The Great Debate

The communist on J. Edgar Hoover’s payroll

Tim Weiner

Mar 1, 2012 13:12 EST

This is an excerpt from Enemies: A History of the FBI, published this month by Random House.

J. Edgar Hoover’s most valued secret agent was a Russian Jew named Morris Childs. The operation the FBI built on his work was code-named SOLO. It posed great risks and the promise of greater rewards.

The FBI’s first debriefings of Childs were declassified in August 2011. They illuminate several mysteries of the Cold War, including the origins of Hoover’s hatred for Martin Luther King, the reasons for Dwight Eisenhower’s failure to approve the CIA’s plans to invade Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and the beginnings of Richard Nixon’s thoughts about a détente with the Soviets.

Morris Childs was an important figure in the Communist Party of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, serving as the editor of its newspaper, the Daily Worker. He had fallen out with the Party in 1948. Three years later, the FBI approached him as part of a new program called TOPLEV, in which FBI agents tried to talk top-level Communist Party members and officials into becoming informants.

Childs became a Communist for the FBI. He rejoined the Party and rose higher and higher in its secret hierarchy. In the summer of 1957, the Party’s leaders proposed that he serve as their international emissary in an effort to reestablish direct political and financial ties with the Kremlin. If Moscow approved, Childs would be reporting to Hoover as the foreign secretary of the Communist Party of the United States.

The FBI’s intelligence chief, Al Belmont, could barely contain his excitement. If the operation worked, he told Hoover, “it would enhance tremendously the Bureau’s prestige as an intelligence agency.”

On April 24, 1958, Childs boarded TWA Flight 824 to Paris, on the first leg of his long trip to Moscow, at the invitation of the Kremlin. He met the Party’s leaders over the course of eight weeks. He learned that his next stop would be Beijing. On July 6, he had an audience with Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Was the United States planning to go to war in Southeast Asia? Mao asked. If so, China intended to fight to the death, as it had during the Korean War. “There may be many Koreas in Asia,” Mao predicted.

The workplace’s new normal

Nellie Borrero

Mar 1, 2012 10:40 EST

Each year for International Women’s Day, a U.N.-designated holiday celebrated on Mar. 8, Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, conducts external global research that investigates the workplace and careers and what women and men around the world have to say about them. This year, possibly more than in any of the eight years we’ve conducted the research, respondents’ beliefs about careers and work-life balance paint a picture of change and a movement to a new normal in the workplace.

Accenture’s research was conducted via an online survey of 3,900 business executives from midsize to large organizations in 31 countries. Respondents were split evenly by gender and were balanced by age and level in their organizations. The margin of error for the total sample was approximately plus or minus 2 percent. You can see the report here.

Accenture found that more than half of both the women and men surveyed (57 percent and 59 percent, respectively) said they are dissatisfied with their jobs, but more than two-thirds (69 percent) of the same respondents said they plan to stay with their current employers. What that means: The workforce is dissatisfied, yet stable. That presents an opportunity for companies to better support their employees by offering career advancement, more flexible work schedules, and new skill acquisition and training in the workplace. Unhappy employees aren’t looking to leave — that’s a bit of knowledge companies can use.

There are some key findings that companies should consider as they work to retain their employees. For example, 71 percent of people we surveyed said they have work-life balance most or all of the time, while 41 percent said that career demands have a negative impact on their family life. So, people’s work is impinging on their lives, but they don’t think their work is overwhelming their personal life — these seem in opposition. But when you consider that more than half of the respondents have some type of flexible work schedule, and 44 percent of this group has had a flex schedule for more than three years, it begins to make a bit more sense. Also, 64 percent of those surveyed say flexible work arrangements are a reason they are staying in their jobs.

When asked about the greatest barrier to career advancement, almost half said it was a lack of opportunity or a clear career path. On the other hand, a third said there are no barriers to their advancement, and only 20 percent said family responsibilities are a barrier.

The word “opportunity” continues to stand out for me in these findings. People want opportunity. They want opportunity for growth, opportunity for flexibility and the opportunity to integrate a career and a family life. And they are dissatisfied without it.

How Apple, and everyone, can solve the sweatshop problem

Dan Viederman

Feb 29, 2012 14:31 EST

Every few years brings us another sweatshop offender. In the 1990s it was Disney, and then Nike and Gap. The 2000s brought us Wal-Mart. The past few weeks Apple has been in the crosshairs.

