So what's the real story here then? Was the alleged lie actually true? Or was NPR just unable to verify whether it is true or not?
Many people held up this story as a justification for the "right to be forgotten", but if it turns out that even a respected news agency can't figure out whether censorship was justified in this case, I think it rather supports the case against censorship.
There are so many problems with the story. It's fairly embarrassing for NPR.
Besides being a one-sided story, it's also obvious PR for Ervine's new company, which is dutifully linked at the end of the story.
Secondly, the story presents Ervine as the heroic protagonist. An interesting choice for someone that turned in his middle-eastern clients to the FBI because they took a cab and didn't talk like typical rich people. Ervine's response to this is to hand over all of his client's private information to the FBI, without a warrant, after which his client is jailed and deported.
> An interesting choice for someone that turned in his middle-eastern clients to the FBI because they took a cab and didn't talk like typical rich people. Ervine's response to this is to hand over all of his client's private information to the FBI, without a warrant, after which his client is jailed and deported.
So he suspected someone was breaking the law and reported them to the appropriate authorities? Or are citizens supposed to always cover for criminals unless and until the government gets a warrant?
The fact that he turned someone in and they "turned out" to be guilty makes it very likely that we just don't have all the information here. Certainly not enough to condemn an accuser that was right.
You are very mistaken about the legality here. Probable cause only matters to law enforcement agents. It has no bearing on private citizens.
The private citizens rights to seize property, turn it over to LEOs, report someone, conduct a search, do not change if they have probable cause to believe a crime has been committed. So, if I'm your boss and can legally read your emails, I can just turn them over to the law enforcement agencies no question asked – they're "my" emails after all.
I know right? Those rich people are not assholes! They must be criminals.
EDIT: /s It ended up he was right, but maybe he had no reason to actually know they were cons. We don't have the full story, which is exactly why it has been retracted.
Only fairly rich people can do this. They know the proper people to ask, to get the proper phone number for the proper "private investigator" who continuously bribes the proper FBI agents in the proper field offices and the proper assistant prosecutors in the proper districts. Lots of money changes hands, the proper evidence is entrapped or manufactured, and then the poor unconnected schlub who pissed off the wrong rich dude is carted off to federal PMITAP. Typically the rich dude then has the requisite noblesse oblige to let it go after simply ruining a family. However, in some cases he's a real asshole, and objects to Google linking to the poor schlub's complaints about his mistreatment...
I dare you to call the FBI the next time you have a business disagreement. You won't even get past the phone bank.
> I dare you to call the FBI the next time you have a business disagreement
I have a friend of humble means who, in response to an incident, filed a police report, sent copies to the public e-mail addresses of our state's responsible regulators and then packaged that correspondence and sent it to a field office's public mailing address. The response was quick, courteous and effective.
Do you have some references for this conjecture? This all sounds very "tinfoil hat" for me. Like, sure, what you suggest is totally plausible-- but is it not a stretch to just assume this is a commonplace thing?
I personally know people to whom something like this has happened. No I won't share their stories here. Every time the general public learns more about FBI, it's always more sordid and awful. Remember this is the house that J. Edgar Hoover built. Those who care to notice, have received notice.
Mostly, though, search your recollection: have you ever heard of anyone who isn't really wealthy doing what Ervine is reported to have done?
So he did the wrong thing by reporting someone that was then convicted for fraud? It's not like he sentenced and deported them. He reported someone that was committing fraud.
No, he reported someone for, essentially, not being stereotypically rich. The person happened to be committing fraud, but that doesn't mean his initial report was justified based on what was written in the original article.
> But NPR did not contact the alleged author. Upon review, NPR cannot say for certain who the author or authors were or what their motivation was. In fact, in court proceedings, the people listed as "staff editors" of the site were identified only by initials, and we have not been able to establish their identities.
It sounds like they tried to get the other side of the story and got nowhere. Makes sense given that, if the NPR story is even generally accurate, it is not in the other side's interest to corroborate it (they are accused of slander). And given that the other side is geographically pretty far away from the US, it could be hard to get anything solid.
