June 30, 2010

"If you’re worried about your own stuff being released..."

(No! This is not another post about the National Enquirer story!)

".... you don’t really safeguard it by not selling out to Breitbart — you just ensure that if one of the 400 other members does, you won’t get the $100K."

19 comments:

Ann Althouse said...

I originally wrote "National Lampoon." Corrected.

John said...

It makes sense, but I can't see it happening. It is a prisoner's dilema for them. And they ought to be released. But, I doubt anyone but Klein has a full archive. And I am sure he has destroyed that.

It would be wonderful to see Breitbart release one e-mail a day for about a year each showing just how awful and vapid Klein and Toobin and the rest of the those clowns are. But Leftists are too fanatical and dedicated for that too happen.

former law student said...

I had to read that sentence three times before it made sense. Try this:

".... by not selling out to Breitbart, you don’t really safeguard your stuff -— you just ensure that if one of the 400 other members sells out, you won’t get the $100K."

Freeman Hunt said...

I bet Klein kept a copy of the archive for himself. Information is power, and I'm getting the sense from this whole thing that Klein really likes power.

After somebody sells to Breitbart though, Klein's archive won't be worth anything. I'm sure he will be sad about it.

Ann Althouse said...

"But, I doubt anyone but Klein has a full archive. And I am sure he has destroyed that."

If that's true, then that's a serious infection of stupidity among 400 individuals!

For your own protection, you need to preserve the context of a written conversation in which other people have particular things that you've written.

John said...

"If that's true, then that's a serious infection of stupidity among 400 individuals!"

That is a good point. It only takes one person. And at least one of 400 people surely was smart enough to think the way you do. It is out there somewhere. Looking at it that way, I bet they all do come out eventually. Information can never be hidden forever.

John said...

"I'm getting the sense from this whole thing that Klein really likes power."

Bingo. That is exactly what the whole thing is about at least for him. Klein is a real low life.

Hoosier Daddy said...

This is really a non-issue for me. I didn't need Journolist to know of MSM collusion with the Democratic party. I mean anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature could see how they acted in the 2008 Presidential election and come to the conclusion that they were all on the same page.

Hoosier Daddy said...

"I'm getting the sense from this whole thing that Klein really likes power."

Honestly Freeman I would question anyone's humanity if they didn't. We all crave power in one form or another.

Triangle Man said...

For a *complete* archive, one would need to have been a member going back to the earliest days of the list. That is probably a much smaller, more tightly knit, group.

Mitch H. said...

The completeness or incompleteness of the provided archive would probably be a marker which a clever hacker could use to identify who ratted the rest out.

Not that I believe that the floating Jornolist collective contains a competent hacker, but they could always hire the talent to out the rat.

GMay said...

I'm thinking it's going to be an IT guy that comes foward. Klein and every other former member can delete everything they want on their end, but they can't delete everything.

I wonder how much Klein is shelling out to keep those guys under wraps now.

Jon said...

Triangle Man said: "For a *complete* archive, one would need to have been a member going back to the earliest days of the list."

Not necessarily. I'm a member of an e-mail list in which any member can access an archive going back years to the very beginning. In fact I never read the e-mails as they are sent out, once a month or so I just browse the new entries to the archive.

However, I do predict that no one will take Breitbart up on his offer. Of the 400 members, a large number were probably lurkers who never posted anything and rarely read there. The percentage of the 400 who bothered to copy the complete archive before Klein took it down is likely very small, and of those many who might be willing to sell it won't do so because Breitbart can't really guarantee their identity will be protected.

Unknown said...

"If you're worried about stuff being released", you need to remember the old wheeze about two people can hold a secret if one of them is dead.

Ann Althouse said...

I originally wrote "National Lampoon." Corrected.

You were right the first time.

For your own protection, you need to preserve the context of a written conversation in which other people have particular things that you've written.

But these people were all Progressives, the Salt of the Earth, the Best and Brightest, the Elect, the Elite. One of them would never betray Glorious World Socialist Workers Revolution.

Poor Joe Stalin must be spinning.

GMay said...

I'm thinking it's going to be an IT guy that comes foward. Klein and every other former member can delete everything they want on their end, but they can't delete everything.

Believe it. There's always a back up somewhere and you'd be surprised what computer forensics can do to recover 'deleted' files.

former law student said...

For your own protection, you need to preserve the context of a written conversation in which other people have particular things that you've written.


Some people worry about self-protection and some don't.

Those who are really concerned will not send out anything questionable at all. They will not save threads containing their innocuous "whaddya think about them Jints" messages.

Conscientious people will save only the threads in which they posted.

Concerned, but lazy, people might save the whole darned thing rather than selectively go through it. But it takes only a bit more laziness to decide to let google save it rather than maintain a home archive.

I don't even get individual emails from the groups I belong to, including an L-Soft Listserv (TM). Otherwise I couldn't pick out my individualized mail. (The idea of sorting list mail into folders offers no advantage over going to the group archives.)

former law student said...

I wonder how much Klein is shelling out to keep those guys under wraps now.

Imagine the headlines: "Google workers shake down journalist to keep list archives secret!"

Working at "don't be evil" is too sweet a deal to swap it for ten months pay.

Phil 314 said...

Given the time of year, this feels like the NBA free-agency dash.

You had a chance to produce the dough and now its lost and the assets have now flown the coop

Or as Iowahawk would say:

PAY UP SUCKA!

reader_iam said...

It's also possible someone out there is compiling what they have, which they may have kept (deliberately or not) but not in an organized fashion. A lot of people tend to be lazy about organizing cyberstuff (I'm one, at least in regards to 95% of e-mails, IM convos, & etc.)

I've never gotten around to deleting, or organizing, e-mails--sent or received--related to this blog, for example, including all the followups I get from threads where I commented and then checked "e-mail follow-up comments." There are literally--and in this case I do mean **literally** thousands of them at this point, almost five years in. Even if offered money, it'd take me a quite a while to organize and print them out, or whatever.

So lack of disclosure **already** doesn't mean it's not in the works. It's early times, yet.

---

By the way, it seems a good time to remind everyone that even deleted comments remain in the e-mailed followups that those who check that box receive. As they say, nothing is ever really "gone."

Ernst Stavro Blofeld said...

JournoList was actually not a mailing list, but a Google Groups web-based site. It's possible they were mailing out updates, but not necessary; it may have been entirely web-based. The setup gives you the option of using either or both.

groups dot google dot com for the entry point.

They admin interface lets you choose to either archive messages or not. They also have a "delete group" option, which has presumably been exercised by Klein.

If they were using the email option (likely) then there would be messages spewed across multiple email inboxes.