Ben Greenberg

This is such an amazing story. Vivian Maier is like the Emily Dickinson of 20th century American photography. A theme of this blog has been what motivates—and what compels—people to commit themselves to a cause or to a practice—whether in art or in politics (or both). Vivian Maier's moving art and mysterious life seem endlessly fascinating in this respect.

I died for Beauty — but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining room —

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied —
"And I — for Truth — Themself are One —
We Brethren, are", He said —

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night —
We talked between the Rooms —
Until the Moss had reached our lips —
And covered up — our names —

(Emily Dickinson)

UPDATE: I'm not the first person to make the comparison to Emily Dickinson.

(On January 14, 1994, my father spoke at a local synagogue in Schenectady, NY, as part of their annual celebration of Dr. King. My father worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and served as special assistant to Dr. King in 1962 and 1963. The following is an excerpt from his speech. —BG)

By Paul Greenberg

Let me start by saying the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. was my boss is less important than that he was my friend. In a significant way he was your friend as well. He was a friend of humankind.

I am not going to engage in the usual eulogy or redacting of Dr. King’s career. You have heard it and or read it so much that it has become common and I am afraid a bit banal. What I would like to do in the short time we have together this Shabbes is place the King legacy in a Jewish context.

I don’t intend to raise the question of Black-Jewish relations in part because I think it has been addressed to little avail at length by our community and in part because I think what I will raise speaks to the question in a more meaningful way than the usual discussion that tries to rekindle a better past that I personally don’t think ever existed. I hope you do not find it too vain that I begin with a story out of my own childhood.

I Was a Stranger in a Strange Land

I don’t remember whether I was seven or eight but the scene is vivid in the feeling part of my memory. We were living in Taunton, Massachusetts. Until that day (it must have been summer because I wasn’t in school) I was only vaguely aware of being Jewish. I had heard the family stories, I was somewhat embarrassed by my paternal grandmother’s accent and I loved Bible stories, especially the Exodus tale.

They were starting a baseball game. Sides were being chosen. I stood there expecting to be chosen around fourth or fifth. I was realistic about my ability. I wasn’t the best but I was far from the worst. I made up in determination what I lacked in size. While waiting in pleasant expectation lightning struck.

"Do you want Jewboy? I don’t want him on my side."

It took several seconds for me to realize he was talking about me.

JEWBOY! JEWBOY! JEWBOY!

The word crashed through my being. My insides were raw with pain.

“I am an American,” I screamed in a tearful combination of fear and rage.

"Jewboy!"

"Jew cry baby!"

"Mockie!"

"Christkiller!"

"Scram, Jews can’t play baseball."

I stood my ground and yelled the most meaningful words I could find: "Its a free country!"

I don’t know who threw the fist blow but a general melee ensued. I was badly bruised and I would like to believe several of my tormentors carried home some effects of my frantic and violent surge of energy.

If I Am Not for Myself Who Am I?

Arthur was in my class in public school. He came from a faded line of the town’s Protestant aristocracy. Arthur had a reputation for being wild that led most parents to instruct their children to shun him. Arthur was the nearest to a close friend that I had except for my cousin Marilyn.

News of the altercation traveled fast. Later that same day Arthur came over to exhibit boyish solidarity. He assured me that in any future confrontations he would be a gladiator on my side. He told me that no one could tell a Jew by his looks. He asked me if I thought it was a good idea to change my last name to Green.

I responded with avid indignation. "I am not a quitter!"

Arthur looked at me with new found respect. We sat for some time in quiet togetherness. After Arthur left I felt renewed by his friendship. Three days later he was dead.

"Wasn’t Arthur White a friend of yours," my mother asked?

I felt trapped between loyalty and safety. Admitting Arthur was a friend might bring on the order to stay away from such a wild boy. Denying my friendship would be a major sort of betrayal. I had not caught the nuance of the past tense and I cagily responded, "why?"

Mom matter-of-factly answered, "he was killed while riding his bike this morning. He was over on the Brockton road where he wasn’t supposed to be and he was struck by a car." I ran out side crying tears of rage at Arthur for deserting me.

Several days later I walked to the church where his funeral service was being held. As I approached to enter, I saw all my recent tormentors going in.

Panic overcame me. I ran until my breath was nearly spent and sat down under a tree and cried tears of loneliness and fear. When I was finished crying I made a pledge to myself that I would never again desert a friend.

And now one of Dr. King’s favorite poems as well as one of mine.

Incident

by Countee Cullen

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee.
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

What is the point? Simply put we who are conscious and actively Jewish live within two cultures Jewish and American. Our effort individually and collectively is to find a place of comfort and ease so that we can have both.

Let me say quickly and emphatically right here so that there is no mis-understanding: the Jewish American experience and the Black American experience are not the same nor can we find an easy equation between the two. I am indicating that we share this relationship to America. We want our own identity and we want to participate fully in our country’s bounty and its decision making.

Living in two cultures is not just the pain and degradation that the story and poem highlight. It is also the joy of sharing in the richness of your heritage. Dr. King once said about the African-American experience: “Life is part pain and part joy and lord knows we have had our share of both.”

(Dedicated to Francine Greenberg Reizen on the anniversary of her Bat Mitzvah)

—Speech at Temple Gates of Heaven (excerpt), Schenectady, NY, January 14, 1994, by Paul Greenberg

A week ago, Hungry Blues was hacked and brought down. As it happened my web host is in the process of migrating everyone on its servers to a new hosting infrastructure, and the best way to fix my hacked site was to start over on the new hosting servers. After several days, my data was moved over to the new servers, but there were some remaining technical problems that I was not able to resolve until today (with a little help from a friend).

Things may still be broken here and there on posts and pages—and I'm also in the process of rebooting the site design, as long as I'm starting fresh—so please excuse any messes you may stumble on. If something seems broken on the site, drop me a line, if you're so inclined.

