or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> laurie andrews examines the way social media are surveyed by a host of parties. they range from employers to data servicesers and how personal information is collected and sold. she argues that a social network constitution is needed to protect privacy rights online. this is a little over an hour. >> as we tackle and timely thorny topic in the age of individual freedoms.

our founding fathers protected individual freedom, right to privacy, the right to a fair trial but now online social networks are creating an entirely new set of questions and challenges. colleges and employers reject applicants because of publicly available information and photos found on social networking sites, jurors post details on a case and ask their friends to vote on whether a defendant should go to jail. marketing companies are facing lawsuits for allegedly collecting information on citizens based on our travels on the web without our knowledge and consent. how would our founding fathers would handle this? we have a fantastic group of experts with us tonight to delve into this subject. starting with lori andrews who's a professor at las colinas's technical university. she assesses the social impact of emerging technologies. she's always bestselling author. her latest book is i know who

you are and i saw what you did. social networks and the death of privacy and we're honored that professor andrews has chosen the national constitution center as a venue to launch this book tour. please join professor andrews for a book-signing. kasmir hill goes through the personal information on the blog and the not so private before. before joining forbes hill was legal editor above the law. she has worked for the week and the washington examiner. jefferson preston is a staff writer at the "new york times" where she covers the relationship of social media, politics, business and real life. ms. preston took on this new beat in january of 2011 after working as the newsroom's first social editor. preston began her career right here in philadelphia at the bulletin newspaper and the "philadelphia daily news." she also serves as an adjunct

professor at columbia school university of journalism. moderating is christopher wink cofounder of technology news site technically philly and its parent company technically media, a media services consultant for the online ecosystem. he leads the transparent city, open government reporting project including coverage of the city i.t. policy. he has appeared in the "philadelphia inquirer" pittsburgh post gazette and the morning call and now i ask to you silence your cell phones in consideration of your fellow guests but i encourage you to use them. if you would like to tweet questions for our panel tonight, please use the hash tag pound cc privacy. and now without further adieu, please join me in welcoming lori, kashmir and jennifer. [applause]

>> thank you, everybody. i apologize for starting a little late. it turns outlet lapel mics to put on lapels with no lapels. the constitution was written here in philadelphia and in subsequent years the foundation of our democracy, the communication patterns, the communication patterns and issues of privacy were developed and 25 years later new communication forms are developing new standards for that. as steffan says we got a great panel and ask lori why social network is great. >> the founding fathers would have loved facebook, twitter they were techies. they have a clause in the constitution, the patent clause to encourage innovation but they were also very concerned about things like privacy, the fourth amendment preventing the cops from going in and finding a letter in our drawer and our house but now everything private about us is in the cloud.

it's not in the drawer in the house and i think we have to figure out ways to protect things we care about, free speech, right to a fair trial and so forth in the digital world. >> so what are we talking about? maybe start -- give some of the names of the organizations, of the services that we're talking about and let's bring in our other panelists. who are we talking about? >> we're talking about not only facebook. think about it. private data on 800 million people. it would be the third largest nation in the world after china and india. it has its own currency, it has its own economy. and it has dealing with other nations, china, so forth. and yet there's no real regulation about what is done with information about you posted on the website of facebook. if you think about it, 800 million people's private information. if a government would take it, it would take laws, it would take lawyers it would take guns and yet we're freely giving that

information up but we're also talking about companies you've never heard of, axiom, a data ag-garrett that has 1500 bits of information on 96% of americans. we're talking about nebuad who made a deal with service providers in california to put their hardware at the internet service provider and copy and analyze every email, every web search, skype calls, everything that anybody sent, everything that goes over the web. now, they're in litigation. there was such a settlement but we got to think about the many ways in which our private information has now become public, monetized, potentially used against us. >> so i want to go to kashmir, obviously, lori is talking to nation states. it seems like the conversation with what the web entails is a reasonable expectation of privacy. and i think there are those who would suggest -- well, it's

ludicrous to think that. you are choosing this is not a sovereign nation. these are choices talking a little bit, you know, kind of that feeling of reasonable expectation of privacy, if any deserve it to have it on the web and kind of where that comes from? >> i mean, there are many different ways in which we are on the web and i think we have different degrees of privacy depending on which area we're talking about so i think it's -- it's fair to say we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our email which is something private. but when we're talking about increasingly public forums like twitter, facebook, i think that there's less of an expectation of privacy when your broadcasting in a case where you know people can look at and read. i think we really have to differentiate in terms of which forums we're talking about.

