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Saturday, Dec 30, 1995 12:06 PM UTC

Mitnick's Malice, Shimomura's Chivalry

Three books on the celebrated hacker case debunk one another's myths

By 

I.   T h e   T w o   P i c t u r e s


Thick glasses, double chin, frowning lips and a bitter stare: Kevin Mitnick’s 1989 mugshot is forbidding — a hacker gargoyle. By the time of Mitnick’s most recent arrest, in February, 1995, the photo had appeared twice on the front page of the New York Times.

No one made Mitnick into a hacker; that was his own choice and responsibility. But the media turned his trespasses into legend. The Times turned that little photo into a receptacle for all its readers’ projections of digital-age paranoia — an icon of junk-food-fed, anti-social computer thievery.

Who might exorcize this demon? How about a young, Japanese-born physicist, ski bum and computer-security expert, revealed in photos as an elfin young man with long black hair — in short, a wizard like Tsutomu Shimomura?

When Mitnick apparently broke into Shimomura’s computer system on Christmas Day, 1994, he threw down a challenge that would lead to his capture two months later. If Mitnick was “the dark-side hacker” (as he’s called in “Cyberpunk,” until recently his only in-depth portrait), then his nemesis, Shimomura, stepped right out of central casting into the role of a Jedi knight.

The story of the Mitnick manhunt, recounted by veteran computer reporter and “Cyberpunk” co-author
John Markoff, broke in the New York Times on February 16, 1995 — setting off a different kind of chase, one involving agents and deals and contracts. This month, the stores will be crowded with the fruits of that second hunt — a complementary trio of books, each, “Rashomon”-like, providing a different angle of vision on the Mitnick saga.

Individually, these volumes are dissatisfyingly incomplete. Put them together, though, and they debunk the very media-legend stereotypes that sold each of the authors’ contracts. Mitnick is no demon; Shimomura is no wizard. Crime and punishment online is a lot harder to score than a Dungeons-and-Dragons-style duel.

II.   T h e   T h r e e   B o o k s

Of the trio, the most eagerly awaited, heavily promoted and apparently most lucrative is the collaboration between Shimomura and Markoff. (Trade reports peg its advance at around $700,000, with additional movie and game deals bringing the tab near $2 million.) Its title reads like a late night marketing-meeting compromise that everyone got to tack a few words onto: “Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America’s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw — By the Man Who Did It.”

This force-fed title presages an awkwardness, and an arrogance, that the book, alas, fully delivers on. By the end of “Takedown,” Shimomura has shredded his own courtly image and replaced it with a picture of near-inhuman condescension.

Where “Takedown” provides the view from Shimomura’s corner, “The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick” portrays events from the quarry’s point of view, as recorded by Jonathan Littman, a journalist who was in telephone contact with Mitnick through most of the chase. (Littman has also accused Markoff of being not only an observer but a participant in the Mitnick manhunt.)

More effective in humanizing Mitnick than any of Littman’s exhaustively reported phone conversations are “The Fugitive Game’s” photos. By juxtaposing the now-familiar mugshot gargoyle with a more recent snapshot of a slimmer, amiable regular guy in jeans and a T-shirt, “The Fugitive Game” effectively undermines our natural revulsion to the earlier picture. It embarrasses us into a less knee-jerk, more even-tempered view.

A third volume, a quickie paperback by writer Jeff Goodell with the hype-laden title “The Cyberthief and the Samurai,” offers far less inside detail but somewhat more context, coherence and chronological logic than its competitors.

With this much verbiage and talent dedicated to it, you’d think the Mitnick story would finally emerge with some clarity. Instead, the journalistic free-for-all only ends up muddying the biggest question of the story: Just how dangerous was Mitnick, and how damaging were his exploits?

III.   T h e   H e i n o u s   C r i m e s


Hyperion took out an ad in Publisher’s Weekly for “Takedown” that reprinted the Mitnick mug yet again with these words: “He could have crippled the world. Only one man could stop him. Shimomura.”

“Crippled the world”? Huh?

“Takedown” summarizes Mitnick’s wrongdoings as “reading other people’s mail and stealing their software.” These are certainly immoral and almost certainly criminal acts. I don’t want Kevin Mitnick reading my e-mail — no doubt neither do you. If I were Markoff or Shimomura I’d be pretty mad to find him rummaging around my hard disk, too.

