Your Internet Friends Are Real

Let’s Really Be Friends
A defense of online intimacy

By Kyle Chayka The New Republic

In 1997, a writer and web developer named Paul Ford walked into a sushi restaurant in midtown Manhattan to meet a group of strangers. These were bloggers—a term not yet widely in use—who, along with Ford, formed a tight-knit vanguard of individuals publishing personal writing online. Ford had been building experimental personal websites since 1993, and had made a name for himself online with his lyrical missives on programming esoterica and New York dating mishaps. He’d never met the other bloggers IRL (In Real Life, a phrase that likely had even less currency then than blogger). He was excited to finally get the chance to do so.

When Ford arrived at the restaurant, however, he froze with anxiety. “I was 22 and the Internet was new and everyone was sitting around a table chatting and laughing,” Ford told me. “Who went to parties where no one knew each other?” He stood just inside the door and surreptitiously watched the group clustered around a table. “I left after ten minutes.”

This incident remains as strikingly plausible today as it did two decades ago. Relationships that travel from the Internet to the nondigital world, or navigate a space somewhere in between, have retained that same patina of weirdness. The stigma associated with online friendship, that persistent doubt that “real” intimacy can only be created via physical encounter, has not faded. Even in this, the Age of Social Media, when virtual interaction populates almost every facet of daily existence, online friendships are still viewed with suspicion. But they shouldn’t be. The time has come to obliterate the false distinctions between digital ties and the ones that bind us in the physical world. Our lives on Twitter and Tumblr are today a real part of our real lives. Everyone is an Internet friend.

John Suler, in his 2000 book The Psychology of Cyberspace, wrote that people “tend to separate their online lives from their offline lives.” But this is far less true today. With the launch of Friendster (2002); MySpace (2003); and, in 2004, the global behemoth Facebook, distinctions between friendship online and off grew more ambiguous. People had to decide which of their friends and acquaintances—many of whom they had not been motivated to see in years—they should befriend digitally. Facebook in particular, with its early reliance on college e-mail accounts for membership, has tied digital identity more firmly to the IRL iteration.

The perception that online relationships are somehow less real than their physical counterparts exemplifies what Nathan Jurgenson, a New York-based sociologist and researcher for the messaging platform Snapchat, calls “digital dualism.” Contemporary identities and relationships are no more or less authentic in either space. “We’re coming to terms with there being just one reality and digital is part of it, not any less real or true,” Jurgenson said. “What you do online and what you do face-to-face are completely interwoven.”

The first mainstream internet communities—and thus some of the earliest virtual friendships—didn’t emerge until the late ’80s, when commercial traffic was allowed online via private Internet service providers like The World, which launched in Massachusetts in 1989. Early online social groups were largely restricted to specific-interest cliques that hewed to the medium’s nerd origins. Usenet, an e-mail and file-sharing client created to sort news by subject, first launched in 1980; the WELL, a dial-up bulletin-board system co-founded in 1985 by hippie futurist and editor of the utopian Whole Earth Catalog Stewart Brand, became a popular gathering point for Grateful Dead fans. IRC, or Internet Relay Chats, were likewise segregated along topical channels, like #anime or #hardware or #geek. The platform peaked in the 1990s with Eris Free Network, and today is largely reserved for illicit hacker groups with a need for anonymity.

In this early period, crossover from the digital world and into the real one remained rare, in part due to suspicion of the semi-anonymous nature of the Internet itself. “You don’t tend to find deep relationships online,” Douglas Rushkoff, the tech writer and thinker, told me. “And if you look for them you could easily get catfished,” Rushkoff said. (Catfish [noun]: “Someone who pretends to be someone they’re not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities, particularly to pursue deceptive online romances.” See Urban Dictionary.) For those who have grown up on the Internet, the expectations of honesty in response to the existential chat query “A/S/L?” (Age/Sex/Location) might be low. But this may not remain the case.

Online traffic in the United States increased by more than 1,000 percent between 1999 and 2003. A by-product of this growth was a narrowing of the digital divide. Enough people were online that your real friends might well know your online-only ones, who could then be mentally reclassified simply friends-of-friends. IRL meetings became less suspect. Web communities, meanwhile, began to leave the vertical depths of niche interest and join the mainstream. In 1999, a web designer named Matthew Haughey launched MetaFilter, a general-interest online forum that is still active today. MetaFilter was designed to help users share links of compelling posts (cat videos!) from across the wider Internet. It also became known for its then-unique penchant for physical meetups. “The meetups were half shy nerds and half relatively normal people,” said Rusty Foster, a developer who founded a contemporaneous (and now largely defunct) community called Kuro5hin, which skewed toward a nerdier audience. Foster has since referred to his site as a “gated dysfunctional community.”