and i think because the way facebook has changed over the years from being more of a private place to being more of a public place, people are still adjusting to that and putting a lot of information about ourselves online and out there, a lot of people get uncomfortable and it's used against them just because they're not thinking of how exposed they really are. >> i'd like to comment on the fact that emails are considered private and i think there should be a reasonable expectation of privacy in emails but that's not what the courts are finding. a new york judge said your emails should be treated like a postcard as if you were writing to anyone. and if you look at court cases, for example, one woman who was really injured in a personal injury case -- the judge actually used her facebook picture of her smiling to say oh, she can't be that hurt if she has a smiling picture on facebook not even asking if it was from before the accident and so -- and people might think --

might know enough not to have drunken sodas of them in facebook but often things are used against you when you wouldn't think about it. holding a glass of wine at a wedding. 35% say they have turned down applicants because they've held a glass of wine in their hands and you have things like -- people who are, you know, young poor kids who are charged as gang members because they're wearing gang members. that i love. i looked at the los angeles police department, it's plaid, it's plaque new york art open and so i don't think we understand seemingly innocuous pictures could be problematic. the woman who loses her child because she has a sexy picture on facebook. it's not knowingly giving up your privacy, twitter, yes,

you're talking to the larger population but sometimes it sneaks up on you in terms of how this is used. >> i want to get more of a dialog going but quickly i want to put it quickly in the context. often in the and, again, we're looking at facebook and twitter we'll see this trivial but, jennifer, maybe talk to us about why social media and -- when we're looking at how the constitution is involved and how the founding fathers might see it and we're looking directly at the arab spring that you were involved in reporting. talk a little bit about why the social space and these questions are a lot bigger than just what we may see here in the states? >> well, the privacy issues that were discussing tonight are very important. but what's also important is these platforms turned out to be enormously powerful tools in countries that -- where there were tremendous restrictions of freedom of expression, freedom

of assembly and these are rights and freedoms that many of us just take for granted here in the united states. in egypt, you know, many people first thought that -- they kept on talking about facebook, you know, helped spark the january 25th protests and revolution. well, it didn't begin with an event of, an invitation posted on a facebook page. actually began in june of 2010. and that was the facebook page that was started by a group of anonymous human rights activists, one of them was a person who was also working as a google marketing executive.

and what happened is in -- there was a young man who was killed by police. miss lied to his mother, first big mistake. the next thing that happened was someone in the morgue took a photograph with a cell phone of this young man's battered face and they put that photo up on youtube and they put that photo up on facebook in june of 2010. over the next few months, hundreds of thousands of people joined that facebook page. and on that facebook page they discussed things that they could not discuss, you know, in an internet cafe or anywhere else and i think tonight as we talk about these very important concerns about privacy, that we also remember and think about what our founding fathers might have thought about how powerful that these tools can be for

promoting democracy and for promoting freedom of expression. >> i think that's why i've advocated a right to connect because what did egypt do? they shut down the internet then after people were using the internet as a way to organize. you might we don't use the internet but that you might suggest all the traffic have tabs so we can shut off dangerous text and you're surprised to learn and astonia has a right to connect and you have an internet provider next to it ando competency you're not so readily to be bumped off if you have a cope wright violation and astonia in the rankings of freedom of press ranks higher

than the united states because of the openness of the internet there and so it is an important democratizing tool. >> so social networking in a conversation of privacy and freedom of speech nothing short of the future of democracies in the world. lori in your book it builds to your soccer network constitution. a lot of questions i'd love to hear but why some private companies might dive into that but i think this is a great start of the conversation. so we're talking about the incredible important communication tools. maybe walk us through in your book why a sensible bill is toward a social network constitution maybe give us the highlights of what that means and we can get kashmir or jefferson in about what could be part of that important conversation. >> when we think about it, our constitutional rights and here we're sitting at the 225th

anniversary of the u.s. constitution our rights against the government. other countries, though, their constitutional rights apply to corporations as well in many countries. why should private companies even care about this? i think these civil rights really are based on fundamental values we all share. initially, the founders of facebook said, oh, privacy, you're just going to get over that, the new generation isn't going to care about it. but the pew internet polls actually show younger people care than older people, 71% of those people 18 to 29 choose the highest privacy settings so there are two reasons why companies could care. first of all, they might get regulated by places like the federal trade commission because the u.s. constitution has influenced private laws. we have private state laws about our right to privacy. we have provisions about equality in the constitution that have been enacted as civil rights laws so it influences

private law in addition there may be a market for privacy. i mean, look at the fact that google blogs came along and said we're going to make it easier for you to divide your groups so when you put up your drunken photo so your boss doesn't so he it and your true, true friends and facebook had to modify and course and create lists and so forth so what i'm just suggesting is a kind of touchstone so before i buy, you know, an iphone that has geotags on it i think about privacy before new social networks are set up. they also give consideration to and we don't get judges who say in emails like a postcard, you know, anywhere you go on the web, that's not protected. but really think about things that people might hold dear and private. >> kashmir, you know, can you maybe jump in -- you do a lot of coverage around the intersection of technology and businesses and folks involved there, you know, does this seem like a real step forward? talk by the about your reaction?

>> one thing i would say in terms of email being a postcard i think that judge is an outlier and that speaks to one of the problems at that point a lot of judges who are interpreting the laws around these technologies don't often completely understand the technology. many courts have found there are privacy protections around your email and that, you know, law enforcement can only get that for -- kind of a complicated technical issue. i think many judges would say that email is private correspondence. i mean, in terms of -- go on, sorry. >> we can go back to it. trying to apply constitutional rights to social networks i remember constitutional rights are supposed to protect our rights against the government and some of the things that you suggest that, you know, businesses shouldn't be able to look at a person's facebook page

when they're making hiring decisions i remember i find that very problematic. increasingly on social networks, we kind of mix our lives all together so that you have the personal and the professional all mixed up on your facebook account and on your linkedin account and a business' customers will be looking at those places and i think businesses want to lock at how they're represented by companies to say businesses aren't allowed to look at their accounts and customers can look at those accounts on how their employees appears. i feel you're suggesting violating the right of businesses there. >> so i would say that one of the issues -- first, on the protections, when the courts have -- considered cases where data aggregates put cookies on your computers and