One question is of paramount importance: How can we use this current public conversation to finally drive a different outcome? What must companies do so that 15 years after Kathie Lee Gifford tearfully became the first sweatshop poster child, workers who make and grow products for global consumers are paid fairly, protected from danger and free to advocate for themselves without fear of reprisal?

The good news is that these years of effort have created robust experience from which to identify what has gone wrong. The fundamental driver of “sweatshops” is that multinationals do not place value on good working conditions in their supply chains. This does not mean that a company doesn’t care about how those workers are treated, or that the company intends to act unethically or exploitatively. To the contrary, big companies require good conditions through vendor standards and “codes of conduct.” They build corporate responsibility departments whose staff have budgets to reduce the risk of bad working conditions at supplier factories and farms. But their work is much like the arcade game Whac-A-Mole: A problem arises in one factory that they take steps to fix, while other problems fester and ultimately break through the surface elsewhere.

For this to change, companies have to resolve the ways in which their business decisions actually drive irresponsible performance among their suppliers. Companies frequently speak with two voices when they talk to suppliers. Procurement officers responsible for ordering something from a supplier expect delivery of a quality good at a cheap price on a tight time frame. Corporate responsibility professionals embody the expectations that all those other business needs will be met, but in a responsible manner. Yet that responsibility gets ignored when a company makes last-minute design changes or increases order size. The supplier will still deliver a quality product on time, but will do so by keeping his employees at work overnight or for days on end. Without the ability to negotiate a higher price at the last minute, the supplier can’t pay the workers for their overtime without taking a loss himself. Thus responsibility is sacrificed by a company’s business decisions.

Instead, companies must learn to speak to their suppliers with one voice and reinforce that voice with action. Suppliers should get positive incentives in the form of higher prices, financial bonuses, long-term contracts or other benefits for maintaining good working conditions. In-house procurement and supply chain staff should be compensated more highly if they place orders with responsible suppliers. Taking these steps would allow businesses to integrate social responsibility with other business requirements like quality, price and delivery.

Workers must be part of this conversation as well. Line workers and harvesters are the best source of information about working conditions, no matter the industry. Only a worker can tell corporations with accuracy whether or not she is being paid according to her contract, whether she considers her work hours to be excessive, whether she is provided with drinking water and toilets during her long days, and whether she has been harassed or fired for “associating freely” by joining a union. By working with trade unions and NGOs, companies will learn what the reality is at their suppliers, providing an early warning when things go awry and a constituency that can help improve conditions.

To hold themselves accountable, companies need to communicate publicly what has changed as a result of their social responsibility efforts. Our recent survey of corporate responsibility reports captures a mind-numbing array of activities, but no analysis of what has been achieved. To its credit, Apple has demonstrated that communicating achievement is possible. The company remains the only multinational to quantify the impact of its supply chain social responsibility in dollar value for workers — disclosing that $6.7 million was returned to migrant workers who had been overcharged by unscrupulous labor contractors. This kind of disclosure leaves no doubt about its impact and stands in contrast to the usual corporate responsibility communication.

Monetizing the marginalized

Chadwick Matlin

Feb 28, 2012 14:30 EST

Five years ago, Ron Paul’s popularity was still surprising. Sometime in 2007, the former physician, longtime crank in Congress, and thoroughly fringe Republican had somehow turned his shtick into success — at least monetarily. Paul raised more than $31 million in the 2008 Republican primary even though he never actually won a contest where actual delegates were at stake. For a longshot like Paul, it wasn’t the chance of his success that drove people to donate; on the contrary, all but the deluded knew he would fail.

Now, in 2012, the idea of his success among the fringe is mainstream. And Paul’s alchemy — turning derision into dollars — isn’t exclusive to his corner of the fringe. The powers that be — politics, media, Corporate America — have refused to embrace causes from Occupy Wall Street to Elizabeth Warren. And yet these underdogs still find a way to succeed because marginalization has become incredibly lucrative. How else to explain the $150 million that the DIY funding site Kickstarter is expected to help raise this year, even though many of the projects it funds will do no better than Ron Paul?

As always, credit the Internet. Since the earliest days of altnet message boards, we’ve known the Web can build just as well as it can destroy. Its vastness allows for connections both obscure and passionate, while its anonymity creates hate both entropic and cowardly. This new economy of the marginalized is the child of the first dynamic — the one that can rally thousands to a cause with the smallest of sparks.