But, as Littman persuasively argues, it’s hard to see what deep national threat Mitnick posed. Among the files he allegedly pilfered from Shimomura’s computer and stashed at various online locations — including accounts he hacked into on the WELL and Netcom — investigators found a big list of Netcom customers’ credit card numbers. That sounds scary. But there’s no evidence Mitnick ever used any of them, and it turns out that copies of this list had apparently been floating around the hacker underground for months.

Mitnick is also accused of stealing proprietary cellular-phone software systems, and that’s of understandable import to company officials. But how do you calculate this sort of damage in dollar figures? Think back on your last few software purchases and “upgrades” and you’ll recall how arbitrary the pricing of “intellectual property” can be.

Shimomura scoffs at the argument that Mitnick was simply a curiosity-driven hacker; he finds no “higher moral purpose” in Mitnick’s exploits — probably because there is none. On the other hand, Mitnick never seems to have made a cent from his hacking, and never escalated from electronic harassment and snooping toward any kind of violence to property or people. If this is how “the dark-side hacker” hacks, we can all breathe a little more easily.

Mitnick seems to have pursued his telecommunications trespassing out of some kind of compulsion (after one of his earlier convictions, he got some minor breaks by accepting a diagnosis of “computer addiction”). Most readers are likely to conclude that he deserves some sort of jail sentence. But did he need to be turned into a demon — a posterboy for technophobic paranoia?

When we embrace reductive pictures for complex issues, we lose the chance to assess what’s really at stake. Hypnotized by visions of duels between demons and wizards, we lose track of today’s far more important conflict over computer security — the battle for privacy and freedom on the electronic networks of the future.

IV.   T h e   R e a l   T h r e a t

“Takedown’s” most valuable contribution to the public debate is Shimomura’s careful explanation of how hard it is to achieve thorough security on the Internet — which was designed as an open network for collaborative research rather than a secure framework for online commerce. The greatest weaknesses, he convincingly maintains, are human rather than technological.

The firewalls most corporations have built around their sites are like digital Maginot lines, he suggests. They lull their owners into a false sense of high-tech safety, while the Mitnicks of the world saunter right past the defenses, employing the low-tech con-artist techniques they call “social engineering.” (Mitnick’s no technical genius, it seems — one incident in Goodell’s book suggests that in autumn of 1994 he didn’t even know what the World Wide Web is — but he has a gift for getting people to divulge passwords and other secrets over the phone.)

Shimomura, touched by something of a hacker spirit himself, has nothing but contempt for institutions and bureaucracies. It’s amusing to compare the passages in “The Fugitive Game” that darkly speculate about Shimomura’s connections to the National Security Agency with the sections of “Takedown” in which Shimomura fumes about all the red tape that’s delaying his basic research grant from the NSA. But when Shimomura criticizes the performance of the law-enforcement authorities he works with, he has a point.

Mitnick’s mayhem, in the end, seems far less terrifying than the ignorance and incompetence displayed by most of the officials who are fumblingly trying to capture him. That ordinary citizens might be easily spooked by shadowy visions of uber-hackers is understandable; that the Feds in charge of prosecuting computer crimes don’t have a more sophisticated understanding of technology is inexcusable.

Through the Clipper Chip, the digital telephony bill and other initiatives, the government has recently sought greatly expanded powers of electronic surveillance: essentially, it wants an open back door into all future networks. “Takedown” suggests that, if legislators create such a door, it’s far more likely to be jimmied by the Mitnicks of the future than to give the rest of us an easier night’s sleep. It’s the legal equivalent of an Internet firewall — providing the appearance of better security while actually opening the possibility of greater mischief.

Meanwhile, the government has blocked the dissemination of the one technology that Shimomura says could make the Net a more private place — digital encryption, a kind of encoding that safely hides one’s data from Mitnicks and gumshoes alike.

V.   T h e   B i g   G a m e

It would be great to think that the Mitnick-book overkill would teach the public more about the importance of online privacy and the nature of true computer security. More likely, it will simply cement some popular myths: there are some creepy, dangerous, overweight hackers out there — and we’d better find some valiant code warriors to protect us from them.

Both “The Fugitive Game” and “Takedown,” with its martial-arts-derived title, envision the Mitnick story as a gaming bout — a kind of intellectual pro-wrestling event with the good and bad participants plainly marked. Mitnick himself put a seal on that image with his courtroom comment to Shimomura: “Tsutomu, I respect your skills.”