The first MetaFilter meetup happened in 2001, after an earthquake in Seattle. Discussion of the natural phenomenon as it happened caused the members to notice that they lived in close proximity to each other. Once it was safe to go out, they decided to gather at a bar. It went so well that Haughey soon devoted a section of his site to planning such events. Haughey attended his first meetup at a Belgian frites spot in San Francisco in 2002. “I was incredibly nervous, because I didn’t know anyone,” he said. But his fears proved misplaced. “It was really a great experience. One of the guys had the greatest username: Fishfucker. 

Fishfucker turned out to be a really nice dude.” Meetups eventually became big business. In 2002, a start-up called Meetup was launched that managed online social circles with an IRL component, charging group organizers for added features. The site now boasts over 180,000 Meetups with focuses ranging from New Age philosophy to “geek physique.” (The Internet’s ability to convene niche cultures has never flagged.)

The anxiety still lingering around Internet friendship is a legacy of a particular antiquated conception of online life—a sense that “the Net,” like jetpacks and the Segway, was going to be a lot cooler than it has proven to be. The 1980s-era techno-utopian vision of “cyberspace” as a separate, and perhaps even pure, Matrix-style realm of glowing tubes and binary code was a false one. “At no point was there ever a cyberspace,” Jurgenson said. “It was always deeply about this one reality.” The Internet is shopping for knitted caps and sharing coupons for bad meals and enduring comments from sexist strangers. It has always included an element of real life difficulty, and the primordial web denizens knew it. Now, the rest of us do, too. We once fetishized cyberspace as sexy and revolutionary. Today it’s just normal.

Online friendships make it clear—and forgive the debt to Facebook—that the way we friend now has changed. Intimacy now develops in both digital and physical realms, often crossing freely between the two. If we accept the equal value of virtual friendships to their IRL analogues (perhaps even doing away with the pejorative acronym), we open ourselves up to a range of new possibilities for connection.

“The Internet represents a broadening of the spectrum of relationships we can have,” Jenna Wortham, a New York Times Magazine writer known for the prolificacy of her online social life, told me. “I have lots of online-, Gchat-only friendships and I love them. I’m very comfortable with the fact that I don’t know [these people] in real life and I don’t have any plans to.” The merit of these friendships lies in their mutability—in your pocket, on your screen, in your living room. Discarding the distinction between real and virtual friendship does not doom us to a society in which tweets, chat, and e-mail are our only points of contact. It just means that the stranger we meet every day on the other side of our screens will no longer be a stranger, but someone that we know and trust.

Real ID Online? New Federal Online Identity Plan Raises Privacy and Free Speech Concerns

Coauthored by Seth Schoen

The White House recently released a draft of a troubling plan titled "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace" (NSTIC). In previous iterations, the project was known as the "National Strategy for Secure Online Transactions" and emphasized, reasonably, the private sector's development of technologies to secure sensitive online transactions. But the recent shift to "Trusted Identities in Cyberspace" reflects a radical — and concerning — expansion of the project’s scope.

The draft NSTIC now calls for pervasive, authenticated digital IDs and makes scant mention of the unprecedented threat such a scheme would pose to privacy and free speech online. And while the draft NSTIC "does not advocate for the establishment of a national identification card" (p. 6), it’s far from clear that it won’t take us dangerously far down that road. Because the draft NSTIC is vague about many basic points, the White House must proceed with caution and avoid rushing past the risks that lay ahead. Here are some of our concerns.

Is authentication really the answer?

Probably the biggest conceptual problem is that the draft NSTIC seems to place unquestioning faith in authentication — a system of proving one's identity — as an approach to solving Internet security problems. Even leaving aside the civil liberties risks of pervasive online authentication, computer security experts question this emphasis. As prominent researcher Steven Bellovin notes:


The biggest problem [for Internet security] was and is buggy code. All the authentication in the world won't stop a bad guy who goes around the authentication system, either by finding bugs exploitable before authentication is performed, finding bugs in the authentication system itself, or by hijacking your system and abusing the authenticated connection set up by the legitimate user. All of these attacks have been known for years.