If they had tried to get the other party to comment at the time of writing the original article I think that would be fair enough, but they didn't. Apparently after the story was published they were sent an email from
> someone who said he was representing the person NPR had identified as the "author" [of the purportedly slanderous website]
Good luck understanding the whole picture when everybody is so fucking keen on censorship! I'm fed up of this. Censorship is never the answer. Publish a correction. Publish a retraction. What the fuck is this!?
Lots of people think they know ideas are false, harmful or both, even though they don't. Take any belief you think is objectively false or harmful, and there'll be plenty of people who think it's objectively true and good.
So making censorship acceptable is pretty dangerous. It just favours whoever is currently in a position of power.
And I tend to think it's counterproductive to censor ideas. You can't stop people from believing them, and trying to censor them can increase divisions between groups. Argument and education seem better approaches in general.
My thinking is that if you really think that an idea is false or harmful or both, you would feel morally compelled to remove that idea. That is, morality is often the first justification for censorship.
No, when I think that an idea is false or harmful or both, I feel morally compelled to present the reasons I think that as clearly and cogently as possible in an effort to provide additional information both to the person presenting the false and/or harmful idea and anyone else who might be observing the exchange. Censorship is inherently immoral.
My hope is to persuade others that the initial idea is false and/or harmful, not to prevent others from hearing the bad idea.
If I succeed, the bad idea still exists, but others can understand why the idea is bad and recognize similarly bad ideas in the future.
If you simply censor the bad idea, at least two bad things happen as a consequence: 1) the bad idea is not refuted, and so is likely to be reintroduced later with fewer people who understand why it is a bad idea; and 2) the person who originated the bad idea does not have any reason to change their mind, but rather is more likely to resent being censored and so hold that bad idea more tenaciously and attempt to spread it more surreptitiously.
I am frankly frightened by this relatively recent promotion of the idea that preventing the public utterance of bad ideas and distasteful speech is good for society. Based on my understanding of history, it is, in fact, a precursor to totalitarian society.
While I do agree on the social harm of censorship, unfortunately your approach is susceptible to asymmetric info-attacks under adversarial conditions.
Specifically, under the condition where the debate actually matters, your compulsion can be exploited by putting out any number of variedly wrong ideas, for which you pay an asymmetrically higher cost to refute, and an opportunity cost of not being able to present ideas of your own.
The debate can this way be framed to either never reach "consensus", or to do so at the counterparty's favored position.
The widespread use of this strategy is a reason why society is falling back on censorship as opposed to reason.
This thread is surrealistic to me in light of the NPR retraction. They didn't retract the article because it was some fringe opinion they didn't stand by, they retracted it because it was factually wrong. It would be as if they published an article saying "water is a yellow gas" then later removed it saying "actually that was a load of crap, nevermind".
So instead you'd prefer if they had kept the original article but added after each sentence "except it probably didn't happen that way"?
>I am frankly frightened by this relatively recent promotion of the idea that preventing the public utterance of bad ideas and distasteful speech is good for society.
There's nothing recent about that, it's as old as humanity itself. Every culture has its taboos and its sacred cows. I don't think there's any society where you could say absolutely anything you want and stay out of trouble. The USA is extremely permissive but there's still slander, libel and hate speech at the very least. In most countries in the EU it's forbidden to be a nazi, that's an opinion you're simply not allowed to have.
> This thread is surrealistic to me in light of the NPR retraction.
I was responding to the statement that bad ideas should be censored, not to the actions taken by NPR. I actually agree that NPR did the right thing by retracting the false information. That is a very different thing from censoring bad ideas. So yes, the thread derailed off into the swamp and here we sit on the wreckage.
> In most countries in the EU it's forbidden to be a nazi, that's an opinion you're simply not allowed to have.
Yes, I know. I studied Nazism in depth during my undergrad years while earning a history degree. I still recall being nauseated for an entire semester because of the material in one particular course, in fact. The downside of restricting political thought is that those who create the restrictions generally become tyrants themselves.
Does it even make sense to talk about censorship if you remove your own content? If you delete your comment are you censoring anything?
If you think that NPR shouldn't have made the original story unavailable I see your point but I really fail to see how that's censorship, especially when they pinpoint precisely why they did it and how exceptional it is.
Many people held up this story as a justification for the "right to be forgotten", but if it turns out that even a respected news agency can't figure out whether censorship was justified in this case, I think it rather supports the case against censorship.