Yet the story’s final irony is that this game isn’t the one that matters most. It’s small potatoes next to the one the books themselves are playing: the public-relations game.

The fine suspense of computer-file reconstruction and cellular phone-line tracing pales next to the high drama of self-mythologizing and public-image manipulation. The competition online may have determined whether Mitnick could be found and captured (right now, he’s awaiting trial in Los Angeles, after a plea-bargain settled charges in North Carolina, where he was caught). But the competition in the media will determine how the story is ultimately seen: hero slays monster? or the system catches up with romantic outlaw?

In this game, Shimomura’s secret weapon isn’t his Unix wizardry — it’s his relationship with a New York Times reporter, who snatched him from the obscurity of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and helped transform him into a digital superhero. Every superhero has a vulnerability, of course, and Shimomura’s is his own arrogance. “Takedown” may alienate the public from him as efficiently as the original Times coverage endeared him. (Some of the early coverage of “Takedown” already shows signs of this.)

But this game has just begun, and its real showdown will only unfold should a Mitnick vs. Shimomura movie get made. In the forging of popular myth, Hollywood is always the final battleground.

Of course, given the mediocre box-office record of last year’s “cyber”-movies, we may never see a “Catching Kevin.” And even if we do, given the movie industry’s dim record of faithfully representing the digital world on screen, the resulting film isn’t likely to bear much resemblance to anyone’s version of the story’s reality — Mitnick’s or Shimomura’s, Markoff’s or Littman’s or Goodell’s, mine or yours.

Something tells me, though, that if Kevin Mitnick ever does make it to the big screen, that mugshot gargoyle is going to grimace at us yet again.

Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg is director of MediaBugs.org. He is the author of "Say Everything" and Dreaming in Code and blogs at Wordyard.com. More Scott Rosenberg.

Wednesday, Apr 4, 2012 11:45 AM UTC

States shush corporate critics

From factory farms to home foreclosures, state governments are helping hide corporate wrongdoing

By Workers at the Perdue Farms Inc. processing plant prepare cleaned and gutted chickens for packaging at the plant in Accomac, Va. (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

You can’t be outraged by — or fight back against — what you don’t know. At least that seems to be the theory behind a spate of new government-backed efforts to help corporations prevent inconvenient information from ever reaching the public domain. In states across the country, as in Washington, D.C., lawmakers are helping companies keep secrets in everything from factory farming to fossil fuel exploration to home foreclosures.

In five states, for instance, so-called Ag Gag laws are now on the books. Iowa just passed legislation that “criminalizes investigative journalists and animal protection advocates who take entry-level jobs at factory farms in order to document the rampant food safety and animal welfare abuses within,” according to the Atlantic’s Cody Carlson.

The impetus for such laws is obvious: After a series of damning videos of factory farms abusing animals, Big Ag faced a consumer backlash. But rather than make its facilities more humane, it has opted to spend its cash on lobbyists and court cases aimed at preventing the public from ever seeing the atrocities in the first place. Accomplishing that means pioneering new legal theories that threaten to set dangerous new precedents curtailing some of the most basic First Amendment freedoms we take for granted.

Over in the world of energy, it’s much the same thing. Last month in Pennsylvania, the oil and gas industry successfully lobbied state legislators to ban physicians from telling patients what toxic fracking chemicals they may have been exposed to. As Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard reports, “While companies must disclose the identity and amount of any chemicals used in fracking fluids to any health professional that requests that information … the new bill requires those health professionals to sign a confidentiality agreement stating that they will not disclose that information to anyone else — not even the person they’re trying to treat.”

At least doctors in Pennsylvania get to see some basic information about the industry’s toxic brew, which is more than health professionals in other states have been able to say in recent years. Indeed, in 2008, an emergency room nurse nearly died after being exposed to a company’s fracking chemicals and, according to High Country News, the company cited a trade secrets law in “refus(ing) to provide more specific information (about the chemicals) to the hospital once she fell ill.” That left her “intensive-care doctor to guess what to do as he tried to keep her alive.” This possibility still exists in states that still do not fully mandate disclosure of fracking chemicals.

In the housing sector, you probably assume you at least have a right to see relevant documents related to your imminent home foreclosure. After all, with that basic information, you might stand a chance of going to court and preventing a bank from illegally throwing you out of your home. Yet, if you live in Colorado, your assumption about being able to see such information would be wrong.