Today, in  Jackson, Mississippi's Clarion-Ledger, I published the first investigative news report about the 1964 racial murder of Clifton Walker:

Four and a half years after the FBI announced it would reopen and investigate more than 100 cases of unsolved civil rights-era killings in the South, the bureau has yet to initiate charges in any of the cases. It has instead closed all but 39 of those cases without recommending prosecution.

"Few, if any, of these cases will be prosecuted," the Department of Justice has acknowledged to Congress.

Despite its most vigorous efforts, the FBI has said, it has not been able to overcome "difficulties inherent in all cold cases: subjects die; witnesses die or can no longer be located; memories become clouded; evidence is destroyed or cannot be located; original investigations lacked the technical or scientific advances relied upon today."

But none of those reasons explains why the FBI has been able to gain little ground in a case that is still open - the slaying of Clifton Walker, a 37-year-old African American who was ambushed by a white mob and brutally gunned down in his car on an unpaved backwoods road outside the southwest Mississippi town of Woodville on Feb. 28, 1964. Walker was married and the father of five children.

For Walker's children, the FBI's own management of the case raises questions

Read the rest at the Clarion-Ledger or at USA Today, which also ran the story.

Also today, fellow Civil Rights Cold Case Project reporter Stanley Nelson interviewed me about the Clifton Walker case for his newspaper, the Concordia Sentinel, in Ferriday Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River from southwest Mississippi, where Clifton Walker was murdered. Stanley gave me a nice opportunity to talk more about Clifton Walker and his family.

Clifton Walker was born in Woodville, Miss. in 1927. The youngest of nine children, he was nicknamed "Man" as a child, which stuck through adulthood, as his older siblings tended to look up to him.

Clifton Walker met Ruby Phipps on her way home from Sunday school in 1943. They were married in 1945 and had five children together. The Walker children remember their parents as a strong unit. After they were put to bed, the children would hear their parents talking about life and planning for their needs, how to pay for a car or a washer or what to buy their kids for Christmas.

Clifton Walker served in the U.S. Army in the Korean War. After his discharge, following a knee injury, Walker went to work at International Paper plant in Natchez, where he was a laborer in the wood yard and a member of the black union, St. James Local 747 Pulp, Sulfite and Paper Mill Workers. At the time of his death he made a good wage for a black worker, reportedly $8/hour.

Read the rest at the Concordia Sentinel.

Be sure to watch the trailer posted with the article (as well as here, on hungryblues.net) to see portions of my investigation unfold, meet three of Clifton Walker’s children and visit the crime scene, where he was murdered.

(Cross-posted at the Civil Rights Cold Case Project.)

This Sunday, July 22, the Clarion-Ledger will publish my article about the the 1964 killing of Clifton Walker, a black man from Woodville, Miss.

On February 28, 1964, Clifton Walker was ambushed by a white mob on his drive home from the late shift at the International Paper plant in Natchez, Miss. On the last stretch of Walker's drive home on the dark, twisty, unpaved Poor House Road, near Woodville, his attackers stopped his car, gathered around it with shotguns and fired in at close range, blowing Walker's face apart. The FBI and Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol investigated for about nine months in 1964 and in November recommended two suspects for arrest to the DA—who claimed there was insufficient evidence for him to act.

In February 2007, the FBI announced it would be probing about 100 of the unsolved civil rights era cold cases. Since then, the FBI says, it has closed all but 39 them. But the Clifton Walker murder case is still open.

In the Clarion-Ledger this Sunday you can read the first full telling of what is currently known about the case—through federal and state documents, through the voices of Clifton Walker's children and their Mississippi neighbors and through my investigation of the case since 2007. For Clifton Walker's children, the FBI's own management of the case raises questions. Learn why this Sunday.

In the trailer, above, you can watch portions of my investigation unfold, meet three of Clifton Walker's children and visit the crime scene, where he was murdered.

On Monday evening, I got a call from my friend Jesse who had been down at Occupy Boston earlier in the day. Mayor Menino and Boston Police were telling the protestors that they could not stay at the second camp they'd started a block away from the original Dewy Square site, on the Rose Kennedy Greenway; the protestors had till midnight to leave the second site at Atlantic Avenue and Pearl Street or they'd be forcibly removed and arrested. Jesse asked me if I'd go there with him to be unofficial observers and document the goings on should the police take action against the protestors. I'd been wanting to visit Occupy Boston to learn more about it firsthand, and this seemed important to do, so I said yes.

Jesse shot stills with his SLR, and though I brought one, too, I focused on posting in real time via Instagram and Justin.tv. But before I highlight any of that material, I want to direct you to this great 10 minute documentary about Monday night, by Michael Gill.

Gill captured many moments that I also witnessed and shows what it was like there very well. My iPhone video streams are much lower quality and, of course, unedited, but at various times I was broadcasting live to over 3000 viewers, after the police had made most official media leave the scene, so they served a function. One thing not shown in Gill's film was how, after the camp was cleared of protestors, police and sanitation workers disposed of all items remaining---tents, sleeping bags, bedrolls, signs, chairs, supplies---in two sanitation trucks. Here's some footage:

Watch live video from minorjive on Justin.tv

Here's a small slideshow of scenes I captured with the the camer on my phone.

More information about night of October 10 and early morning hours of October 11 at Occupy Boston:

• Boston police move in on protesters on Greenway, scores arrested (Boston Globe)
• BPD Arrest Protesters From ‘Occupy Boston’ (WBUR)
• Mayor Menino Responds To Occupy Boston Arrests (WBUR)
• Statement from the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy (PDF)
• October 10, 2011: We Will Occupy (Occupy Boston)
• Mass Arrests of Occupy Boston Protestors (Occupy Boston)
• Images from the Takedown (Occupy Boston)
• Boston Police Brutally Assault Occupy Boston (Occupy Boston)
• More on Occupy Boston Arrests (Occupy Boston)
• Occupier: What Happened to Me in the Police Raid and Arrest of 141 Peaceful Protestors (Occupy Boston)

I started this blog in 2004 to write about things like this photo of my father and James Baldwin in Birmingham, AL in 1963 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

In time, however, blogging led to investigative journalism about unpunished lynchings and other violence from the civil rights era.