dictionary.com puts 233 cookies on your computer and consumers have gone to court and said, this violates the federal wiretap act, i need to be protected the courts have actually favored business too much and they've said as long as one party gives consent it's okay. so the if the website dictionary.com says it's okay for marketing companies to gather and monetize my information, i think that one party consent is crazy and they should be asking me and so i would change that. i think that we really aren't as well protected as you think. with respect to emails, okay, young girls with eating disorders sued blue cross to get them compensated for it under those psychological benefits. blue cross blue shield, i want every email sent by that girl, everything she's ever on social network pages to prove it's a social, you know, disorder that's got her having bulimia

whatever and not a medical information and the judge gave it up in any divorce case, yes, you can have the entire hard drive for the spouse so all this stuff is coming in. as to businesses, i'm more comfortable with an approach like we, you know, see in europe where germany is debating about whether employers could use social network information. we have finland where you can't google an employee before hiring them. i love social network. i don't want to see people branding themselves since birth, you know, you actually -- you can think of the rich families that hire tutors to get their kids in college or to write the college essay. now they got someone starting when the kid is 2 because that's when you have a facebook page, your parents start putting things on. make sure you're saying the smartest clever things. i want it open but i want it protected. >> why would youtype open? i'm the mother of two teenagers.

trust me i don't want that information open and facebook does now -- they have learned because there was a huge backlash from users and they have made privacy settings more transparent. and as a reporter who looks at facebook pages i will tell you there's a lot more people who keep their facebook pages private i've noticed in the last year. so the tools are there to -- for people to control and manage their facebook information. and what we need here is a massive public information campaign for parents, for educators, for -- for people about how to use these tools responsibly. >> we're in a state of flux and we're still adapting as a society and we're still -- we're still learning what it means to

be exposed to the way we are because of the way we track our lives and share information online. and i do -- i absolutely agree, jennifer, part of the problem here is getting everyone educated in terms of -- >> should should employers get the private side right now in misdemeanor some had massachusetts, employers are saying, listen, if you want a job, you have to tell us your password so we can go on that private side. >> bottom line, there are laws governing employment in the united states. there are certain things an employer can ask and there's certain things an employer cannot ask. for one thing an employer cannot ask your marital status. so an employer cannot use that information against you in a hiring decision. if that employer -- >> but how do you prove it -- >> so do we need additional laws? i don't know. there are laws on the books right now.

one story i did last summer which was -- opened my eyes to a lot of what information employers can gather on people. there's a startup company called social intelligence and they're running their business like alike a way a credit reporting agency runs their business. and they provide employers with a social media credit like report on potential employees and what they do, however, for employers is they'll gather every single day that you have ever said in a chat room posted on flickr, put up on, you know, any one of the many like instagram, you know, photo-sharing sites but they're very careful about in this report what information they provide to employers.

they only provide information that is allowed under the law, under the law to be considered in a hiring decision. >> spoken.com and put in your name and you'll see your private information and maps to your house and you make an estimate how good your credit is. if people pay a little more a month they can get things that you posted on social networks and they make no pretense of following the credit reporting laws and so what's happened with that, someone sued them and said you've got everything all wrong about me and you could think about it if they say, lori andrews her credit is bad when it's really good i might not get a loan. i might be thought of this flaky by employers. they have banner ads up h.r. researcher don't you want to see what's on all the, you know, dating and other sites that your -- a million people they

say a day go on to decide who to have sex with, who to hire, who to insure, what credit cards to offer people and when an individual sued them hey this violates the fair credit law association, you have to tell them you're doing it and have a right to correct and the court was not impressed by that argument and so we need to, as you pointed out we got some laws but let's start applying them. and one of the toughest there is for me is that we have great laws that protect medical privacy. but if it's in the hands of doctors or hospitals and so there was a websites patients like me. i'm depressed, i'm suicidal and they shared so people who had diseases can share information. and a website collected everything and they started pulling down their sites.

they're losing the benefits. so when i say i think we should be open. i mean, i think we should be allowed to be open about our ideas in a private setting and should not be -- have to restricted ourselves because of fear what's done with that information. >> so kashmir, something i think you come in and say something other folks ought to be thinking. i think there's a balance between whether we're in a period of flux and 20 years ago we'll giggle and have this conversation. >> or try. >> so talk a little bit of that. is this overhyped and something it will figure itself out because we're in a period of flux and institutions and individuals are figuring out what's appropriate and kids will figure out what's natural or are there some real fears. talk a little bit about that. >> yeah, it's interesting. i don't know how many kids who are, you know, on the internet now and the things they're posting or thinking about the fact that will still be there in 20 years.

and could end up playing into, you know, future hiring or their future political plans because it's new. in 40 years we will have somebody nominated to the supreme court who will have been on facebook for most of their life. and there will be a ton of information there. i think we're already starting to see it with some of the younger political candidates like crystal ball. she was running for congress in virginia and there were some photos -- i mean, i think she's in her maybe late 20s and there are some photos that popped up from a party after college where she was there we are then-husband dressed as santa and her husband was dressed as rudolph the red nosed reindeer but he had something that was not a red nose on his face.