With details of the financial industry’s document shredding and robo-signing scandals still leaking out, the Denver Post reports that Republicans in the Legislature there voted down a bill simply “requiring that lenders prove their right to foreclose on a home.” That means Colorado remains the only state to “allow for a foreclosure without the lender first proving” it has the legal right to repossess a person’s domicile. With the GOP so successfully defeating the reform proposal in the face of public outrage at bank fraud, look for the financial industry to try to get state governments to set the same “no doc foreclosure” precedent all over the country.

Then there are corporate taxes, perhaps the most egregious area in which the government uses its power to shield politically significant information. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports, “neither the SEC nor most state governments require corporations to release detailed information on their state corporate tax payments” — which deliberately makes it “hard to identify which corporations are not paying their fair share at the state level.” At the federal level, after corporate tax disclosure laws made it onto the books in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they were removed. Bloomberg News notes that the Financial Accounting Standards Board has the power to “make the income-tax returns of all companies with shares traded on U.S. stock markets available to the public,” but that it has refused — even in the wake of reports proving that many of the most profitable corporations are now paying no tax at all in America’s loophole-ridden tax system. The result is that the government empowers corporate management to prevent both companies’ shareholder-owners and the public at large from ever evaluating a firm’s tax compliance — or lack thereof.

Each of these examples — and the many others like them — are closely related to the concurrent corporate efforts to prevent labeling mandates. And as disparate as such examples may seem, they each prove that 21st-century capitalism and old-school Orwellian control are not polar opposites, as they are often portrayed. On the contrary, those two political forces now often coexist in a symbiotic relationship — one that uses state power to keep politically charged information hidden. The theory beneath the calculation is simple: Public ignorance equals corporate bliss.

With protest movements rising and the possibility of widespread social unrest a real possibility, we should expect that calculation to be more prevalent in our politics than ever.

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David Sirota

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota.

Monday, Dec 19, 2011 10:09 PM UTC

AT&T agrees to drop bid for T-Mobile

Government objections put an end to planned $39 billion acquisition

By , Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — AT&T Inc. said Monday that it is ending its $39 billion bid to buy T-Mobile USA after facing fierce government objections.

The cellphone giant said that the actions of the government to block the deal do not change the challenges of the wireless phone industry, which it says requires more airwaves, known as spectrum, to expand.

The deal would have solved that problem for a time, and without it, “customers will be harmed and needed investment will be stifled,” AT&T said in a statement.

It called on the government to quickly approve its purchase of unused spectrum from Qualcomm Inc. and come up with legislation to meet the nation’s long-term needs.

AT&T, the nation’s second-largest wireless carrier behind Verizon Wireless, faces paying Deutsche Telekom $3 billion in cash and may have to enter into a roaming agreement with Deutsche Telekom, while transferring it the rights to spectrum it doesn’t need for the rollout of its planned, next-generation “4G” network.

AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom of Germany would have made it the largest cellphone company in the U.S. T-Mobile is currently the fourth-largest.

The Justice Department sued to block the merger on Aug. 31, saying it would reduce competition and lead to higher prices.

Last month, the companies withdrew their application to the Federal Communications Commission after its chairman also opposed the deal.

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Wednesday, Nov 2, 2011 12:00 AM UTC

I hired the wrong person and she turned on me

She's gone now, thank God, but I can't get her out of my head

By (Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon)

Dear Cary,

Three years ago, I hired what I thought to be a talented, kind and honest second in command at the magazine where I work. It turns out, I was only one-third right. While “Sally” was great at many parts of her job, she wasn’t honest and she wasn’t nice. She began sleeping with another person in my department (my work equal), and was dishonest about it, and would often say, “The art department feels this would work better this way,” when our entire organization knew these people were a couple. She’d undermine me at meetings with higher-ups, criticizing my ideas and interrupting me, and in meetings with me one-on-one, she’d burst into tears at the slightest disagreement or say, with a stern little look, “We’ll just agree to disagree.” It made any sort of discussion darn near impossible.

She also puffed herself up constantly — “I was mistaken for a model yesterday!” and made digs at me and other people at work, “Well, that’s not MY taste. But, interesting!”