In the summer of 2007, I returned to Mississippi to look into violence that had taken place near Woodville in the southwest part of the state. After I interviewed an NAACP official, a black woman in her early 70's who owned a shop in the town center stopped me on the street. "You a reporter?" she asked. Before long, she and her husband were sharing stories of violence against blacks in Woodville in the '50's and '60's. They asked if I had ever heard of Man Walker whose given first name was Clifford or Clifton. He was shot in his car on Poor House Road and they thought his children lived nearby in Louisiana.

Since I was on my way to Hattiesburg to do research in the McCain Archives at the University of Southern Mississippi, I couldn't stick around to learn more. Yet at the archives, I found a number of Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol reports on the Clifton Walker case. The reports were riveting. I had to investigate.

I've located a number of Walker's family members and have been working closely with three of his children since 2008. One daughter, Catherine, has joined me in questioning those with possible involvement in her father's murder. On one occasion there was a surprising moment of reconciliation between Catherine and a member of a white Woodville family. Walker's murder had allegedly been planned at this family's truck stop, and at the end of the interview with the elderly business owner and his daughter, Walker and the other daughter hugged. Catherine had not expected to meet whites from Woodville willing to talk about the murder. This small but significant step toward the closure that she and her siblings need gave us a taste of what might be possible for her family and for this small backwoods Mississippi community that is still largely committed to silence and to protecting murderers.

I tell this story in the Fall 2011 issue of Nieman Reports, which is devoted to cold case reporting. The issue also includes stories by my colleagues from the Civil Rights Cold Case Project:

• David Ridgen, It Takes a Hard-Driving Team to Uncover the Truth of a Cold Case, The Bonds of Our Reporting: The Civil Rights Cold Case Project
• John Flemming, Compelled to Remember What Others Want to Forget
• Jerry Mitchell, The Case of the Supposedly Sealed Files—And What They Revealed
• Stanley Nelson, Who Killed Frank Morris?
• Hank Klibanoff, Here’s What People Want to Know: Why Do Journalists Tell These Stories?
• Robert J. Rosenthal, The Enduring Ambition of the Civil Rights Cold Case Project
• Paul C. Johnson and Janice L. McDonald, When Lawyers and Journalists Share Common Cause

The issue also includes stories by Simeon Booker, Bill Minor and Jan Gardner.

I'm honored to again be one of the photographers exhibiting photos of the HONK! Festival at the Inside/Out Gallery, in the windows outside the Davis Square CVS in Somerville, MA. The photos are on display now through the first weekend in October when the 6th Annual HONK! Festival of activist street bands comes to Somerville and Cambridge. Below are three of the photos I have on display, along with photos by Jesse Edsel-Vetter, Greg Cook, Chirs Yeager and Mike Dannenhauer. Stop by and see our photos, if you come through Davis Square. Visit honkfest.org for a full schedule of events and more information about the festival and bands.

New York Times reporter Shaila Dewan blogged yesterday that the Justice Department has declined to reopen the Malcolm X murder case.

“Although the Justice Department recognizes that the murder of Malcolm X was a tragedy, both for his family and for the community he served, we have determined that at this time, the matter does not implicate federal interests sufficient to necessitate the use of scarce federal investigative resources into a matter for which there can be no federal criminal prosecution,” the department said.

This was follow up to her reporting in the Times on new attention to the Malcolm X case and new calls to investigate on the heels of the late Manning Marable's recent biography of Malcolm X and in light of the successful prosecutions of  decades old civil rights murder cases in the South.

I'll explain why I think the funding issue is a bit of red herring in a minute. The more important question, which Dewan raises, is why isn't the Justice Department taking up the murder of Malcolm X under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act of 2008? "The department, without elaborating, said the crime did not fit the parameters of that act," Dewan reports.

If the Till Act is applied to the Malcolm X case, jurisdiction and funding would not be concerns. A House Judiciary Committee report (PDF) found that though federal prosecution may not be possible in many of the civil rights era crimes addressed by the Act,

Concurrent federal jurisdiction is necessary only to permit joint state-federal investigations and to authorize federal prosecution in those instances in which state and local officials are either unable or unwilling to pursue cases that adequately address the federal interest in fighting bias crime.

This Committee nevertheless expects the federal government to still play a vital role in these prosecutions. First, in terms of investigations, in 2006 the FBI began a comprehensive effort to identify and investigate racially-motivated murders committed during the 1950s and 1960s. The FBI has already started to accumulate information from outside organizations and to follow those leads. We expect this initiative to continue and to expand....

in terms of resources, the federal government has the resources and expertise to provide valuable assistance to state and local entities pursuing state prosecutions. In the Emmett Till case, although no federal jurisdiction was present, the Department conducted an investigation into a local matter because Till had traveled from out-of-state into the state in which he was murdered. The FBI reported the results of its extensive investigation to the District Attorney for Greenville, Mississippi. We expect such cooperation and assistance to continue and to expand into other scenarios. While maintaining the primary role of state and local governments in the investigation and prosecution of violent hate crimes, the bill would authorize the federal government to work in partnership with state and local law enforcement officials and to serve an important backstop function with regard to a wider range of hate-motivated violence than federal law currently permits. (Emphasis added)

Furthermore, FBI spokesperson Christopher Allen has insisted to me in an email that "No case" taken up under the Till Act or the FBI Cold Case Initiative "has suffered as a result of lack of funding."

So if under the Till Act, the FBI is mandated to assist in investigations even where there is no federal jurisdiction, and there is no funding obstacle to federal involvement, then the real question is why won't the Department of Justice consider the Malcolm X murder under the Till Act?

For one, it is not clear if the killing could be considered a civil rights crime because both the perpetrators and the victims are black.