that was kind of embarrassing for her. and her reaction -- and this sort of went viral. i don't think that she was slated to win that race but she was running as a democrat in a very conservative district and she didn't win, but her reaction to it was to say, you know, this is -- this is -- this is how we are now. we're going to have more background material and some that will be very personal and that is the future for her generation, my generation, and coming generations. and the challenge that she imposed for society is weather, you know, we can adapt to that. and start looking at people as a kind of fuller version of them, whether our expectations of people will change so that we don't expect people to live these kind of puritanical lives

so that we accept that people, you know, have -- have argument. i hope that is the direction that we're going to move in. and given how -- how much of our lives are captured online, i think that's inevitable. >> it would be great if there were some button you could push when you were 21, 25 and just erase every photograph with a red cup or in some inappropriate, but there isn't. and i think that what that means for all of us, you know, whether we're journalists, parents, educators is a huge responsibility, a huge responsibility to -- you know, with our kids, to raise their awareness about the very simple fact every single day you post

could be made public, if you have very tight privacy -- say, if a friend shared something that you shared on your network, it's then public. i think that right now when we're in this period which kashmir described, there's just a huge responsibility for all of us to use these tools carefully. >> well, some technologies are coming down the pike. in fact, one which has been designed to make sure your digital photos delete after two years so those pictures of you with your ex-girlfriend and so forth and i do think -- you're right we're in a period of flux but what happened -- and i've heard that before, oh, we're all in this together so it won't be used. we're all going to have the red cup photos, et cetera, but we have had people who are applying to the supreme court who because they smoked pot like everybody of that generation they didn't

get that job and i heard that with the genetics, once our genome in public, everybody has 8 to 12 genetic defects. we're going to be in this together. we're not going to discriminate. but certain people feel their things are worse than yours so there's still discrimination and still what's happened we're in a period of flux but with every technology that i followed, whether it's genetic testing or forensic technologies, initially a lot of stuff was used and then privacy was protected and expanded. so i don't think we're going to give up privacy. i just think courts are going to come around to it like they did in cases that the supreme court handled where cops could go along a street and point heat detection device at their house to see if there's more lights to see if you're potentially growing marijuana and even though they didn't enter at your house and they were coming at it

from the streets so initially courts said well, that's okay, there's no fourth amendment violation and eventually the supreme court said, no, no, that's part of your expectation of privacy. i think we'll eventually get there, you know, but a lot of damage might be done on the way. >> yeah, absolutely. >>ing in there's a lot -- to be discussed but we want to get to questions. i want to ask one more question to the panel myself. i'm self, i want to take more from me and i want you have some more ideas and i'm not very good at pantomiming, the last thing, the panel to bring us the concept we're here what would the founding fathers think about facebook and the discussion and your own take on it and, obviously, the founding fathers were a round group of personalities and starting from lori moving to jennifer would the founding fathers as a group love the freedom of speech issues communication issues or

be terrified have the of the privacy infringement. maybe give us is walk from there. >> love the freedom of speech that arab spring. be concerned when the chief of marketing of facebook and when the former ceo of google said, we got to do away with anonymity of the web because that was certainly part of the founding principles. also upset about how it's playing out in the fair to a fair trial where people are actually googling facts of the case and posting on their facebook page the fact of the criminal case and asking their friends to vote up or down and well, you're only supposed to consider things in the courtroom and not outside things and so i think those would be the source thoughts for the founders. >> kashmir? >> yeah, i think twitter and facebook would have been really beneficial and useful during the american revolution. these are great tools for

organizing. ben franklin used to keep a daily journal where he tracked his virtues to figure out, you know, if he was being a better person. and i think we live in a society where we like the idea of archiving and tracking ourselves. i know lori, you were talking about this pool of deleting data and having it automatically expire. i don't know if anyone would want their photo albums to disappear in two years. that is kind of our worst nightmare when your house burns down and you lose, you know, precious photos. but i think there are so many benefits to this -- to these new technologies and this idea of tracking and gathering data from our lives and being able to look at it over a long period of time and i think that's something that ben franklin for one would have lived to a certain extent. >> yeah, i think certainly the founding fathers would have found tremendous utility with

these tools except if george washington is crossing the delaware and one of his guys, you know, says on facebook, oh, it's pretty cold, you know, this christmas as they head for trenton and alerting, you know, those other guys in trenton, that could have been a problem. so -- so, you know, as lori has been saying and i think what we're all saying is that a balance -- you know, there needs to be balance and people need to recognize that these are companies with terms of service. read the terms of service. for just one of the social networks that you use. and they're businesses so awareness, education is vital while the courts and various state legislatures are wrestling with all these very important issues that lori has identified. >> so let's go to what the

ultimate communication device, let's go to the audience questions. folks can walk over to the mic over here to my right. >> while our live audience makes their way to the microphones, there's a bunch of questions on twitter so i just want to ask two real fast while our audience makes their way. the first is a practical question. the second is more theoretical the practical question can employers access facebook accounts if they're set at private? so hopefully you guys can explain how that works. and secondly, the question is, we're a representative democracy but social media is based on patistory direct democracy. it seems the founding fathers would be skeptical of social media, no? >> lori, you want me to take the first very practical question about -- >> how do they get it? well, they may get it from data aggregates that have scraped your account. they may get it from the sort of companies that traffic in past things before you took down, you know -- made private your