In the past, the spark has been all that was necessary, especially in politics. Remember when Joe Wilson yelled “You Lie!” to President Obama at the State of the Union in 2009? Until then Wilson had been a meek Republican congressman best known for his determination to support Strom Thurmond and keep the Confederate flag flying at the South Carolina statehouse. The media made him into a symbol of all that was wrong with Washington. Just as quickly, supporters made him — or his campaign war chest — rich. He raised $2 million in the week after the State of the Union. The Washington Post dubbed it, and every other controversial sound bite that takes on a life of its own, a moneyblurt.

But this most recent crop of marginalized parties is taking part in a more nuanced process than Wilson. These parties have used more than just controversy to raise money. They’ve used the promise of reversal.

Clay Shirky, the author-thinker-smart guy who spends more time pondering the Internet than you do surfing it, told me it takes two things for a mass, financial mobilization: coordination and leverage. On the Internet, plenty of groups can gather en masse. But they won’t be moved to act, let alone donate, unless they think their support is actually going to do something. Shirky points out, for example, that there are plenty of people who want to legalize marijuana, but all their efforts have been focused on changing state law. They know there’s no use pouring their money into a national campaign if the White House isn’t going to acknowledge their issue.

Does the G20 matter?

Terra Lawson-Remer

Feb 24, 2012 13:09 EST

G20 finance ministers are gathering in Mexico City this weekend to prepare for the fourth G20 Leaders’ Summit since the Group of 20 declared itself the premier forum for international economic cooperation at its 2009 Pittsburgh summit. Birthed to coordinate a response to the global financial crisis, the informal body of the world’s richest countries has seen its agenda balloon over the past four years to encompass everything from green growth (Mexico’s pet initiative) to commodity price volatility (the agenda of the French, who hosted last year) to anti-corruption.

As workstreams proliferate, consuming an ever-increasing amount of communiqué paper and government staffers’ time, the question must be asked: Does the G20 matter? Or, more precisely, what should the G20’s role be on the global stage, and what reforms (if any) are required to allow the body to fulfill this role effectively?

The informal group was elevated from finance ministers to heads of state to quickly coordinate a decisive response in the face of the global economic crisis in 2008; and effective action required a forum that included China and other important emerging economies, as the former G7/8 club could no longer really call the shots. In its important initial mission the G20 mostly succeeded, forming the Financial Stability Board and taking other critical measures to stabilize the economy. Now the G20, at a leaders’ level, is de facto the premier forum for international dialogue and cooperation on a whole range of critical global issues that have been unable to find resolution in other contexts.

Yet the G20 excludes more than four-fifths of the world’s countries, causing some critics (and excluded countries) to denounce it as unrepresentative and therefore insufficiently legitimate. And because having enough of the right actors at the table is a prerequisite for effective global coordination, these same critics contend that this lack of representative legitimacy also undermines the G20’s effectiveness. At the same time, the informal structure of the G20, with a rotating chair and no permanent secretariat, means that agendas are determined each year by the chair and so can swing widely, and formal mechanisms to monitor follow-through on countries’ public commitments are weak.

To address these perceived governance challenges, some G20 members (Korea, France, and Brazil, among others) are pushing for a permanent secretariat and formal criteria for membership selection. In this view the G20 should be institutionalized to ensure continuity and follow-through on the implementation of global commitments, and to cement the group’s legitimacy and prominence as a global forum. Likewise, some members and non-members are eager to expand the group to include more countries. On the other hand, some G20 members (including the U.S.) argue that the body should remain nimble, with no heavy bureaucratic secretariat and with a narrowly defined and focused agenda, to reduce coordination challenges and make quick responses in times of crisis possible. As the UN amply illustrates, there is a significant trade-off between inclusive membership and the ability of an international body to come to quick, decisive and meaningful consensus.

Yet fundamentally both camps miss the boat. The main constraint on the G20’s effectiveness is not whether other countries are included — the existent group already represents 90 percent of global GDP, 80 percent of world trade and 65 percent of the global population, including key emerging economies like China and Brazil. This is far more inclusive and representative than the G8, which the G20 has largely displaced, and more than adequate to make agreements to act collectively credible and effective. Nor does the group’s efficacy depend on whether the G20 sticks to financial issues narrowly conceived or expands its remit to address other fundamental global challenges that have failed to see cooperative solutions emerge in other forums. The issues on the G20’s burgeoning agenda are critical global problems, and solutions may indeed be fundamental to sustainable, balanced and inclusive growth in the long term.

