that speaks to maximizing deductions/credits and optimizing income categorization. ..."
Dragging debate into the minutiae distracts from the cogent moral objection. Time honored technique.
Observing that inequity is accelerating does not and should not require a CPA.
"They’re right about the laws, but incurious about why the laws are that way (not just in the US, but across the developed world).:"
Opinions differ.
You do not cite the original precedent setting court case.
Nor do you cite the prescient objections which have proven true.
Further, you do not acknowledge the central issue, nor offer any guidance or wisdom for possible remedies.
I said in that same segment "if your only criteria for publishing are some measure of verification and some measure of newsworthiness". In re-reading their piece, that's all they checked for. So what I said seems substantially accurate to me.
But as a matter of phrasing, it's true that I used "sole criteria" above, which was sloppy. So I'll award a bounty on that. See your email.
> > We understand that nearly everyone who provides material to a reporter is doing so in ways that reflect their worldview, agenda or biases. We have long held that those motives are irrelevant if the information is reliable.
> This is an … insane statement? — both rationally and morally. Truth can't ever be a sole criteria for publishing. It's necessary, but not sufficient. To suggest otherwise ought to flunk someone out of first year journalism school.
This is a misinterpretation of the quoted text. Propublica says that the motive of the source is not part of the set of criteria for publishing (unless it the information is unreliable), not that reliability is the sole criterion for publishing. Propublica's article explicitly says that privacy is a legitimate concern. "One of the billionaires mentioned in this article objected, arguing that publishing personal tax information is a violation of privacy. We have concluded that the public interest in knowing this information at this pivotal moment outweighs that legitimate concern."