account. i mean, there's a long time when myspace didn't have privacy settings so some things have been used against people on that. generally courts, police can get your private side but employers can't if you have current privacy settings although some employers as i mentioned will ask for your password to get to the privacy side. >> i want you to give us the quick walk-through data aggregates i think that will maybe answer other questions. what are the real nefarious side. >> facebook is basically a data ag-garrett it makes $1.6 billion a year as serving as an intermediary between advertisers and your private information. so if i post, you know, i'm thinking of, you know, going on a trip to florida ads can pop up about airlines and so forth. but some data aggregates use

flash cookies, web beacons, use bots to collect a picture of you from all aspects of the web. your google searches, your -- and so forth and so far courts have not said that's a problem. so there's a lot of information that follows your travels all over the web and can mainly be used for marketing but now increasingly can be used for other purposes. >> there's a question on facebook. generally if your account is very private, it's hard for an employer to look at it. something that some employers have done is -- sometimes you can access some information if a person has made it available to their network. so something a lot of employers used to do is if they had, you know, an intern who is at nyu, that intern could access certain information for other people who are there. you want to look at your privacy settings and know -- make sure

you know with which audiences your exposing your data to. if you're only showing it to your friends, for the most part only your friends would know it's there. >> and they would not have access to it if i understand it. and how would -- if i may ask lori so that i can understand, so how would police and courts get access to your private facebook data without a subpoena or a court order? >> some do it with deals with data aggregators and some are looking at exactly what government agencies are looking at information about you and they have the manuals of all the social networks on twitter to see how much they give without a subpoena, you know, and so it's really very, very interesting 'cause there are these guidelines for -- like the immigration service to go on

mihente and pretend to be a member and find out about other people on it. >> let's jump -- the second question was on -- did you catch that, jennifer, was pushing us on the issue -- could you repeat the second question. >> our nations based on representative democracies and the question was social media having been built as a participatory direct democracy seeing the founding fathers would be skeptical of that? >> yes, especially if women jumped into the conversation. so you want to go over here and we'll go over here. let's do direct questions so we can get through a bunch of them. >> you guys talked a lot about what should be private, what shouldn't be private. how private should things be. a concern i have is that if things are sort of too private and we have too much anonymity it's very easy for me to masquerade for somebody else and cause problems for you because i can pretend i am you so how would we address that. >> every comment air

moderator -- >> california has a ecommerce impersonation law pretending to be somebody else. but in cyberharassment cases where the parent of a rival -- the mother of a rival will pretend to be a 16-year-old boy friend the daughter's rival and at first pretend to be interested and then push that person towards suicide. so i think we're again balancing between freedom of expression, the importance of anonymity and political sector and then the whole cyberharassment issue. >> yeah. i will tell you on twitter, their real identity is not required. and in the political space -- and i've covered politics for a very long time and i've covered, you know, dirty tricks and i used to cover new jersey. [laughter] >> so i'd get those calls like from former new jersey state

troopers, hey, did you hear about so-and-so and blah and blah this candidate and that candidate now what i'm seeing on twitter it's a new form of dirty tricks. and it's all done behind these anonymous accounts. so it does create some very big trauma. >> trial problems too. apparently there were websites about phil specter that had a lot of information that was actually not part of the case so the attorneys tried to get an order not allowing jurors access to twitter or, you know, the ability to tweet out. and in martha stewart's trial i mean, she immediately created a website, you know, a very, very expensive website about her daily doings to try to influence people's opinion in the case. >> but i think it does tend to come out. and you sometimes see people's

uglier side and that's part of the kind of -- the beauty and difficulty of the web. but, you know, the law still does apply in the web and when people do break laws there oftentimes they discover they're not as anonymous as they thought they were. our activities are tracked on the web. you leave your ip address behind. it's like leaving a fingerprint. and so when people, you know, do defame another person or, you know, break into servers, oftentimes they do get tracked down based on the fingerprints that they left behind. so -- >> but let's jump to the next question, sorry. can we go down here. she had her hand up. >> what i'm going to ask ties directly into that. where i work we call the whole notion of security and actually if someone is looking to find you they generally can through technical forensics and things

like that but my question to what kashmir said earlier about the distinction what a employer may be looking for on the job and you're representing your employer or your organization around-the-clock 24/7. i'd like to hear all three of your thoughts on what has just broken as a news story with u.s. army troops, unfortunately, and the whole issue of the viral video with the taliban. what -- whether you see a distinction between this being armed forces and sort of what the gradient is for, you know, going from people who are employed by the armed forces and people who are employed by private industry and sort of where that line moves and how that looks so that the whole question of whether or not 24/7 someone's life is a representation of their organizational affiliation? >> you want to jump in?