The main threat to the G20’s effectiveness is its lack of domestic legitimacy within member countries. The group is widely perceived by the public as transnational elites hatching plans behind closed doors in insulated centers of power. Without genuine ex ante engagement to build trust and support with diverse domestic constituencies — labor, business, civil society, and the members of parliaments and congresses that purportedly represent these different interests — leaders will never have the space within the G20 to negotiate meaningful agreements. Finance ministers and heads of state now come to the table with their hands tied, their positions determined in advance by their governments and a formal script that precludes meaningful and creative compromises. And the problem only increases once leaders leave summits to return home. Bound internationally by public commitments, but without the ability to get those agendas enacted at home, the effective implementation of commitments is even weaker than the ability of leaders to forge meaningful agreements in the first place.

The G20 needs to embrace growth

William Rhodes

Feb 24, 2012 11:15 EST

This week’s Group of 20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers in Mexico City needs to take concrete actions to support global growth and job creation, revive credit growth by the private financial sector, guard against a rise in trade protectionism and reduce financial market uncertainties.

The scope for long-overdue G20 actions on budget deficits and payments imbalances, including currency misalignments, is limited this year given presidential and legislative elections in France, South Korea, the U.S., and Mexico, and given the emergence of a new leadership team in China, a once-in-a-decade event. Politicians may well want to avoid taking unpopular measures right now, even if they’re necessary. However, there is still significant scope now for concrete G20 measures that strengthen the forces for growth and confidence-building in the short term.

Over the last two years, a euro sovereign crisis has been building in which many of the lessons that should have been learned from past debt crises in Latin America and Asia have been ignored. These include the risks of contagion, the dangers of delaying tough decisions, and the excessive focus on imposing austerity on debtor countries. The latter undermines debtor nations’ political leaders and their crucial task of building public support for tough reforms, ultimately creating the opportunity to grow their way out of their difficulties.

We need better balance. It is crucial for the G20 ministers’ meeting to emphasize concrete measures to strengthen competitiveness for countries now facing acute difficulties. For example, officials from the IMF and the euro zone governments should encourage Spain, Italy and Portugal, in particular, to introduce short-term actions that explicitly create jobs and stimulate investment. At the same time these countries should underscore their medium-term commitment to fix their underlying problems by mapping detailed budget and structural reform programs.

For its part, the U.S. Congress has taken action, finalizing an extension to the payroll tax deduction and securing unemployment benefits, that provides essential momentum to the economy. But more needs to be done. The U.S. should signal at the Mexico City meeting that it recognizes the risks of deleveraging right now by financial services firms, which in part is a product of enormous uncertainty about future rules and regulations. At an absolute minimum, there should be a freeze on any new regulation or additional capital requirements beyond what has already been approved by Congress and the regulators; bank capital requirements today are high enough.

Indeed, the G20 should declare its opposition to any new macroeconomic or financial regulatory actions that may dampen 2012 growth. This means, for example, that euro zone leaders should come to their senses and end the dangerous talk of introducing a financial transactions tax. European governments should also avoid imposing any new capital requirements on banks, over and above Basel III standards, at a time when banks’ balance sheets are being hit hard by sovereign debt losses, forcing them to reduce credit extension and therefore prospects for economic growth.

In addition, at a time when global economic conditions are so fragile, it is prudent to bolster the resources available to the International Monetary Fund. The G20 should encourage the IMF to create a special financial vehicle with resources from the countries with large foreign exchange reserves, such as Brazil, China, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. These resources could then be deployed swiftly to provide support to countries around the globe should they confront acute difficulties.

Suing corporations should be a last resort

Christine Bader

Feb 23, 2012 10:50 EST

On Feb. 28, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum. The case is about Shell’s alleged complicity in torture and extrajudicial killings committed by the Nigerian military in the mid-1990s, and is expected to determine whether corporations can be sued in the U.S. for their involvement in human rights abuses abroad.

Corporate lawyers and plaintiffs’ attorneys alike are eagerly awaiting the outcome. If the Supreme Court upholds corporate liability, as federal courts have in the past and the Obama administration is encouraging the High Court to do, other lawsuits will surely follow — against Apple for labor abuses in its Chinese manufacturing base, for example.

But we should not let this case distract us from the fact that lawsuits should be a last resort for people hurt by business. Suing a company is expensive, complicated, and time-consuming, and it rarely makes victims whole. In 2009, after three years of litigation, Shell settled a related case for $15.5 million — to be divided among 10 plaintiffs, their lawyers, and a fund for education and other initiatives in the plaintiffs’ communities. Hardly an ideal outcome where lives have been lost.