A Real ID Society?

The draft NSTIC says that, instead of a national ID card, it "seeks to establish an ecosystem of interoperable identity service providers and relying parties where individuals have the choice of different credentials or a single credential for different types of online transactions," which can be obtained "from either public or private sector identity providers." (p. 6) In other words, the governments want a lot of different companies or organizations to be able to do the task of confirming that a person on the Internet is who he or she claims to be.

Decentralized or federated ID management systems are possible, but like all ID systems, they definitely pose significant privacy issues. 1 There’s little discussion of these issues, and in particular, there’s no attention to how multiple ID's might be linked together under a single umbrella credential. A National Academies study, Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy, warned that multiple, separate, unlinkable credentials are better for both security and privacy (pp. 125-132). Yet the draft NSTIC doesn’t discuss in any depth how to prevent or minimize linkage of our online IDs, which would seem much easier online than offline, and fails to discuss or refer to academic work on unlinkable credentials (such as that of Stefan Brands, or Jan Camenisch and Anna Lysyanskaya).

Providing a uniform online ID system could pressure providers to require more ID than necessary. The video game company Blizzard, for example, recently indicated it would implement a verified ID requirement for its forums before walking back the proposal only after widespread, outspoken criticism from users.

Pervasive online ID could likewise encourage lawmakers to enact access restrictions for online services, from paying taxes to using libraries and beyond. Website operators have argued persuasively that they cannot be expected to tell exactly who is visiting their sites, but that could change with a new online ID mechanism. Massachusetts recently adopted an overly broad online obscenity law; it takes little imagination to believe states would require NSTIC implementation individuals to be able to access content somehow deemed to be "objectionable."

Anonymity

The draft NSTIC "envisions" that a blogger will use "a smart identity card from her home state" to "authenticate herself for . . . [a]nonymously posting blog entries." (p. 4) But how is her blog anonymous when it’s directly associated with a state-issued ID card?

The proposal mistakenly conflates trusting a third party to not reveal your identity with actual anonymity — where third parties don’t know your identity. When Thomas Paine anonymously published Common Sense in 1776, he didn’t secretly register with the British Crown.

Indeed, the draft NSTIC barely recognizes the value of anonymous speech, whether in public postings or private email, or anonymous browsing via systems like Tor. Nor does it address issues about re-identification, e.g. the ability to take different sets of de-identified data and link them so as to re-identify individuals.

Bellovin credits the draft NSTIC for suggesting the use of attribute credentials rather than identity credentials — that is, using credentials that could establish that you're authorized to do something without saying who you are. But, as he puts it, "We need ways to discourage collection of identity information unless identity is actually needed to deliver the requested service," and the draft NSTIC doesn't seem to address this.
Privacy, Identity Theft and Surveillance

The draft NSTIC seems to presuppose widespread use of smart ID cards. In one example, it envisions that an individual will use "a smart identity card from her home state" to "authenticate herself for a variety of online services," presumably modeled upon driver’s licenses. (p. 4)

One major concern, acknowledged briefly in the draft, is whether people's computers can really be secure enough to be used for these purposes — smart ID cards or no smart ID cards. As noted above, the vast majority of privacy and authentication vulnerabilities stem from buggy software, and when a computer is trivial to compromise, its users’ credentials are easy to steal. The NSTIC proposal could, in fact, decrease user privacy and enable identity theft: once a user’s digital ID is stolen, it could be used to both pose as the user and access all the user’s accounts and data.

Consider, for example, the proposal to use a state digital ID card to access health records and online banking. What happens next time you lose your wallet?

Furthermore, by consolidating your credentials, the NSTIC plan may provide the government with a centralized means of surveilling your online accounts. And if the government issues your digital ID itself, it won’t even need to approach a third party with any kind of legal process before surveilling you.

The draft NSTIC also mentions the development of a public-key infrastructure (PKI). (pp. 15, 27) We support good, widespread encryption, which could allow people to get correct public keys reliably and possibly cut down on phishing, spam, fraud, and pretexting. But as Bruce Schneier and Carl Ellison have explained, doing PKI properly isn’t easy.2 All of their concerns apply, in some form, to the NSTIC proposal.