anybody. >> can we have a quick background on the story that broke today. i was actually at a cybersecurity conference and it was basically offline. >> it was marines urinating on dead enemy bodies. >> and there was a video of that. >> uh-huh. >> and so, you know, that, you know, shouldn't prevent court martials and so forth representing the company. now, what about -- here's one of the issues that comes up, you know, divorce case and here's the video that was posted by the ex-husband that a court did not admit. someone shooting ronald mcdonald's in the face. now, if i work for a company maybe some of the people -- customers wouldn't like that. i still would allow it to be kept, you know, private. i would say you should have privacy settings, you know, because companies don't -- you know, initially, clients didn't

like women lawyers. they thought they didn't present as well court. we've gotten over, you know, letting customers sort of run what competent people in their jobs can do. and so i'm completely comfortable having this offlimit to employers who might make bad decisions and we're seeing some movement in that area. for example, employers can't discriminate against you based on your genetic makeup. but the eeoc just recently said, okay, that includes they can't go on your facebook page and see if you liked the breast cancer association or if you're saying i've got a doctor appointment for my huntington disease and so forth. now, you can argue that companies might be benefited by having that. they could then choose to not hire or promote employees who might cost them money in their insurance, but we've said social

networks are off limits to employers in that setting. we have now rules that the eeoc and the national labor relations board have said it's okay to say critical things about your boss on your facebook page or even your company if it's part of a concerted sort of lobbying effort to change conditions. so we're -- we have the backbone for protecting it. i don't think it's that big of a leap just to say keep it off limits. >> i think the reality of the new world -- i mean, we travel around for our smart phones, our device are on us we're always checking email we're always kind of connected to work. and on the web when we're moving around, we tend to move around with our employer attached to us. and this is not true for everybody, but most of us list where we work on facebook, on linkedin, on twitter. and we kind of -- whether you see it as a good thing or a bad

thing we have come to represent and be attached to our employers all of the time. and so i think this is part of the education here is you have to think about it. there will be repercussions for what you put out there and you might be fired. so people need to be cognizant of that in their decision-making and what they do online. >> well, at the "new york times" when i was social media editor, that was a big question. should we allow our journalists to go out there and, you know, post on twitter? or should we impose all sorts of restrictions and rules? what we realized is that we have lots of rules at the "new york times." we have an ethics guideline book, you know, like this. our journalists know putting a

mccain bumper sticker or an obama lawn sign in your yard so you shouldn't say, you know, i love sarah palin. i don't love sarah palin, you know, on your twitter account when you're a journalist at the "new york times." so i think that there are many guidelines and rules, you know, that's out there and we need to consider them and not necessarily make up new ones. but the most important thing that people need to remember when they're using these tools is, you know, what your mother told you, good judgment. you know, show good judgment. and then briefly one -- i did a story a couple of weeks ago about school boards across the country imposing guidelines for teachers on facebook because for many teachers, the decision to friend a student or not was a

decision that many teachers were and are making all by themselves. and it has been getting some teachers in trouble. and what i found fascinating some teacher unions fought back against these guidelines. they saw them as being too restrictive of freedom of expression. and there was a big dispute over a proposed -- over a law in missouri. however, some teachers unions saw these guidelines, as kashmir said we're in this period of flux as being guidelines that really protected educators. that really helped them understand what was appropriate and what was not appropriate to say and do on these social networks. >> let's just keep it going. let's go -- >> so you had mentioned 70% of users have all their privacy

protected to me that totally makes sense because they're the ones getting photos, getting drunk and putting it on facebook. as people are starting their own startups and become the business force in america, where do you see, i guess, the laws coming from and where do you expect where the change to start from? and because so many young people are starting their own jobs and, you know, we have a different opinion of things, don't you see that -- our lives are kind of transparent instead of a facebook beinguned as this is, you know -- then outside of work and inside of work it's more looked this is them as a person and all of their sides? >> well, i think some businesses, unlike the "new york times," want you to be quirky. you know, in terms of having fun things up. i've seen some of the younger lawyers having on their websites, you know, a tally of how much coffee they have a day.

which -- which legal character in a tv show they want to be but new issues are coming up and when you were talking about the, you know, in the twitter audiences where you have where employers say we own your audience. you can't take them with you and so i think you're going to have to face a lot of the intellectual property issues that this generation has in terms of if you build up a huge following and you change companies, you know, who owns that? if you're tweeting from cbs.com, you end up in a tiff, you know, with the television network as to whether you can take your followers with you. >> lamar odom get in the next question. >> hi. i just wanted to say that i recently left facebook because every day i'm reading about some case where it's being used against people in the courts. sort of -- they incriminate

themselves and they can't plead the fifth. i thought it was a gated community and then my aunt got on there. [laughter] >> my daughter's classmates' parents are on there, my mother-in-law is on there now. so -- >> you didn't mention the friends. >> you'd be surprised. you don't want to see my house at thanksgiving, i will say that. but you said, you know, it would be nice if there was a big reset button you could push. yeah, that would be nice. but facebook doesn't want to make that button and i can't pressure that button and the only thing i can do is have three friends and maximize my proifz setting and scrub my

data. i don't see a law saying, hey, facebook you have to give people more control. >> maybe kashmir, this seems to be at the heart of the question. does the market dictate what privacy should be in the future or should there be kind of more legislation jurisprudence? do we all need to leave facebook if we're concerned -- >> this is often, you know, the response to that is, you know, if you don't like it, if you feel alike your privacy is being violated then just quit. in one way i think that's valid. in another way i think it's difficult and we have built networks and it's a way people are communicate so if you're not there you can't communicate. but i do think this is evolving and if we find that there are more down sides to being on facebook, than there are upsides, benefits, then people will leave. i think that'll happen, you know, there are some people who

