[Infowarrior] - Obama wants you (to spill your secrets)

[Richard Forno]

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/11/24/online_privacy/print.html

Barack Obama wants you (to spill your secrets)

Prospective White House employees must cough up an unprecedented  
amount of detail about their online activity. Is the new  
administration being smart -- or scary?

By Michael Martin

Nov. 24, 2008 |

In his first press conference after the election, Barack Obama cracked  
a joke about Nancy Reagan holding séances in the White House. (It was  
factually inaccurate; the former first lady was into horoscopes, not  
"Hellraiser.") This provoked the administration’s first apology, but  
not the first bipartisan critique. That came a week later, with the  
release of the administration’s job application.

In 63 questions over seven pages, prospective White House employees  
are being asked — in addition to questions about finances, gun  
ownership and, possibly, flossing habits — to list “all aliases or  
‘handles’ you have used to communicate on the Internet,” everything  
they’ve written, “including, but not limited to, any posts or comments  
on blogs or other websites,” links to their Facebook or MySpace pages  
and any potentially embarrassing “electronic communication, including  
but not limited to an email, text message or instant message.”

Three, two, one, controversy! “Mr. Obama has elevated the vetting even  
beyond what might have been expected,” declared the New York Times on  
Nov. 13. TV commentators, giddy with White House puppy speculation  
only hours earlier, expressed concern. The words “intrusive” and “most  
extensive” were frequently used. Rachel Maddow raised her first  
eyebrow at the new administration. In a commentary on ABCNews.com, Sam  
Donaldson wondered if Obama would pass his own vetting (citing  
question 20, about association with controversial characters).

By now, it’s conventional wisdom that Obama’s transition team intends  
to “avoid the mistakes” of the Clinton administration, whose early  
Cabinet appointments were under-researched and ultimately sunk by  
scandals involving untaxed nannies and undocumented housekeepers. In  
that view, the prospect of a little rigor seems reassuring. The  
wounded right is almost certainly coiled to pounce on the first sign  
of indiscretion. And Sarah Palin — that improper gift that kept on  
giving — was propelled onto the national stage largely by lazy vetting.

But something about those Internet-usage questions caused a lingering  
shock. The idea of listing every blog comment you’ve ever made?  
Laughable. But the imperative to disclose every Internet alias you’ve  
ever used? Uncomfortable. Unexpected. And more than a little ironic.  
The grassroots campaign that was incubated — and largely won — on the  
Internet has now assumed the role of moral groundskeeper, parsing and  
judging the online behavior of the generation that launched it.

“It reflects, in a strange way, the relatively clean record the  
president-elect has,” says Paul Ohm, an associate professor of law at  
the University of Colorado. No one was really able to dig up dirt on  
Obama. Starting at the very top, you have someone who has laid it all  
bare and lived to see the next day. So maybe it doesn’t seem  
exceptional to ask those who want to work for him to do the same  
thing.” Obama did, after all, confess to drinking, doing drugs and  
engaging in other youthful indiscretions in his 1995 memoir, "Dreams  
 From My Father."

But how clean will Obama’s staffers have to be? Today, everyone has an  
extensive Web trail, and young and old alike have embarrassed  
themselves online, either by accident or an ignorance of potential  
repercussions. How many members of Generation O, newly roused to the  
idea of government participation, will be judged unfit because they  
were playing against rules they didn’t foresee? Will the application  
have a chilling effect, discouraging potentially qualified candidates?  
Will the administration be staffed with an army of flavorless Tracy  
Flicks, resulting in a more conservative White House than we bargained  
for, at least from a human-resources standpoint?

We don’t know. Clues will become evident only down the road — if and  
when thwarted applicants choose to blog about it. But, for now,  
privacy experts don’t agree that the application is all that  
intrusive. “It may not be a good thing or a comfortable thing, but I  
think it was to be expected in today’s information age,” says Anita L.  
Allen, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of  
Pennsylvania. “If it’s a little bit awkward, it’s because we’ve never  
had to do this before. In history, there’s never been so many  
different ways in which embarrassing, salacious or inappropriate  
conduct can go viral. It shouldn’t be surprising that an  
administration that’s raised so much money by using the Internet also  
understands, better than most, the dangers the Internet poses for  
revealing embarrassing facts about people’s lives. ”

In the application, the words “controversial” and “embarrassing”  
appear several times. But how do you define either, and what is a  
disqualifier? An impulsive rant in a comments section? An ill-advised  
foray into Second Life? Holding a beer in a Facebook photo? Who among  
us has not sent a text message — or a hundred — that might not  
embarrass us in retrospect, much less an entire presidential  
administration? In this sexy, Web-savvy new political era, must  
individuals with even a cursory interest in future government service  
comport themselves online like traditional politicians?