[Historian David] Garrow said the definition of a civil rights crime should not be too narrow. “When a major civil rights leader is assassinated, I’d like the civil rights division to be interested, regardless of the color of the gunman,” he said, referring to the federal unit.

Some experts say the Justice Department’s participation is crucial because the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department had Malcolm X under surveillance at the time of his death, raising questions about whether law enforcement officials had knowledge beforehand of the assassination plot.

It would be a shame if the color of the gunmen became a convenient cover for not examining possible failures of law enforcement to stop a crime officials may have had foreknowledge of; it would also be a shame if avoiding a full investigation allowed a known, alleged perpetrator who currently lives free to evade prosecution.

Here also are two of the thornier obstacles to resolving any number of civil rights era cold cases: black involvement in and government responsibility---direct or indirect---for the crimes. Though the approach to these issues in southern cases has largely been inadequate, it may yet be more palatable to many to consider involvement of blacks who were more widely subject  to subtle and overt forms of coercion in the South and to call up stereotypes of racist southern law enforcement and lawmakers who participated in and/or fomented and supported Klan violence.

The Till Act is meant to address the very problem that most of the cases it covers were never fully investigated at the time they occurred.

David Garrow, a historian and a King biographer, obtained and reviewed the Federal Bureau of Investigation files on Malcolm X in the 1990s. He said it was probable that reams of wiretaps of the Nation of Islam had never been combed for clues. In 1980, the bureau said it had never investigated the assassination.

Without a full investigation, justice will not be done and the truth cannot be known.

(Cross-posted on Colorlines.)

Today and tomorrow in Neshoba County, MS is the annual memorial for James Chaney, Michael Schewerner, Andrew Goodman, and all civil rights era racial murder victims. I first attended in 2005. It is an important, meaningful event that is also an opportunity to meet and listen to famous Civil Rights Movement veterans and many unsung heroes of racial justice.

There's an announcement with details posted on the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement website. Attached is a more recent and detailed press release (PDF) sent to me by the organizers. The event is free and open to the public.

Right-wing violence in Israel is always provoked by something, we’ve been told. The murders of Palestinian laborers and Israeli Arab bus passengers by two settlers during the disengagement from Gaza was provoked, of course, by the disengagement from Gaza. The drive-by murders of Palestinians during the second intifada were provoked by the second intifada. The Rabin assassination and the two-year hate campaign that preceded it were provoked by the Oslo accord and Palestinian terror attacks. The Hebron massacre by Baruch Goldstein was provoked by the Oslo accord and Palestinan terror attacks. The Jewish terror underground of the early 1980s, involving shootings of Palestinian mayors and college students, as well as an attempt to bomb a Palestinian bus and a plot to blow up the Temple Mount, was provoked by the pullout from Sinai following the peace treaty with Egypt.

There’s always a reason, supposedly. Jewish blood is being spilled by terrorists, the Left is giving the country away to the enemy, the settlers and their allies are being driven to extremes, they’re being backed against the wall, so they’re lashing out in desperation.

This is a popular notion in this country. So why has settler violence been going through the roof again, most recently in Sunday night’s “price tag” torching of a mosque in the Galilee Bedouin village of Tuba Zangaria? Life for Jews in Israel and the West Bank has never been safer than it’s been for the last few years. Palestinian security forces have been working with the Shin Bet and Israeli army to shut down terror, to throw Hamasniks in jail, to even keep big protest rallies from taking place.

Meanwhile, the peace process couldn’t be deader. The Israeli government could hardly be more right-wing. The administration in Washington could hardly be more craven, while Congress has become indistinguishable from the Yesha Council.

Yet here’s Yediot Aharonot’s Palestinian affairs writer Roni Shaked (a former Shin Bet agent) summing up the situation: :

“Arab terror is under control. The intelligence network in the West Bank is yielding good results. and the Palestinian security apparatus is also helping. While there are worries over Israeli Arab terror, it does not meet the criterion of a security threat. By contrast, ‘price tag’ terror is no longer the ideology of a few ‘wild weeds.’ It is a full-blown underground, a security threat that is liable to set off a new intifada and enflame relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel.”
“
Here is Ha’aretz military affairs correspondent Amos Harel:

“According to the Shin Bet, the right-wing extremists no longer appear to need a ‘trigger’ to take action, while the targets of the violence are also widening – military vehicles at an IDF base near Ramallah have been vandalized, and threatening graffiti has been sprayed onto the apartment door of a left-wing activist. Attacks on Arabs and their property are carried out when the opportunity arises, the Shin Bet officials add.”

What’s going on? What’s provoking the settlers in this underground now?

Nothing. They “no longer appear to need a ‘trigger.’” It doesn’t matter what the Palestinians, the government in Jerusalem or the administration in Washington do or don’t do. Nobody’s bothering them, nobody’s threatening them; they’re just feeding off the endless, escalating provocations in their own minds.

Is this an isolated phenomenon? Is it unconnected to the national political scene? I don’t think so. It seems to me that the rise in settler violence over the last couple of years is the crude, violent expression of the trend we’ve seen in the Israeli public at large: While Palestinian terror and political radicalism have steadily diminished, Israeli politics and public opinion have continually gotten more right-wing and hostile to Arabs.

There’s never been less terror here, the Palestinian police are doing much of our dirty work, we’ve never had a Palestinian leadership remotely as moderate and peaceable as Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad – yet the feeling here is that the situation’s hopeless, there’s no one to talk to, any minute all hell’s going to break loose, our backs are to the wall. If Bibi can’t save us, maybe Lieberman can.

Israelis used to say – and I used to believe – that if the Palestinians only stopped terror, we would be only too eager to make peace with them. If that was ever true, it certainly hasn’t been for many years.  They’ve stopped terror, and not for the first time – Arafat stopped terror for the last 4-1/2 years of the 7-year Oslo process, and it had no effect on Israeli opinion then just like Abbas’s efforts have had no effect on Israeli opinion now.

