Maybe Jeffrey Rosen is looking ahead to 2084 by which time every man, woman and child will have a Lojack type device installed that will track movements, speech, etc, so that there can be constant monitoring of just about everyone.

As to Jeffrey's reference to professional journalists, it must be kept in mind that journalism fails the definition of a true profession, as no specialized training (e.g., law, medicine, ministry) is required and there is no readily available means of enforcing ethics or conduct codes, what with the protection of the First Amendment press clause (as picked up by the Fourteenth Amendment for limitations on the states). So just about anyone can be a journalist, especially via blogs. In any event, the regular speech clause should provide to the non-press the same rights as the press under the First (and Fourteenth) Amendment. Edits are helpful, but far from perfect, at least in this day and age.

Rosen contacted me and Matt over the summer about being interviewed for this article. Both of us agreed, but were never called for a real discussion. I believe Matt gave him some info on background, but I was disappointed that Rosen never followed-up, because I would have been glad to have talked about some of the issues that you raise here.

Having worked as a journalist before returning to law school, and having been misquoted in the media several times in the past few days, I can't agree with Rosen's comments regarding the benefits of "a & b" for "professional journalists." Editors don't offer much in the way of safeguards on accuracy or content, and the wish that journalists will be cautious because they want to maintain credibility is a dream. Perhaps this was true in some bygone era, but nowadays most people being interviewed need the press as much as the press needs them (and everybody in the newsroom knows it). The swift news cycle and the crushing hunger for content combines with superfast deadlines to produce a marked decrease in accuracy with no real consequences. Most bloggers will at least do a Google search to double check themselves before they post, but in my experience most "professional journalists" and editors don't even have the time or good sense to do that!

Chris,

I'm not quite sure I understand your criticism. Rosen is interested in the intersection of technology and privacy; that's what he wrote about. You seem to have wanted him to write on other issues that are more interest to you. In particular, you seem to have a story to tell about the role of blogs, and you seem to have wanted Rosen to tell it. But who says that one story on blogs means that there cannot be others on other aspects of blogs?

- A reader

Actually, reader, my intent was to show how -- even within a privacy discussion -- Rosen dropped the ball in favor of over-reporting on one lurid, flashy area of the online privacy issue: sex.

What I didn't even begin to discuss in my response was that if Rosen's interest truly was examining sexuality and the Internet, blogs are not the place to be (as if anyone needed me to tell them that). If this is about interpersonal relationships and privacy, why is there nothing about any of the many dating Web sites? Or -- more trendily (if that's a word) -- why not discuss Friendster, Facebook, MSN's new My Space feature, or something that has actually led to regular issues at the intersection of dating, the Internet, and privacy?

In other words, it's not so much that Rosen did a poor job of examining privacy and blogging issues (although I believe my and others' posts make that much clear), it's that he also did a poor job of discussing the real issues out there in terms of the Internet, dating, and privacy. Either way, the story he told was woefully incomplete.

At base, however, you are correct, reader, that this is my criticism of his choices. All journalism is about choices. I believe, in both the way I explained in my post, as well as the way detailed in this comment, that Rosen's choice was a poor one -- for himself and his readers.

Got it. I suppose one difference between the technologies you mention and blogs is that with a blog, you don't need to be a blogger to have your privacy violated. With a dating site, Friendster, or Facebook, you need to affirmatively agree to participate. To some one who is older than the Friendster/Facebook crowd, it must seem like blogs are a bigger threat to privacy.

Great post, I share many of your sentiments about the article. I also believe that Rosen mischaracterized our blog by glossing over the more interesting discussion of what is on or off the record in the classroom to instead focus on salacious tidbits that appear from time to time.

As for reporting private conversations, or even what professors said during class, I am unaware of any specific instances where we did that. We did blog extensively about our Supreme Court class but, to the best of my knowledge, we did not quote our professor, or even disclose his opinion on the cases we discussed, other than in the context of raising a particular issue. On the other hand, I did see the professor (whom I like) on O'Reilly discussing what his class thought of the Newdow case (O'Reilly called us a bunch of "radical secularists," which I suppose was true), which was fine by me. From my perspective one of the fundamental purposes of higher education is to spread ideas and in that regard, what is good for the professor is good for the student. Reporting private conversations, however, is another ball game....

I'm reminded of Judge Easterbrook's "Law of the Horse" essay. What makes the Internet so different?

Rosen writes at lengthy about Washingtonienne and how horrible it was that she talked about her sex partners on a blog. But, geez, I dated a writer five years ago, and she just published a short fiction piece about our relationship--and worse, it was for a non-fiction anthology printed on Dead Tree. The name's changed ever so slightly, but anyone who knew me or her back then will know exactly who she's talking about, though they won't know how much of the story is made up. It was something right out of "Good in Bed". The question Rosen poses is one of shifting cultural mores; the technology has just so little to do about it.