Another concern that’s emerged recently is whether governments could coerce certificate authorities in a PKI to issue false credentials in order to facilitate surveillance. Chris Soghoian and Sid Stamm have reported on an industry claim that governments could get "court orders" giving them access to falsified cryptographic credentials. This threat seems greater if the government itself is running the PKI.

Much more could be said. The NSTIC is only a draft, and the Department of Homeland Security and the White House sought public input online through July 19th. Because of the importance of this issue, EFF has joined with a coalition of concerned civil liberties group to ask the Administrations for a longer comment period and a way to submit more detailed comments. We hope and expect that this will be only the beginning of a public debate about ID management online.

1. See, e.g., Susan Landau et al., Achieving Privacy in a Federated Identity Management System.
2. See Ten Risks of PKI: What You're Not Being Told about Public Key Infrastructure

Google Confirms It Aims to Own Your Online ID

Amid a furor over Google+'s ban on pseudonymity and anonymity, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt just admitted the company intends to be an 'identity service"

By Mathew Ingram
Ever since Google (GOOG) launched its new Google+ social network, we and others have pointed out that the search giant clearly has more in mind than just providing a nice place for people to share photos of their pets. For one thing, Google needs to tap into the “social signals” that people provide through networks such as Facebook so it can improve its search results. There’s a larger motive, too: As Chairman and former Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt admitted during an interview in Edinburgh over the weekend, Google is taking a hard line on the real-name issue because it sees Google+ as an “identity service” or platform on which it can build other products.

Schmidt’s comments came during an interview with Andy Carvin, the National Public Radio digital editor who has become a one-man newswire during the Arab Spring revolutions.

Carvin asked the Google chairman about the company’s reasoning for pushing its real-name policies on Google+—a policy that many have criticized (including us) because it excludes potentially valuable viewpoints that might be expressed by political dissidents and others who prefer to remain anonymous. In effect, Schmidt said Google isn’t interested in changing its policies to accommodate those kinds of users: If people want to remain anonymous, he said, then they shouldn’t use Google+.

Google+ is primarily an “identity service”It was the former Google CEO’s remarks about the rationale for this policy that were most interesting: He didn’t just say—as Vic Gundotra, the Google executive in charge of the new social network has—that having real names maintains a certain tone of behavior that is preferable to anonymous forums (an argument that online-community pioneer Derek Powazek has also made). According to Carvin, Schmidt said the reason Google needs users with real names is that the company sees Google+ as the core of an identity platform it is building that can be used for other things:

He (Eric) replied by saying that G+ was built primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally it depends on people using their real names if they’re going to build future products that leverage that information.

As Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson noted in a blog post in response to Schmidt’s comments, this is an admission by the company that it wants to be an identity gatekeeper.

Others have made similar observations since the launch of Google+. Programmer and online veteran Dave Winer, for example, said—when the real-name policy first started to become a hot-button issue—that Google’s purpose was clearly to “provide identity in a commerce-ready way. And to give them information about what you do on the Internet, without obfuscation of pseudonyms.” In his blog post, Fred Wilson said:

It begs the question of whom Google built this service for? You or them. And the answer to why you need to use your real name in the service is because they need you to.

Real names are more valuable to advertisersAs I tried to outline in a recent GigaOM Pro research report entitled “How social search is changing the search industry” (subscription required), there’s an obvious search-related rationale for launching a social network such as Google+ because indexing and mining that kind of activity can help the company provide better “social search” results. But the real-name issue has more to do with Google’s other business: namely, advertising. Users who are anonymous or pseudonymous are arguably a lot less valuable to advertisers than those who choose to attach their real identitie—including their age, gender, location, and further demographic details—to their accounts.

What kind of services is Schmidt referring to when he says that Google is looking at Google+ as an identity platform that could support other services? Dave Winer thinks the company wants to effectively become a bank—something he suspects Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) are interested in as well. Apple and Google both seem interested in NFC technology (near-field communication), which turns mobile devices into electronic wallets; having a social network tied to an individual user’s identity would come in handy. Ross Dawson says Google wants to build a “reputation engine,” using Google+ as a platform.

Whatever its specific interests, Google clearly sees Facebook as a competitive threat, not just because it has developed a gigantic social network with hundreds of millions of devoted users, but because it has also become a kind of identity gatekeeper—with tens of millions of those devoted users happily logging into other websites and services with their Facebook credentials, thus sending Facebook valuable data about what they are doing and where they are doing it. The ubiquitous “like” button provides even further data, something Google is also trying to mimic with its +1 buttons.