To be clear, the Israeli mainstream opposes these price tag attacks, it rejects the torching of mosques and olive groves. However, the Israeli mainstream remains deeply antagonistic toward Arabs, and this feeling has only gotten stronger in recent years, regardless of how subdued the local Arabs have become. The price tag underground is a violent, fanatic, superheated outgrowth of what’s happened to the Israeli political mind. On either side of the Green Line, we need no trigger, no provocation anymore. The provocation is inside us, and we just keep feeding on it.

During the storm and for several days afterwards, several thousand men, women, and children as young as ten--many of them being held in pre-trial detention on minor offenses-- were effectively abandoned as floodwaters rose and the power went out, plunging the cells into darkness. As deputies fled their posts, prisoners were left standing up to their chests in sewage-contaminated floodwaters, without food, drinking water, or ventilation.

Once they were evacuated from OPP, prisoners were sent to receiving facilities around the state where human rights abuses appear to have continued. At one facility, for example, thousands of OPP evacuees spent several days on an outdoor football field where there were no toilets or wash facilities, and where prisoner-on-prisoner violence went unchecked by guards. A recent ACLU report examining changes made at the prison since the disaster concluded that "OPP remains dangerously ill prepared to handle a future emergency," with a revised evacuation plan that is "inconsistent" and "inadequate" to prevent the kinds of abuses that occurred after Katrina.

When you think about hacking laptops, it’s highly unlikely that you would ever consider the battery as a viable attack vector. Security researcher [Charlie Miller] however, has been hard at work showing just how big a vulnerability they can be.

As we have been discussing recently, the care and feeding of many batteries, big and small, is handled by some sort of microcontroller. [Charlie] found that a 2009 update issued by Apple to fix some lingering MacBook power issues used one of two passwords to write data to the battery controllers. From what he has seen, it seems these same passwords have been used on all batteries manufactured since that time as well. Using this data, he was subsequently able to gain access to the chips, allowing him to remotely brick the batteries, falsify data sent to the OS, and completely replace the stock firmware with that of his own.

He says that it would be possible for an attacker to inject malware into the battery itself, which would covertly re-infect the machine, despite all traditional removal attempts. Of course, replacing the battery would rectify the issue in these situations, but he says that it would likely be the last thing anyone would suspect as the source of infection. While using the battery to proliferate malware or cause irreversible damage to the computer would take quite a bit of work, [Charlie] claims that either scenario is completely plausible.

He plans on presenting his research at this year’s Black Hat security conference in August, but in the meantime he has created a utility that generates a completely random password for your Mac’s battery. He says that he has already contacted Apple to in order to help them construct a permanent fix for the issue, so an official patch may be available in the near future.

[Thanks, Sergio]

Please share this WIDELY.  Why?  Here's why in 15 minutes or less:



As Lisa Guisbond quoted Fred Klonsky, "this is an amazing video from the Aspen Ideas Festival in which Stand For Children’s Jonah Edelman explains how he, with the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan’s senior advisor Jo Anderson (former Executive Director of the IEA) out foxed the CTU, the IFT and the IEA’s Ken Swanson and Audrey Soglin into agreeing to Senate Bill 7."

For those who still believe that there is any way to trust, negotiate with, compromise with, or have any dealings with Ed Deform in any way that does not demand complete capitulation to the ed deformers, watch this video.  Play it at your next union meeting, share it with the world. 

We do know some of what goes on at the Aspen Ideas Festival besides getting a chance to smell and touch sewer rats like Rupert Murdoch.  Here is a great example of massive ego mixed with manipulative glee that was posted and quickly pulled from the Aspen site, but not before Fred Klonsky captured a copy for the world to see and hear.

In this Machiavellian masterpiece, we see Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children infamy (list of donors here) describe in great detail how great wads of hedge-fund and other corporate cash came to bear on the last legislative election in Illinois, how all the best lobbyists were bought up by Deform (including minority ones), how unions were outspent and how politicians followed the money, how teacher unions were lured to the table and how they were totally manhandled by the best lawyers and negotiators that money can buy, how union leaders became complicit, scared, weak, groveling. 

Hear how Karen Lewis, head of Chicago Teachers Union was made a fool of, how she gave up the right to strike with less than a 75% strike vote (something that has never happened, as Jonah notes).  Hear how Lewis gave the Deformer lawyers free rein to work out the details on a terrible agreement.  As Jonah swaggers, "We got to decide all the fine print."  In those details is the insurance needed to impose the same IMPACT teacher eval plan that DC has.

Hear Jonah, with eyebrows arched like Mephistopheles, brag that Rahm can make the school day and year as long as he wants in Chicago, how principals can hire and fire whomever they like, how seniority is history, how Jonah now wants to use the union capitulation in Illinois to inspire unions in other states--quickly. 

Sorry, Jonah, for having to post this again.  You arrogant twerp.



You can get to the entire video from here: http://preaprez.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/your-very-own-copy-of-the-jonah-edelman-tape/

Some quotable quotes:

"There's a high squirm factor" about the way they bought and paid for Illinois Democratic legislative leaders.

"We're already getting going. We're doing this level of work in every state. ..In Washington state, same goal. We could readily outspend the WEA. MA, very similar. It might be a ballot measure in WA. If might be we have a ballot measure on the ballot in MA, and we use it as a lever.

"By the end of this decade we're going to have ended seniority-based decision making in education in this country. It's not enough to ensure better outcomes, but it's certainly something that has been long overdue."

"If you have a longer day but terrible teachers, that doesn't do anything. It's about performance management. It's boring, it's not a silver bullet. Brizard has to hire a lot of really good superintendent level people. They've got to evaluate their principals rigorously and create pipelines of quality principals. More people would want to be principals because not only do they have the accountability but they have the authority."

"The Tribune was fantastic. They probably wrote more than 10 supportive editorials. Sun Times was good. We had a lot of downstate editorial support."

"Wisconsin was a problem, but we were able to do a side by side comparison to say the unions mantra that this was a Wisconsin style attack was baloney."

