Full Circle Associates

I recently blogged about the Gonzalez speech and T.B. Brown posted some links fact checking some of Gonzalez' data which I thought was worth pulling out into a blog post. Thanks, Tom! (And I had a giggle that you were quoted in our local paper here in Seattle. Funny world!)

Tom commented:

Eric Rescorla (a security author) reminds us why we should sanity check the speech. It seems the amount of fear this speech attempts to inject is unjustified. Your statement "I have a stronger sense of the perception that the bad news is far more visible" is understated. Maybe Jingjing and Chacha can come to our rescue.

The data he linked to...

Educated Guesswork: 50,000 "sexual predators"?: "The 'one in five' claim comes from the Youth Internet Safety Survey. I've blogged about this survey before, but the bottom line is that the one-in-five statistic is fairly misleading in a number of respects. The great majority of solicitations were of teenagers 14-17, technically children I suppose, but not really the image that the statistic conveys. Moreover, only 4% of the solicitation was by adults over 25, so this more looks like come-ons across the 18 barrier than like dirty old men. Oh, I should also mention that according to this study: 'None of the solicitations led to an actual sexual contact or assault.'"

I TOTALLY agree that Gonzalez was following in our current US administration's use of fear. Not constructive in my opinion.

That said, we still have to deal with human nature online. To that end, Dennis also commented on the post with a very thoughtful conjecture that I'm chewing on...

It seems to me that in the online world, consequences are disproportionately landed on the community and not so much on outlaws. It is a feature of the level of anarchy.

So now I'm thinking about how different behaviors show up disproportionately to the actual number of people doing them. (Bad English. Sorry. Have to go clean the house. Must. Stop. Blogging.)

Tags: community_indicators, onlinecommunity