Similarly, Chevron’s relentless pursuit of legal absolution for environmental destruction in Ecuador means that the communities harmed by toxic waste will never receive remedy of any kind, as long as their advocates, government, and the company are consumed by the court proceedings.

Instead, we should focus on making sure that companies don’t hurt people in the first place — and when they do, that there are adequate means of redress so that the victims don’t have to end up in protracted legal battles.

The tragic circumstances that led to Kiobel — poor communities ironically left worse off after the discovery of natural resources in their area — are hardly limited to Nigeria or Ecuador. The “resource curse” has affected communities around the world.

Extractive companies increasingly recognize that they can no longer block out the problems that their installations cause for the people who live nearby. Companies are hiring community ombudsmen and establishing grievance mechanisms to resolve disputes before they escalate to levels where serious harm is done.

The Book of Jobs

Maureen Tkacik

Feb 22, 2012 10:36 EST

Steve Jobs smelled so foul that none of his co-workers at Atari in the seventies would work with him. Entreating him to shower was usually futile; he’d inevitably claim that his strict vegan diet had rid him of body odor, thus absolving him of the need for standard hygiene habits. Later, friends would theorize that he had been exercising what would prove a limitless capacity for sustained and gratuitous lying that came to be nicknamed the “reality distortion field.”

Jobs originally learned the “reality distortion field” from Bob Friedland, an enterprising hippie he met by chance one day when he returned early to his dorm room and found Friedland having sex with Jobs’ girlfriend. Bob was four years older than Steve, and had taken two years off to serve a prison sentence for LSD trafficking. Like Steve, Bob would eventually become a billionaire, just in the mining business. His followers would often invoke his old drug dealer nickname “Toxic Bob.”

Steve Jobs needed no nickname. As the title of his definitive biography reminds, Steve Jobs speaks for itself. His name was his essence, what set him apart even among greats like Einstein and Kissinger, iconic figures with whom he shared a biographer, Walter Isaacson (though not the cheesy, descriptive subheads Isaacson used in his books about the other two subjects).

Steve Jobs, the book, is very much a product of its time, which is to say, a product of its subject’s fastidious narcissism and the broader culture’s limitless capacity for nurturing it. With any luck future generations will saddle Steve Jobs, the brand, with the blemish of all the jobs (small “j”) a once-great nation relinquished because of brand-name billionaires like Jobs. But we are not there yet.

Arriving in stores all of a fortnight after his death, the book was instantly deemed by the New York Times as “clear, elegant and concise enough to qualify as an iBio.”

In truth Steve Jobs is the antithesis of concise, but words have a way of inverting meanings in the reality distortion field. Surely Isaacson might have dropped one of 92 references (according to Kindle) to Bob Dylan.

Sometimes the repetition serves a purpose: The drug LSD, referred to 33 times, is clearly important to Jobs. (The FBI thought the same, according to documents released this month.) “How many of you have taken LSD?” Jobs taunts an audience of Stanford business school students. “Are you a virgin? How many times have you taken LSD?” he demands of an Apple interviewee. Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid.” Tripping was “one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his life.” People who had never dropped acid “would never fully understand him.” The generations that followed his own were more “materialistic” and less “idealistic” for not having tripped; also, they all looked like “virgins.” In the binary world within Steve’s reality, having consumed LSD was the key determinant of whether a colleague or employee was deemed “enlightened” or “an asshole.”

How to close America’s financial literacy gap

David Nelms

Feb 21, 2012 13:09 EST

In an election year, many issues vie for our attention. Complex matters like healthcare, social security, and taxes — that inspire endless opinions but have no easy solutions — are debated daily. One issue that we should all agree on without any debate: the need for financial education in schools. As a country we are failing in financial literacy. We owe it to our children to provide them with the best opportunity for a brighter financial future. By giving them a stronger grasp of the basic principles that can help them achieve their dreams — and avoid financial nightmares — we can help our nation as well.

Americans, on average, were able to correctly answer just three of five questions about fundamental financial concepts, according to a FINRA capability study. And less than 25 percent of students say they are prepared to deal with the financial challenges that await them in the real world. Yet while Treasury Department research shows that high school graduates in states that mandate financial education have higher savings rates and a greater net worth than graduates from states without financial education, only 12 states require that students take a personal finance course to graduate.

It’s up to all of us — parents, schools, government, private sector, and public sector — to give students the tools they need to succeed. We must take steps to ensure that our kids remain competitive and prepared for the future.