Despite Andrew Cuomo’s admirable push for gay marriage, he is a horrible governor. As a “Democrat,” Cuomo has declared war on unions, on the environment, and on everything Democrats theoretically stand for, outside of gay marriage. And again, while his stance on that single issue is to his significant benefit, Cuomo is atrocious. After his pro-fracking announcement today, I was going to unload, but Steve M beat me to it and I’ll leave it to him and those Steve links to:

The Cuomo administration is expected to lift what has been, in effect, a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, a controversial technology used to extract natural gas from shale, people briefed on the administration’s discussions said on Thursday.

Administration officials are discussing maintaining a ban on the process inside New York City’s sprawling upstate watershed, as well as a watershed used by the city of Syracuse, according to people briefed on the plan. But by allowing the process in other parts of the state, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo would open up New York to one of the fastest-growing — critics would say reckless — areas of the energy industry….

Hydrofracking has spurred intense protests from environmental activists, who say it threatens the cleanliness of ground water….

It isn’t just the fracking. There’s a lot more to dislike about the guy if you’re a progressive, as Eric Alterman recently noted:

The same liberal Democrat who fights for gay marriage is presiding over a budget agreement that will cost New York City schools 2,600 teachers, 600 more than estimated, and lay off 1,000 city workers, many of whom work in health care for the poor, at a time when the need for both could hardly be greater. Cuomo, who one must sometimes remind oneself, is a Democrat, also fought tooth and nail to ensure the death of New York’s millionaire tax, at exactly the moment when its proceeds might have been able to prevent exactly the kinds of cuts described above. In his willingness to play “bulldog for the rich,” as Michael Powell puts it, he is distinguishable from Roger Ailes’ favorite politician, right-wing New Jersey Governor Chris Christie only in degree, rather than in kind.

And if you can judge a guy by his friends, here are some of Cuomo’s:

“Looking for a tax-cutting, budget-slashing, fiscally conservative governor? How about Andrew Cuomo?” wrote the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner back in February.

“Cuomo’s performance thus far has advanced the cause of limited government in the Empire State far more than did his past three predecessors,” enthused Deroy Murdock in April.

Cuomo in 2016? Reihan Salam can get down with that. “Imagine a presidential election pitting a budget-cutting Democratic governor against a budget-cutting Republican governor,” Salam wrote. “That would be, in my view, an excellent outcome for fiscal conservatives.”

Even Carl Paladino has praised Cuomo.

So if he’s the 2016 candidate against Chris Christie, update your passport.

I’ll only add this: Cuomo has a clear vision–to be the ultimate centrist, thinking he can squeak through the 2016 presidential primary against other, presumably real Democrats who actually share the vision of the post-1933 Democratic Party and then triangulate himself into the presidency, where he will make us all long for the halcyon Clinton and Obama days, when a Democrat knew how to stand up to a Republican.

Except that I don’t think he can do it. I don’t think the bastard can withstand a Democratic primary, unless we let his single good and admirable position outweigh the fact that he doesn’t care about working-class people or the environment or essentially any other traditional Democratic issue. Certainly I would not vote for Andrew Cuomo for president, not in a primary and not in a general election.

Update: I have authored a 20+ page paper on verifying social media content based on 5 case studies. Please see this blog post for a copy.

I get this question all the time: “How do you verify social media data?” This question drives many of the conversations on crowdsourcing and crisis mapping these days. It’s high time that we start compiling our tips and tricks into an online how-to-guide so that we don’t have to start from square one every time the question comes up. We need to build and accumulate our shared knowledge in information forensics. So here is the Google Doc version of this blog post, please feel free to add your best practices and ask others to contribute. Feel free to also add links to other studies on verifying social media content.

If every source we monitored in the social media space was known and trusted, then the need for verification would not be as pronounced. In other words, it is the plethora and virtual anonymity of sources that makes us skeptical of the content they deliver. The process of verifying  social media data thus requires a two-step process: the authentication of the source as reliable and the triangulation of the content as valid. If we can authenticate the source and find it trustworthy, this may be sufficient to trust the content and mark is a verified depending on context. If source authentication is difficult to ascertain, then we need to triangulate the content itself.

Lets unpack these two processes—authentication and triangulation—and apply them to Twitter since the most pressing challenges regarding social media verification have to do with eyewitness, user-generated content. The first step is to try and determine whether the source is trustworthy. Here are some tips on how to do this:

• Bio on Twitter: Does the source provide a name, picture, bio and any  links to their own blog, identity, professional occupation, etc., on their page? If there’s a name, does searching for this name on Google provide any further clues to the person’s identity? Perhaps a Facebook page, a professional email address, a LinkedIn profile?

• Number of Tweets: Is this a new Twitter handle with only a few tweets? If so, this makes authentication more difficult. Arasmus notes that “the more recent, the less reliable and the more likely it is to be an account intended to spread disinformation.” In general, the longer the Twitter handle has been around and the more Tweets linked to this handle, the better. This gives a digital trace, a history of prior evidence that can be scrutinized for evidence of political bias, misinformation, etc. Arasmus specifies: “What are the tweets like? Does the person qualify his/her reports? Are they intelligible? Is the person given to exaggeration and inconsistencies?”

• Number of followers: Does the source have a large following? If there are only a few, are any of the followers know and credible sources? Also, how many lists has this Twitter hanlde been added to?

• Number following: How many Twitter users does the Twitter handle follow? Are these known and credible sources?

• Retweets: What type of content does the Twitter handle retweet? Does the Twitter handle in question get retweeted by known and credible sources?

• Location: Can the source’s geographic location be ascertained? If so, are they nearby the unfolding events? One way to try and find out by proxy is to examine during which periods of the day/night the source tweets the most. This may provide an indication as to the person’s time zone.

• Timing: Does the source appear to be tweeting in near real-time? Or are there considerable delays? Does anything appear unusual about the timing of the person’s tweets?