“One concern is: Is requesting this information a substitute for a  
moral vetting?” says Allen. “There are issues to be discussed there,  
and it might be very troubling, especially to liberals, to think that  
someone has to have led a conventionally squeaky-clean, perfect life  
in order to be qualified to work for a new administration. My guess is  
that this isn’t about morality. It’s about appearances. The Obama  
administration does not want to appear to be full of people with  
salacious backgrounds, nor does it want to have to waste time dealing  
with media publicity around an embarrassing past. There are way more  
important things to worry about right now.”

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy  
Information Center in Washington, says the questionnaire’s level of  
vetting is appropriate. “I’m not necessarily against intrusive  
questions,” he says. “What I’m concerned about is the absence of any  
notable privacy protection that would prevent the subsequent use of  
the information. It illustrates a larger problem that the United  
States has: We don’t have good privacy safeguards for the collection  
of personal data in the private sector. The Obama administration  
should be credited for the good job they’ve done so far in setting a  
high bar for ethics in government. But the transition team has dropped  
the ball in not establishing similar high standards for the privacy of  
the very detailed information they’re gathering from this  
questionnaire.”

In some ways, the application is merely an extension of corporate  
background checks that have been going on for years. “What’s being  
asked is not qualitatively different from the kind of highly personal  
information that’s been asked in the past: medical exams, drug and  
alcohol tests,” says Allen, who is accustomed to being interviewed by  
the FBI about the suitability of former students for government posts.  
“Background checks are nothing new. It feels new because the questions  
are different, but my guess is we’re going to get used to asking these  
kind of questions.”

In fact, the questionnaire may be ultimately more old school than it  
seems: Because any disclosures about online behavior are voluntary,  
they promise to be as effective as other voluntary disclosures usually  
are. If given a questionnaire about inappropriate online behavior,  
Mark Foley probably wouldn’t have owned up to his definitely  
embarrassing chat sessions with teenage boys. “I think asking the  
questions is more about setting the tone and justifying the later  
punishment,” says Ohm. “The administration would be fooling themselves  
if they think they’re immunizing themselves from scandal. Almost every  
applicant is going to withhold the truly, truly, devastatingly  
embarrassing thing that’s out there.”

The question about online handles disturbs Ohm a little more. “There,  
they’re starting to tread on personal, private anonymity in a way that  
is kind of without precedent,” he says. “I can’t think of another  
situation where someone had been compelled to give up all of their  
handles. There are very good reasons you might have an email address  
squirreled away that no one knows about, and it doesn’t seem fair to  
have to reveal that to get a job like this.”

Back to Nancy Reagan for a second. In the 2002 story collection  
"Things You Should Know," A.M. Homes published a short story that  
envisioned the former first lady leading an elaborate secret life on  
the Internet, logging on to the Psychic Friends Network as  
"Starpower," flirting with a middle-aged biker under the name "Lady  
Hawke" and joining an Alzheimer's support group as "Edith Iowa."

Like the fictional first lady, most of us have found community and  
enlightenment in anonymity. (Well, in concept.) In recent years, legal  
scholarship has held that one of the benefits of privacy is one’s  
ability to try on different masks, to be different people at different  
times. “There are quite a few very smart people who think this is very  
essential in self-development as a human being,” says Ohm. “This  
application is asking you to list all of those different masks next to  
one another, and link them all to one another: The person who did X is  
also the person who did Y and also sent e-mail V. That’s a real  
powerful unmasking. Now the administration has that document, and that  
may get into the public someday. In some ways, it is forcing us to  
violate some trust we had — it was the one thing we didn’t think we’d  
ever be asked, and to get this job we desperately want, this is what  
we have to do.”

But not all of us, not yet. “This is a fairly rarefied category of  
people. We have, regrettably, watched celebrities lose a fair amount  
of privacy over the years. This is the same sort of thing,” says Ohm.  
“On the other hand, if Obama starts asking this question of the fourth- 
tier appointees or, God forbid, career appointees, then nothing I’ve  
said would be true, and I’d be much more alarmed.”

What is clear: The release of the Obama application is the latest, and  
loudest, in a series of wakeup calls about the conflict between online  
socializing and professional opportunity, and even those who've never  
aimed a tourist's camera toward the White House -- much less a  
lifetime of ambition -- could be forgiven for taking a personal  
inventory. None of us truly knows which parts of our online selves  
we'll be asked, or expected, to proffer in the future -- or that no  
opportunity is worth that revelation. This marks a turning point in  
what online privacy is, or what we can expect it to be, and our  
ongoing negotiations between online self-expression and self-care.

“This is the new reality,” says Allen. “On one hand, we’ve moved  
forward in terms of technology. But we’ve not moved forward in terms  
of our expectations of demeanor, professionalism and judgment. We’re  
kind of living in the 1950s and the 21st century at the same time.”



-- By Michael Martin