have decided to quit facebook. good luck. a lot of them come back. it's hard to live without facebook, i think. and there is a reset button in that you've now deleted your account and when you do come back you can start fresh and rebuild. >> it used to be facebook kept your information where the electronic system has if you quit and delete within 30 days and i think that's an important aspect of it. i think we might see some alternatives to facebook that coming up as social networks to go back to that original idea but i do love that single digit skit, oh, no my mom is on facebook where the skeet that it's a computer programmer you could use so if you have a beer in your hand it turns into a diet coke and you're naked it turns into a t-shirt, i heart my

mom. we do need oh, no my mom is on facebook. i have a son of 23 and, oh, no, his mom is on facebook and now twitter has their open youtube channel. this is -- poor thing. >> you talked about tumbler and for parents find out if your kid is on tumbler because there's a lot more content that can be created there, than on some of the other networks. >> social networks rise and fall. there have been friendster, there's been myspace. my feeling is that facebook is more entrenched. it does seem to have appeal to so many different generations but, of course, that's tependent on newer generations also being drawn to facebook. but there are so many different social networks there are other places that you can go to, you know, have a more private space or a more private network so

people need to start doing -- different things in different places and that way they can kind of keep their identity somewhat separate. >> so i've been alerted there are five minutes left so we're going to move to the lightning round. you get social capital -- >> 140 characters plus. >> a similar situation if we go back far enough, health care and your private information about your health was not necessarily restricted by law. yet, hipaa came out and now all of that information is prevented by law to be released. why couldn't a similar situation be developed here? although it's somewhat different you're providing the information per se on facebook, where the health information -- when you go to a hospital or a doctor's office yet that's pretty tightly controlled and i think really effective. couldn't something like that be implemented in these situations?

>> i mean, it could be and especially since now we're seeing an overlap where people post information about their health. i mean, the types of information people post are the types of information about, you know, relationships, sexuality, sexual preference, political, you know, interests and so forth that we in the past have most stringently protected under privacy laws you have privacy in facebook. you're asked to friend people. it's not like writing information on the bathroom wall. you get the impression you're talking to smaller groups. i actually see the privacy evolving to cover social networks. >> lightning round contestant number 2. >> i think it's very ironic that once the data aggregated, they have very large value, commercial value and lots of companies make a lot of money

with those but that nothing of that triggers down to people whose data concerns for it. so where they originate. i remember the pennsylvania department of motor vehicles certainly sold data about what kind of cars people own. this was before, you know, the facebook, et cetera. and i thought it was an outrage at that time. so the point is really, how about the commercial aspect of the ownership of these data? don't these data belong to me instead of the company that sales it freely? shouldn't they ask -- shouldn't they pay me for that? and what kind of value do these data actually have at my level, you know? ..

>> but they are not free. >> the david is what you're paying for those, for those services. >> i think if we are more aware of it, look, do you really need a company that makes 2 billion a year off your private display ads alone, or could some of the group of twentysomethings create something with a make a little us and you have more privacy protection and you still get the

benefit of service? >> free business idea, okay. next. >> i think our vocabulary, like the law, isn't really suited to this problem. if you think the question is protection against using the information, not suppressing the information. i'll give you an example. a lot of the conversation has been well, you can protect yourself. you actually can protect yourself because anybody can put up information that we would normally consider private. we don't want to suppress a freedom of speech. by way of example, one of my classmates from years way before any of this, has scanned letters and photos and so forth from high school and put it on the web. now, should -- yes. [inaudible] [laughter]

>> i haven't read them all. i'm sure you are always professional. >> likewise, even with these kids, the photos that go up can be put by one of their friends. >> and i do think that facebook and these other services have made changes in the last year. very important changes in the right direction. and one of them includes tagging, where people cannot just tag you without your permission. bubut on the other and they have developed facial recognition software for automatic tagging. hey, isn't that great? they give this example nowhere i don't have to take everybody in photos at a wedding. but at least if the bride had to take everybody, you know, maybe they wouldn't tag the picture of you, you know, having the sake bomb or kissing someone else's wife or puking on the dance

floor. now it is automatic and you can untagged yourself but it is not that great a thing. the technology, i have been reading patents with the idea is i can snap your picture with my smartphone on the street, it tells me every dating site you're on, what you listen to. so the whole, you know. >> it's just what is different now is they can say in a place where they can have a huge audience. that's really the difference. >> as opposed to the little town, the people they are telling it to don't know other things about you, that you are a really responsible person and so forth. so the world, you know, audience. >> i've been trying to hide the fact i had a bowl cut for years but i can't do it now. >> in rural america one of my colleagues did a really smart

story. and i wonder if there's a place where we could put some links after this talk so that you might be able to see some of the pieces, articles and issues that we are talking about. but in small towns across america, there's a social network that not many people know but here in philadelphia or new york or boston or washington, where it's nasty in many of these small towns because they don't have real identity and people are saying all sorts of -- >> actually madison, about whether you're married and you want to have an affair, one of my friends went to close his parents house and remote area in michigan after his father died and he went on madison for the area and i like all these people out there come people he ran into at the post office and so forth. advertising to have affairs. more may be happening with social network and we realized.