• Social authentication: If you’re still unsure about the source’s reliability, use your own social network–Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn–to find out if anyone in your network know about the source’s reliability.

• Media authentication: Is the source quoted by trusted media outlines whether this be in the mainstream or social media space?

• Engage the source: Tweet them back and ask them for further information. NPR’s Andy Carvin has employed this technique particularly well. For example, you can tweet back and ask for the source of the report and for any available pictures, videos, etc. Place the burden of proof on the source.

These are some of the tips that come to mind for source authentication. For more thoughts on this process, see my previous blog post “Passing the I’m-Not-Gaddafi-Test: Authenticating Identity During Crisis Mapping Operations.” If you some tips of your own not listed here, please do add them to the Google Doc—they don’t need to be limited to Twitter either.

Now, lets say that we’ve gone through list above and find the evidence inconclusive. We thus move to try and triangulate the content. Here are some tips on how to do this:

• Triangulation: Are other sources on Twitter or elsewhere reporting on the event you are investigating? As Arasmus notes, “remain skeptical about the reports that you receive. Look for multiple reports from different unconnected sources.” The more independent witnesses you can get information from the better and the less critical the need for identity authentication.

• Origins: If the user reporting an event is not necessarily the original source, can the original source be identified and authenticated? In particular, if the original source is found, does the time/date of the original report make sense given the situation?

• Social authentication: Ask members of your own social network whether the tweet you are investigating is being reported by other sources. Ask them how unusual the event reporting is to get a sense of how likely it is to have happened in the first place. Andy Carvin’s followers, for example, “help him translate, triangulate, and track down key information. They enable remarkable acts of crowdsourced verification [...] but he must always tell himself to check and challenge what he is told.”

• Language: Andy Carvin notes that tweets that sound too official, using official language like “breaking news”, “urgent”, “confirmed” etc. need to be scrutinized. “When he sees these terms used, Carvin often replies and asks for additional details, for pictures and video. Or he will quote the tweet and add a simple one word question to the front of the message: Source?” The BBC’s UGC (user-generated content) Hub in London also verifies whether the vocabulary, slang, accents are correct for the location that a source might claim to be reporting from.

• Pictures: If the twitter handle shares photographic “evidence”, does the photo provide any clues about the location where it was taken based on buildings, signs, cars, etc., in the background? The BBC’s UGC Hub checks weaponry against those know for the given country and also looks for shadows to determine the possible time of day that a picture was taken. In addition, they examine weather reports to “confirm that the conditions shown fit with the claimed date and time.” These same tips can be applied to Tweets that share video footage.

• Follow up: If you have contacts in the geographic area of interest, then you could ask them to follow up directly/in-person to confirm the validity of the report. Obviously this is not always possible, particularly in conflict zones. Still, there is increasing anecdotal evidence that this strategy is being used by various media organizations and human rights groups. One particularly striking example comes from Kyrgyzstan where  a Skype group with hundreds of users across the country were able disprove and counter rumors at a breathtaking pace. See this blog post for more details. See my blog post on “How to Use Technology to Counter Rumors During Crises: Anecdotes from Kyrgyzstan.”

These are just a handful of tips and tricks come to mind. The number of bullet points above clearly shows we are not completely powerless when verifying social media data. There are several strategies available. The main challenge, as the BBC points out, is that this type of information forensics “can take anything from seconds [...] to hours, as we hunt for clues and confirmation.” See for example my earlier post on “The Crowdsourcing Detective: Crisis, Deception and Intrigue in the Twitterspehere” which highlights some challenges but also new opportunities.

One of Storyful‘s comparative strengths when it comes to real-time news curation is the growing list of authenticated users it follows. This represents more of a bounded (but certainly not static) approach.  As noted in my previous blog post on “Seeking the Trustworthy Tweet,” following a bounded model presents some obvious advantages. This explains by the BBC recommends “maintaining lists of previously verified material [and sources] to act as a reference for colleagues covering the stories.” This strategy is also employed by the Verification Team of the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF).

In sum, I still stand by my earlier blog post entitled “Wag the Dog: How Falsifying Crowdsourced Data can be a Pain.” I also continue to stand by my opinion that some data–even if not immediately verifiable—is better than no data. Also, it’s important to recognize that  we have in some occasions seen social media prove to be self-correcting, as I blogged about here. Finally, we know that information is often perishable in times of crises. By this I mean that crisis data often has a “use-by date” after which, it no longer matters whether said information is true or not. So speed is often vital. This is why semi-automated platforms like SwiftRiver that aim to filter and triangulate social media content can be helpful.

Last month, Zoetica launched “Leveraging Social Media: Becoming A Networked Arts Nonprofit,” a peer learning project to build capacity for arts organizations in using social media effectively with a one-day masterclass.  Zoetica designed and is delivering the six-month program for Theatre Bay Area, with support from the Wallace Foundation, Grants for the Arts, the San Francisco Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and the Koret Foundation.

This week the beginner track got underway where 20 arts organizations will design and implement action learning experiments in Facebook, Listening, or Twitter to improve their social media practice.   They are “learning in public” on the wiki, paving the way for networked conversations with others.    Here’s a best practice about Facebook that surfaced from the discussions.

Facebook Custom Landing Tabs + Measurement = Best Practice

Why:  Custom Landing Tabs

The default welcome page for your Facebook Page is your wall.   There is a more inviting welcome mat. Facebook landing pages give people reasons to like your page.   Debra Askanese pointed to a study that shows Facebook pages with custom landing pages have a higher conversion rate than those without landing pages.

Principles

An effective custom landing page should support your SMART objective,  show value at a glance, and have a clear call to action.     A landing page without a strategy or good design will not  automatically make people like your organization’s page.    A landing page can reinforce organizational branding or promote specific campaigns, programs, or events.  It doesn’t have to be a static content either, it can change according to your organization’s activities.