First, financial education starts at home. But parents are often uncomfortable talking to their kids about money, in part because many of them lack confidence in their own financial acumen. For many parents, it’s easier to talk to their kids about sex, drugs, and alcohol. Here are some easy things we can do as parents to reduce the discomfort and start the conversation:

• Use everyday experiences to talk about money. For example, use tax season as a reason to talk to kids or engage them in the process of budgeting for vacations.
• Talk to your kids about money by using milestones like saving for something special.
• Tell them about money mistakes you made when you were younger and what you’d do differently now.

Second, schools need to start making financial education a priority. Studies show that teachers want to provide personal finance instruction, but relatively few of them — only 20 percent – believe they have the capability to teach it. Today, 38 states may or may not be teaching the next generation about basic financial concepts, which are critical life skills they will need as adults. There are tools to help schools and teachers. For example:

• Non-profits like the Council for Economic Education are training teachers around the country, giving them effective ways to reach children in grades K-12 about personal finance topics, such as saving and investing.
• Jump $tart Coalition has an entire database of free financial education resources for teachers and parents. There are game sites like http://financialentertainment.org/ that have award-winning games, for both adults and kids, to teach such financial fundamentals as budgeting, interest rates, and saving.

My tweets refuse to be subpoenaed

Malcolm Harris

Feb 17, 2012 10:26 EST

When I saw an email from Twitter Legal in my inbox, I figured it was spam. Data phishers use those kind of emails to steal user passwords, but this was a genuine warning from the social media giant. The New York District Attorney’s office had filed a subpoena requesting my account information and all of my tweets from last September to the end of the year. Twitter had attached the subpoena, and there was my handle, called by the County of New York to testify against me, the person it represents.

My tweets were being called to testify against their creator because on Oct. 1 of last year I was one of more than 700 people arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge as part of an Occupy Wall Street action. We had planned to march over the pedestrian walkway, but the crowd was too large. The police retreated and allowed us to cross half the bridge before kettling and arresting the entire crowd. I had my phone with me and was using Twitter to spread information to people following at home, as well as people behind me in the march. After a short stint in a cell, I was charged with disorderly conduct and released. I pleaded not guilty, not because I didn’t block traffic, but because I believe the march across the bridge was a constitutionally protected form of political speech.

To try to prepare a convincing case that I intended to block traffic, the district attorney has requested over three months of my tweets, as well as any information attached to my account, including my password and email address. The scope of the request extends back to Sept. 15, two days before the occupation of Zuccotti Park began. Since the subpoena is related only to the disorderly conduct charge, the prosecutors want to look through my tweets — preferably without me knowing — for content from weeks before and months after Oct. 1. That wastes taxpayer dollars and some poor trial prep assistant’s time for what amounts to little more than a politically motivated traffic ticket. My attorney soon informed Twitter of his intention to file a motion to quash the subpoena on four different grounds, and they have agreed not to disclose anything for the time being, at least until a judge rules on the motion later this month.

To anyone who has seen a single episode of Law and Order, this looks like a clear misuse of prosecutorial power, using trial preparation for investigative ends. The surreal subpoena calls for a witness named “Twitter, Inc.” to appear in court and produce the documents or face up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine, and ends with a gag request attempting to cajole Twitter into not disclosing the search to, well, me. Thankfully Twitter did not abide by that last part. They don’t comment on specific cases (even to those involved in one, like me), but Twitter’s official policy is to inform users when their information is requested unless legally required not to. In this case, they were smart not to take the prosecutors’ word as gospel; the gag request wasn’t binding.

So far there have only been a handful of these electronic subpoenas, all of which (including mine), have been aggregated by Anonymous hackers as part of what they’ve named “#opsubpoenathis.” Local police in Boston subpoenaed two accounts (including @occupyboston) and — bizarrely — two hashtags. In Plano, Texas, authorities subpoenaed the WordPress blog records of Occupy Plano. What we can see across the country is the modest beginning of a national move toward the use of activists’ legal electronic communications against them. Treating it as the serious threat to Internet freedom and political speech that it is, the National Lawyers Guild, Electronic Frontiers Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union have all lent their assistance in the legal efforts.

When students used Twitter to coordinate protests in Iran in 2009, The U.S. State Department applauded and intervened to keep the service online, but local prosecutors in cooperation with the police have tried to access user records to build cases against Anonymous members and Occupy activists. As far as I or the ACLU know, mine is the first Twitter subpoena related specifically to offline Occupy activities, and though I’m surprised to be singled out, I’m not surprised that officials at different levels can’t make up their minds about Twitter.