>> final question. we'll pass it over here. >> i would really love to in on a positive note. i've read a lot of what kashmir has had to say. the positive benefits of social benefits arguments for all we're talking that is negative behaviors and that has a lot of psychological ramifications but yet what about the positive behavior? i'm a social need administrator and am also a fraud investigator so i see both sides of it. the connections i've made to build my professional life in addition to her personal life are just enormous. and i would love to really have conversations about the positive benefits. >> i think a great way to end it, on that note, is comedy each have 15 seconds. >> i which is a look, look at what happened in the last year,

in 2011, you know, and started in tunisia, we saw what happened in egypt, in bahrain. it's not just social networks, social networks and cell phones. protesters in bahrain, when the cell phone and the ability to take a photo of what was happening to them and their ability to transmit that around the world helped like save them at very, very difficult part moments. and then what we saw with occupy wall street, where people, the horses left the barn. people are documenting their experiences, and social media is here to stay and learn how to use it responsibly and in a smartly is everyone's responsibility. >> i'm just amazed at the way we can connect. when i was democrat and shopping i was out walking in d.c., and spotted a whole bunch of women

stuff spilled on the sidewalk. i assume that maybe she had had a fight with her boyfriend and he dumped her stuff outside your but i spotted a prescription, and because i'm naturally curious, i flipped it over and her name was there. so i googled her and her twitter account came up. and it said six hours earlier that her car had been broken into. so i tweeted after i said hey, i think i just found your stuff. where is the? i told her what was. her friend went and collected it. i was just, my mind was blown by that. i did that in about three minutes. before twitter, before facebook that couldn't have happened. it's a small story, but a really think there are many benefits to our new publicness. >> i think also the difference to me with art and music. if you're a banjo ditty fall and so forth, but also outsourcing going on. i start a novel, you add to it,

or a song and so forth. they found individuals are better at figuring out how to fool proteins than computers. you can get it on the people working on a project. since you brought up egypt, shortly after the revolution, a little baby girl was born in egypt and her dad entered a facebook as an important not as to what's going on. >> perfect. thank you, thank you everyone for coming out. [applause] >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here online. type the author or book title in the search bar in upper left side of the page and click search. you can share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with the top nonfiction books and authors.

booktv.org. >> i think barnes & noble for hosting this would get together and talk about issues that i think are very important. there seems to be some confusion in the united states, a lot of people don't realize that america failed. they think it is still going on. just as i entered here, some guy said to me i didn't know america for. i said stick around, you know, stick around. i also wanted to just locate this particular talk in terms of the stuff i have been writing. this is, "why america failed" is the third in a trilogy on the american empire. the first one was the twilight of american culture which is published in the year 2000. the second was called "dark ages america" that was published in 2006, and this came up about a month ago. "why america failed." there was, however, a collection

of essays that i publish about a year ago. so that came between book to a factory. about half the essays are about the united states. and i kind of want to encourage you to have a look at that book. it's called the question of bodies. and reason it's important is because there's material in there that is not in any of the other books. but it deals with the kind of unconscious programming that americans have that leads them to do the things that they do, whether the person in the street or the president. and that sort of completes the picture. so i just want to encourage you to have a look at that book. the title of this talk tonight is the way we live today. despite great pressure to conform in the united states, to celebrate the trend dates the system in the world, the nation does not lack for critics. the last two decades have seen

numerous works criticizing u.s. foreign policy, u.s. domestic policy, in particular economic policy, the american educational system, the court system, the military, the media, corporate influence over american life, and so on. most of this is very astute and i've learned much from reading these studies. but two things in particular are lacking, in my opinion. and have a very hard time making it into the public eye. partly because americans are not trained to think in a holistic or synthetic fashion. in part because the sort of analysis i have in mind is too close to the bone. it's very difficult for americans to hear it. and somebody would say, i didn't know it failed. the first thing that these words like is an integration of the various factors that have done the country and. these studies tend to the institution specific, as though the institution under examination existed in a kind of

vacuum and could really be understood, apart from other institutions. the second thing i find lacking is the relationship to the culture at large, the device and behaviors that america's manifest on a daily basis as a result, these critiques are finding superficial. they don't really go to the root of the problem, and this avoidance enables them to be optimistic which infect places him in the american mainstream. the authors often conclude these studies with practical recommendations as to how the particular institution of the functions they have identified can be rectified. they are as a result not much of a threat. it's usually mechanical analysis with a mechanical solution. if the authors were to realize these problems did not exist in a vacuum or lead to other problems and are finally rooted in the nature of american culture itself, and its dna so to speak, the prognosis would not be so rosy. it would become clear that the

simply is no way out, that drinking surround is not really an option at this point. today just two examples, michael moore and noam chomsky, i buy them greatly. they've done a lot to raise awareness in the united states, to show the both foreign and domestic policy as currently pursued are dead ends, or worse. yet both of these men assume that the problem is coming from the top, from the pentagon and the corporations. which is partly true, of course. the problem is that this rest on a theory of false consciousness. that is that the belief of these constitutions have pulled the wool over the eyes of the average american citizen who is ultimately rational and well intentioned but i would say to them, get out and talk to some people. find out how accurate that is. so for them the solution is one of education. pull the wool away from