I was trying to figure out how to fire her when she took another, more lucrative job in another field. The guy at my office dumped her shortly before this happened. But sadly, even though it’s been a year, I’m still haunted by the experience. I feel like I let myself be steamrolled by an “All About Eve” clone, and I dread running into her at events in my relatively small professional circle.

I honestly believe she’s a pretty lousy person, and I wish her ill. But I check her Twitter feed, and, honestly, am a little obsessed with hating her. How can I move beyond this, or, better yet, make sure other people in my industry know she is evil?

The Bad Boss

Dear Bad Boss,

I know how hard these things can be. I am a champion grudge-carrier myself.

I could go into business carrying grudges. I could get a truck with a magnetic sign: No Grudge Too Small. Bulk Rates. Tired of carrying that grudge? Call 1-800-GRUDGE-KING.

Would it make you the most miserable man on earth, carrying all those grudges for others? Or would it be liberating, knowing that not one of them is yours?

Anyway, some of us are champion grudge-carriers and we need a way to let go of a grudge. If we don’t deal with it, it can last for years.

So what we do in the 12 steps, we do inventories. You could look that up. We work with a sponsor. We’ll say, I can’t stop thinking about this person who screwed me over. And the sponsor will say, Well, let’s do the steps on this. Or, have you done the steps on this? Or, what step are you on?

Doing the steps gets you focused on you, not the person you’re obsessing about.

In doing the steps, we write things down. We answer questions like, what happened, and who was involved, and what sort of injury or threat did we perceive? What area of life was affected? Was it our sex relations, our self-esteem, our status?

We just more or less dispassionately look at what happened. We break it down. We also ask what role we played. This is not done in a blaming way. We just, for instance, say, well, the role we played was, we made the decision to hire her. OK. The great part about that is it puts us in the mix and gives us a sense of agency. We’re not a victim, we’re a participant. We see, OK, we did have a decision and we did play a part. We might have made a different decision. Likewise with the other events, we just identify what part we played. It may be that all we did was choose to go to a party. But we realize then, though it may have seemed like we  had to do what we did, we see  that maybe we could have avoided the upset. Not that it’s our fault, but that we were present and played a part in it.

It reminds me a little bit of how one proceeds in cognitive therapy. What I like about cognitive therapy and the 12 steps is that they lead us increasingly toward reality. We are always asking what is real, what is concrete, what can we see?

Then we often find that our response had something to do with fear. We see that we were trying to prevent something from harming us.

As we continue in this way, dissecting the event, we begin to see that in an existential sense we can’t protect ourselves anyway. We are vulnerable. We may be disliked or disrespected by co-workers or family members. We may be cheated on or deceived. There are no guarantees. We cannot control other people. Meditating on this returns us to the real world; it restores a correct relationship to the awesome powers of life and death that surround us; it fills us with appropriate awe for nature and fate; it unites us with other creatures living and dead; it humbles us and returns us to the bosom of humanity.

This notion of letting go of control is a sticky one, because it involves beginning to trust in something outside ourselves, and often we have been adamantly self-sufficient. But to get out of our awful predicament we focus on something beyond ourselves. We place trust in something larger than us.

It’s not like we get converted or saved or ascend to a higher state of consciousness. It’s more subtle. We entertain the notion of something bigger than us, and it shifts our focus away from ourselves, away from our vexing, all-consuming fear. We see that the world is awesomely powerful and if it wanted to strike us down it would have done so already. So we relax a little. If it’s coming, it’s coming. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Once you entertain that notion that maybe you are not the one in control, then you do not need to respond to every possible threat with a flanking maneuver and a public relations campaign. Some things you can just let go of.

You are able to entertain the notion that maybe it’s not about the other person. Maybe it’s about you.

So you work with a sponsor and the sponsor suggests you do a fourth step, or a tenth step, or maybe the sponsor just talks with you about this obsession you have. But somehow you work through it by working through it. You have a method. That’s the point. The 12 steps offer a method, a simple, concrete method of purging ourselves of worry, doubt and fear.

If you’re not an alcoholic or drug addict and don’t have an eating disorder or a sex addiction you can always go to Al-Anon.

It’s just helpful to have a group. The Al-Anon group is all about how we deal with problems associated with other people — how the behavior of other people affects us, and how we learn to separate our problems from other people’s problems.

Really, I suggest you check out Al-Anon. You can get some grounding in the 12 steps, and you can hear personal stories from people who are coping with similar situations.

Plus it’s sort of fun. Really. Once you get over the initial novelty of it it becomes fun.

