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Hackers show the Web can threaten ties so carefully woven
"Not many folks have a couple of Colorliners in the garage. But computers? And hacking skills? Now, that's different."
A newspaper's relationship with its readers is a special one, built up over years, if not generations. Newspapers rightfully guard that relationship jealously. Yet the move to the Web has jeopardized that relationship.
One Sunday in September, the venerable New York Times became the vulnerable New York Times when hackers took over its web site, replacing the paper's home page with one of their own. The site was unavailable for most of the day, and access to many features was disrupted for days thereafter.
A couple of days later, a friend at the Times asked if the hackers could have substituted a page that looked like that of the Times, or just substituted or edited a story. The answer, unfortunately, is yes.
This is something that just does not happen in print. Yes, there are occasional reports of an entire issue being stolen from racks, or someone doing a wrapper and placing it around papers in some racks. But replacing an entire press run? Not likely.
Not many folks have a couple of Colorliners in the garage. But computers? And hacking skills? Now, that's different. And it opens newspapers up to a lot of things that just were not there before. Adam Liptak, senior counsel in the NYT corporate legal department, is among the many people who have been thinking about this lately.
"It's quite hard to tinker with the paper," Liptak says. "Once in a while, we hear that someone has stuck a flier or something in the paper. That drives us berserk if our readers think it's coming from us. But that is very, very rare. This kind of thing, where somebody hijacks the electronic version of the paper, is another dimension."
So, are we all liable for things that hackers may say under our name? "I don't think our main concern is that this can get us in legal trouble," Liptak says. "But it's enormously costly in terms of relationships with readers."
That relationship is something papers need to protect. Most of the new media listservs, trade shows and discussion groups talk about branding and trust and relationships as the way to establish or maintain market position as newspapers stake their claim in the electronic world.
The Times itself is quite careful with its brand name on various cable TV projects, its expanding web presence and other projects. It tries to protect its relationship.
That relationship can be damaged in any number of ways. Recently, an editor at one TV network showed me two web sites that were almost indistinguishable. One was for the news branch of the network, the other for a pornographic site that had taken the source code.
That damages the relationship, as does a hacker's diatribe replacing a newspaper's home page. Presumably, the typical reader would quickly figure out that the porn was not from the network (at least before the Starr report), but what of other malicious tricks?
"I don't think this occurred to people when we first got into this business," Liptak says. "What if the manipulation were more subtle, if someone gets into a story and inserts a paragraph instead of putting up porn? ... It raises all kind of issues if we're not able to protect our product as well in the electronic realm as we are in the print."
Protecting that relationship in an electronic world is a dicey proposition. Lance Hoffman, director of the Cyberspace Policy Institute at George Washington University, is not surprised that the Times was put in this position. "We're building computer systems as if we built cars without seat belts or emergency brakes," Hoffman says.
He contends things could have been much worse. "They could have put out a bogus New York Times," he says. "Or, they could have done nothing visible but unleashed a rogue program, something that messes up things.
"On the Internet, every man can be a publisher, and even worse, they can make like they are the Times, even when they are not."
This gets into the issues of security, identification, authentication and accountability, Hoffman says, issues that most businesses are just starting to address. But that starts yet another ethical problem -- how to ensure that a paper and its readers are who they say they are, and how to ensure the data gathered in the authentication process remain private and protected.
"This didn't have to be the Times," he says. "It could have been Procter & Gamble or anyone. ... Computers are just like early cars. We just learned how to go 50 miles per hour. Now we have to build Volvos and put in air bags."
Just as most newspapers are putting procedures in place to ensure that the ethical and quality standards of print are used in the electronic product, newspapers need to ensure that the relationship of a paper with its readers is upheld.
Seat belts, everyone.
-- Steven E. Brier