Landing pages provide a fertile ground for testing and data collection much like nonprofits test their email newsletters.  While custom tabs might look nice and can be strategic, if you don’t measure – it’s a waste of time.

On my Facebook page, I asked nonprofit  people to show examples of customized landing pages.  Here’s a couple of examples.

Organizational Branding

Highlight A Program or Event

Promote A Fundraiser/Special Event

Renee Alexander Hamilton, who is the Social Media Manager for UNICEF USA, says that they used one of the DIY apps creators for the tab, but are fortunate to have an in-house designer to make it attractive.   Renee tracks the conversion rate including clicks to the tab, clicks within the tab, and the conversion rates (clicks to donations).  She mentioned that the app includes analytics, but prefers her tried and true ruler of choice:  Google Analytics.

Small Nonprofits Can Do This Too!

During the Leveraging Social Media peer session, which consists of small and mid-sized arts organizations, the Meridian Gallery showed off their custom tag that was created using a free version of one of the DYI apps, Pagemodo. Andrew Pulkrabek, the marketing director,  worked with a designer.   His words of wisdom:  make sure that people who are not the page administrators also test it.

The Techy Stuff

It used to be easy to create a custom landing tab with FBML, but you can no longer install that app.   Now it takes some tech skills to pull this off because of the switch to iFrames.  If you don’t have those skill then there are some free tools (and low cost tools here and here) available to get your basic Facebook landing page up and running. You might need some graphic design skills though.  You can also build a Facebook Page using Word Press, here’s the video. Want to look at a few inspiring custom landing pages, check these out.  Here’s a wiki on custom landing tabs and more advice here.

Earlier this week, Causes, the popular Facebook fundraising app, announced integration with Facebook pages, a featured long awaited for by many nonprofits.    While it is not yet possible to measure the donation funnel or conversion rates, those features are no doubt coming soon.

Does your nonprofit use a custom landing tab on Facebook?  How did you create it?  How do you test and measure its effectiveness to get results that support your objectives?

I’m really curious about how networked nonprofits can use measurement and make decisions using data to get more impact from networked approaches.   I want to hear about your successes and challenges in making your networked nonprofit more effective using measurement and data to make decisions about effective use of emerging media.   I expect to be blogging more about this topic.

It is a hot topic in the corporate marketing world.  The State of Marketing 2011 report recently released from IBM analyzes over 300 online and direct marketers across a wide range of industries, geographies, and company sizes.  The study found that corporate marketers have become more practical about their expectations for campaigns that use  both mobile and social media technologies.

A key finding:

Nearly 60 percent of respondents listed “measurement, analysis, and learning” as their top information technology bottleneck

Respondents are seeking to find the value that social channels can yield with more targeted insights and actions.

According to this summary,  this theme is not an odd finding, it corresponds to this  Forrester Group report that states that marketers are struggling with both the organization of data as well as how to best measure marketing performance.    This not a problem limited to the for-profit sector or social media specialists as Holly Ross from NTEN suggests in her recent blog post “Four Ways Nonprofits Can Increase Their Impact With Data.”   As Holly points out, we need to get better at transforming data into knowledge and wisdom and using those insights to take action.

Holly offers four principles:
Know What Data You Have and What It Means
Give Your Data Meaning
Make Your Data Tell Stories
Share Your Data

How many nonprofits, in their quest to update their Facebook page or engage with stake holders on Twitter, are implementing tactics based on data and good measurement practice?  How many take the time on the front-end to set up a simple system to collect the essential metrics to figure out what is working or what isn’t?   Or to document results?
It requires a culture or discipline of measurement, not just as a task after the campaign or program concludes.   Networked nonprofits have a culture of measurement and learning and that makes them successful. 
How is your nonprofit using data and measurement to make effective decisions about networked approaches and social media?  Please share your stories in the comments below.

It appears that the Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority is considering banning open strollers on buses, and is even considering future expansion of this ban to subway trains.

This is problematic for any parent who uses public transportation, and especially so for parents and other caregivers who rely on public transportation to get around. According to this Herald article, MBTA general manager Richard Davey says that “The number-one complaint that I have received since I have been here is strollers.” People hate strollers on buses and subways. To some extent, we’re sympathetic. People sometimes take very large strollers on crowded subways (or even on buses) and that does produce problems for everyone. Even compact umbrella strollers can be a nuisance, but then so can luggage, backpacks, and, frankly, people. If fewer people were clogging up the buses and subway cars, I could stretch out a little.

But it is unrealistic to expect parents to always fold strollers, particularly on the subway. On a crowded bus, I can understand a driver asking a passenger to fold a stroller in order to accommodate more passengers getting on (which drivers currently do). Some other cities do have this requirement. But it can be extremely difficult for parents, especially those of us with multiple children, to juggle an infant or toddler, a backpack or bag, and an older child along with a folded stroller. It would certainly be disruptive to other passengers (toddlers who are strapped in are much easier to deal with), require much more time for boarding and exiting, and be potentially dangerous if seats were not available (although I have found that passengers will almost always offer me a seat if I have children with me).

The fact of the matter is that what is really inconvenient and annoying is having children on trains and buses at all. They are noisy, come with too much gear, pick their noses openly, and smell bad. It would be easier and more pleasant for many if children were simply banned from public transportation. Or better yet, from public. But sorry folks, I’m a parent and I have a need to ride on trains and buses with my kids, so I’m going to keep bringing them with me. And it’s better for all of us for me not to buy an SUV. Many thanks to the vast majority of you who smile at my kids when they are cute and tolerate them when they are not. If you want to be a voice in support of having family-friendly transit, let the MBTA general manager know that even if a stroller ban may be popular, it’s not OK to throw parents under the bus. You can leave a comment for the MBTA at this link or tweet the general manager at @mbtagm.

Update: The MBTA has a one-question survey up about this, simply asking if parents should be required to fold strollers before boarding a bus. I wish they were doing something a bit more nuanced than a yes/no popularity contest, but I left some of my thoughts in the comments.

(Photo credit)