Google needs a horse in the identity raceThe bottom line is that Google needs to have a horse in this identity race. It has been unable to create one so far. The growth of Google+ provides a reason for people to create Google profiles, and that data—along with their activity on the network and through +1 buttons—goes into the vast Google cyberplex where it can be crunched and indexed and codified in a hundred ways. The more people who decide to do it, the better it gets, both for Google and for its advertising strategy. As the saying goes: If you’re not paying for it, then you’re the product being sold.

That’s the obvious background to the real-name issue, something Eric Schmidt has effectively confirmed with his remarks in Edinburgh. It remains to be seen if users like the position that puts them in.

Collateral Damage in the War on Anonymity

Friday, August 12, 2011 by Creators.com
by David Sirota

From warrantless wiretapping to ever-present surveillance cameras, our world is right now in the midst of a long war on anonymity.

In the media and political arenas, we've seen paparazzi culture famously fetishize the outing of anonymous iconoclasts, from Watergate's Deep Throat (Mark Felt) to a top CIA agent working on weapons of mass destruction (Valerie Plame). Likewise, in our communities, we now know that we are almost always being monitored in highly trafficked parks, malls, airports and stadiums -- and as Slate recently reported, we may soon have apps on all of our smartphones that let us identify random faces in a crowd.

Teeming with incognito bloggers and commenters, the Internet seemed to be the last bulwark against this trend -- a rare public space that let us broadcast opinions from the shadows. But even cyberspace will likely be exposed to the white-hot spotlight of identity, as a new campaign for disclosure now starts in earnest.

Launched in response to cyber-bullying, this campaign made headlines last month when Facebook executive Randi Zuckerberg declared that "anonymity on the Internet has to go away." Her statement echoed that of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who previously called for "true transparency and no anonymity" on the Web.

As advertising corporations always seeking new information about their users, Facebook and Google have an obvious financial stake in these positions. Regardless of these firms' particular motives, though, they set standards for the entire Internet. So when their luminaries declare war on anonymity, it's presumably a fait accompli.

Thus, the key question: Will the end of Internet anonymity be good or bad for society?

The big potential benefit of users having to attach real identities to their Internet personas is more constructive dialogue.

The downside, though, is that true whistle-blowers will lose one of their most essential tools.

Though today's journalists often grant establishment sources anonymity to attack weaker critics, anonymity's real social value is rooted in helping the powerless challenge the powerful. Think WikiLeaks, which exemplifies how online anonymity provides insiders the cover they need to publish critical information without fear of retribution. Eliminating such cover will almost certainly reduce the kind of leaks that let the public occasionally see inconvenient truths.

Encouraging civility while preserving avenues of dissent is a tough balancing act, and the core debate over whether one should have a right to anonymity in public spaces is long overdue. However, it comes with a danger -- namely, that legitimate arguments for disclosure will be expanded to justify illegitimate spying on private interactions.

If you think that's far-fetched, recall that this is precisely what happened in Congress last month, when a House committee moved forward a proposal forcing Internet service providers to keep logs of all online activity by their users.

Clearly, if it ultimately becomes law, this legislation would undermine not just anonymity in public spaces, but privacy in general. Should it succeed, we may achieve transparency, but at far too high a cost.

What Do Online Advertisers Know About You?

by Tim Jones AUGUST 4TH, 2010

In a groundbreaking new series titled "What They Know," the Wall Street Journal is taking a close look at the information that online advertisers collect about you as you browse the Web:

"The tracking files represent the leading edge of a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers who are in effect establishing a new business model for the Internet: one based on intensive surveillance of people to sell data about, and predictions of, their interests and activities, in real time."

What the industry knows about you may surprise you. The articles examine the world of tracking cookies, and other less well-known tracking technologies like flash cookies and beacons. Theyfound that "the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning."

Using information gathered this way, the advertising industry is able to accurately guess substantial information about you — often including your gender, age, income, marital status, credit-rating, and whether you have children or own a home. The findings are used not only to determine what advertisements you see, but sometimes to decide what kind of discounts or credit card offers you're allowed access to.

The series also reveals the stunning story of how a 2008 power struggle at Microsoft Corp.undermined Web privacy standards. When the product design team behind Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 proposed adding stronger privacy safeguards, Microsoft's advertising department objected. The software features would have granted Web users substantially better privacy and protection from tracking than exists today. But Microsoft, seeking to maintain alliances with the online advertising industry, ultimately rejected the features. The story shows that the advertising industry has considerably more influence over web-browser design than one might expect.

The advertising executives interviewed in the series emphasize that the information collected is anonymous — in theory. But the series' fourth article — titled "On the Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only" — describes how de-anonymization techniques can be used to extrapolate actual identities from the information gathered.

The "What They Know" project is already the largest and highest-profile investigation by the mainstream media into consumer Web privacy to date. No doubt more articles are on the way, and the project's Twitter account is providing many smaller updates. It's already affecting the conversation in Washington DC, where important efforts by both Congress and the FTC are underway to rein in this dangerous and unregulated industry.

So, kudos to the team at the Wall Street Journal. Hopefully their efforts will encourage more serious approaches to privacy from regulators, law-makers, software companies, advertising companies and ordinary consumers.

CNN anchors attack the scourge of anonymity

BY GLENN GREENWALD |  SATURDAY, JUL 24, 2010 (updated below - Update II)

CNN's Kyra Phillips and John Roberts spent a good five minutes yesterday expressing serious concern over what they called "the dark side" of the Internet:  the plague of "anonymous bloggers" who are "a bunch of cowards" for not putting their names on what they say, and who use this anonymity to spread "conspiracy," "lunacy," "extremism" and false accusations (video below).   The segment included excerpts from an interview with Andrew Keene, author of Cult of the Amateur:  How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture, who explained that the Real Media must serve as "gatekeepers" to safeguard the public against the dangers of anonymity on the Internet.  Roberts demanded that bloggers should "have the courage at the very least to put your name on it," while Phillips announced:  "something is going to have to be done legally. . . . these people have to be held accountable, they're a bunch of cowards."

These CNN journalists have a very good point, of course:  it was, after all, Internet bloggers -- using the scourge of anonymity -- who convinced the nation of a slew of harmful conspiracy theories:  Saddam had WMD,an alliance with Al Qaeda, and responsibility for the anthrax mailings.  Anonymity is also what allowed bloggers to smear Richard Jewell, Wen Ho Lee, and Steven Hatfill with totally false accusations that destroyed their lives and reputation, and it's what enabled bloggers to lie to the nation about Jessica Lynch's heroic firefight, countless U.S. airstrikes, and a whole litany of ongoing lies about our current wars.  And remember when anonymous bloggers spewed all sorts of nasty, unaccountable bile about Sonia Sotomayor's intellect and temperament?  Just as Roberts lamented, blogs -- as a result of anonymity -- are the "Wild West of the Internet . . . . like a giant world-wide bathroom wall where you can write anything about anyone."

Indeed, what's especially noble about establishment media journalists such as those on CNN, what vests them with so much deserved Credibility, is how much they hate anonymity because of how cowardly and unaccountable it is.  There are several examples from the last 24 hours alone which demonstrate these high journalistic standards.  Here is a Washington Post article from yesterday by Philip Rucker on the criticisms of the Obama administration from the Left:

"As a party, we respect the role that people like [Markos Moulitsas] and his blog play and understand that their role is to try to push the envelope further than it might be pushed otherwise," said a senior Democratic official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "This has been the busiest and most successful Congress since the Great Depression and it's been accomplished with big majorities. I don't think anyone can argue that it would be better if Democrats are in the minority or have smaller majorities."

So there, the Post granted anonymity to a "senior Democratic official" in order to reveal how great the Democratic Party is and how vital it is that they win as many seats as possible in the election.  Then there's this U.S. News & World Report article from yesterday on Newt Gingrich's presidential run:

Conservatives we talked to said that Gingrich is on to a good political issue should he run for the presidency. "Newt is going to be a very strong candidate," said one supporter, a Washington political strategist and fundraiser.

There, U.S. News granted anonymity to a supporter of Gingrich to say what a strong candidate Gingrich is.  And then there's this extremely important and probing article from The New York Times today on the hurt feelings which many friends of Bill and Hillary Clinton (i.e., their large donors) are experiencing as a result of not having been invited to Chelsea's wedding:

"I'm good enough to borrow a plane from, but not good enough to be invited to the wedding?” complained one Clinton friend, who remembered the times he handed over his jet and his pilot to take Bill Clinton around the country but had not landed a coveted invitation to Chelsea Clinton’s nuptials. . . . "I'm sure there are some people who are lobbying discreetly," said someone who has known the Clintons for decades. "If they're on the list, they will ballyhoo it quietly, and if they’re not on the list, their noses will be out of joint. I know some people whose noses are out of joint." (Like most F.O.B.'s -- Friends of Bill -- the person did not want to be quoted by name, swearing by the wedding’s code of silence.) . . . "It's not a political rally, it's not a state affair," said one longtime Clinton supporter who was not invited but was still nervous about upsetting the former president. 

Click here to see but one of countless examples of how much CNN itself hates cowardly anonymity.  The catty, harmful insults in the 2004 campaign that John Kerry "looks French" and John Edwards is the "Breck Girl" were introduced to the public by The New York Times' Adam Nagourney, quoting an anonymous Bush aide.  And, of course, pick any random Politico article from any day which shapes cable news coverage and Washington chatter for the week, and it's certain to be based in this formula:  one anonymous person said X and another anonymous person denied this.

At least anonymous bloggers are very clear and truthful about what they are:  often citizens whose jobs or other interests prevent them from attaching their names to their political expression.  By stark contrast, all of these establishment media outlets perpetrate a total fraud on the public by pretending that they have standards for when anonymity will be used even though, as these examples from the last 24 hours alone prove, they routinely violate those alleged standards for absolutely no reason.  It just never ceases to amaze how much establishment journalists like Roberts and Phillips love to rail against the Evils of Internet Anonymity when reckless, cowardly anonymity -- for purposes ranging from catty, trivial gossip to pernicious propaganda and everything in between -- is a central tool of their "profession" and of the political class they cover.

[The most noteworthy part of this segment might actually have come toward the end, when Roberts -- out of absolutely nowhere -- volunteered this creepy confession: "I always caution young people: never post a naked photograph of yourself on the Internet"; if there's anything needing greater attention, it might be Roberts' bizarre propensity for walking around starting conversations with "young people" about that].

UPDATE:  As several commenters noted, this is the same Kyra Phillips responsible for one of the more disgusting television moments of the last decade.  In April, 2003, she interviewed the doctor treating Ali Abbas, a 12-year-old Iraqi boy who had just lost 15 relatives, including his father, pregnant mother and three siblings, as well as both of his arms, in an errant American missile strike on the Baghdad suburb where he lived.  While this child had burns all over his body, some of them infected, putting him in constant pain, Phillips asked his doctor this question:

Doctor, does he understand why this war took place? Has he talked about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the meaning? Does he understand it?

As Joan Walsh put it at the time:  Phillips asked this "question" after the doctor explained that Ali said he hopes no other "children in the war will suffer like what he suffered"; "Phillips seemed shocked by Ali's apparent inability to understand we were only trying to help him."  Walsh wrote that the boy's physician had "to explain [to Phillips] that the doctors were more interested in treating the boy than indoctrinating him:  'Actually, we don't discuss this issue with him because he is -- the burn cases, and the type of injury, he's in very bad psychological trauma'."  I have no doubt that Kyra "Operation Iraqi Freedom" Phillips would be eager to explain to you how she -- unlike those hordes of wretched, anonymous, partisan Internet bloggers -- is an Objective Journalist who doesn't allow any opinions to infect her "reporting."  Of course, since the opinions she expresses are the Right Ones, she -- unlike Octavia Nasr -- still has a job on CNN, crusading for High Journalistic Standards.

UPDATE II:  Jim Henley notes the other strange aspect of this whole episode:  Phillips and Roberts used the fraudulent Shirley Sherrod video as their jumping off point to attack "anonymous bloggers," but, as Henley says:  "Andrew Breitbart is a lot of things, but 'anonymous' is none of them. The Sherrod lie got as far as it did because, in CNN-spokesmodel circles, Breitbart is a celebrity. A trusted brand. That's why everyone from the Emm Ess Emm to the Obama administration jumped on the lie so quickly."  Indeed, the Sherrod episode negates rather than bolsters the point about anonymity which the CNN readers thought they were making, since the primary culprit in that fraud used his real name.

People spill a lot of ink on complex explanations for the profound flaws of the establishment media, but often, the proximate cause is simply the pure denseness of media stars (though they are chosen to be media stars by the corporations that own them because of, not despite, this denseness, which leads back to the more complex questions about what establishment media outlets are and the functions they intend to fulfill).