If you don’t want to do the steps, you can certainly get into therapy. I’m all for therapy. But therapy costs money and its efficacy depends on the intelligence and talent of the therapist. The 12 steps are pretty much free, and they work.

So that’s my approach to dealing with grudges.

But I still like the idea of the grudge-carrying truck.

I bet I could make some money.

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Cary Tennis

Cary Tennis writes Salon's advice column, leads writing workshops and creative getaways, publishes books, plays guitar, performs in art galleries, writes an occasional newsletter and tweets as @carytennis.

Join Cary's Online Writing Workshops More Cary Tennis.

Thursday, Oct 20, 2011 3:36 PM UTC

Fox Business Network exec: Channel has too much Fox, not enough “business”

Rupert Murdoch's would-be CNBC-killer suffers in the ratings as it imitates its ultra-conservative sister network

By (Credit: Salon)

In 2007, Rupert Murdoch started the Fox Business Network to crush CNBC using the same tactics that Fox News used to surpass CNN: Make a louder, sexier, angrier, more right-wing populist product, and the old people who watch TV during the day will tune in. Except it didn’t really work with Fox Business.

CNBC averages 263,000 viewers during the workday, according to Nielsen. Fox Business tops off at 85,000 from 4:30 to 8 p.m., and that period includes daily shows hosted by Fox stars Lou Dobbs and Neil Cavuto. Fox Business executive vice president Kevin Magee had a great idea to finally turn things around, according to a memo Reuters obtained: Maybe focus more on business news?

“I’ve been asked to remind you all again that they are separate channels and the more we make FBN look like FNC the more of a disservice we do to ourselves,” Magee said in the memo dated October 5, carrying the subject line “Fox News and Fox Business.”

“I understand the temptation to imitate our sibling network in hopes of imitating its success, but we cannot,” Magee went on to say in the memo. “If we give the audience a choice between FNC and the almost-FNC, they will choose FNC every time. Earnings, taxes, jobs etc give us PLENTY to chew on.”

As Media Matters ably documents here, Fox Business is right now just a sort of weird alternate-Fox News, with slightly different personalities who are still fixated on the exact same right-wing causes and phony outrages. (Plus cantankerous Connecticut cowboy Don Imus in the mornings, which is an odd choice for a “business” channel.) It’s Fox’s ESPN 2, except without extreme sports.

Why would an investor or trader want to watch Eric Bolling interview Pam Geller about the “ground zero mosque”? Who turns on a “business news” channel hoping to see former Wall Street Journal editorial writer David Asman promote birtherism and interview an ex-NFLer about the dangers of gay marriage?

The problem with Fox Business is baked right into the channel’s founding: It serves a market that is totally satisfied with preexisting offerings. People who want conservative-slanted market news all day already had a channel: CNBC. Just about everything Fox Business has ever done is either a retread (sexy ladies talk about stocks, just like on CNBC!) or just stupid (a five p.m. show set in a weird fake Irish pub!). While CNBC flatters its viewers’ senses of sophistication and superiority, Fox Business assumes its audience would rather watch an interview with Tila Tequila than hear about the SEC’s decision to charge Goldman Sachs with fraud.

The Fox model doesn’t work with business news, where the pro-corporatist mind-set is already baked into the majority of “objective” coverage and there isn’t a need to spice up the mundane business of promoting the interests of the wealthy with culture war material. Fox Business should be targeting the conservative elites who find Muslim-bashing and birtherism a bit distasteful (if necessary). But those elites may never find a reason to tune in. News Corp’s own Wall Street Journal has an exclusive deal with CNBC, and WSJ reporters are just as turned off by the Fox Business brand as everyone else.

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Friday, Oct 14, 2011 12:00 AM UTC

No, I can’t edit your manuscript for free

I write about books for a living, so people think I'd love to critique their prose

By (Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon)

Dear Cary,

I’m writing to you because you’re very nice and have a great deal of empathy, and I’m hoping you can tell me how to respond with empathy in a situation that’s causing me distress.

I write about books for a living. I have been working with, around and in books for over a decade. Hooray for my job; I feel very lucky. In the last six months, four people I know have approached me and asked for help with books they are writing. They want me to read and evaluate and edit their manuscripts. They want me to tell them where to send their manuscripts after I have made them publishable.

To which I say: No way! First of all, I have two jobs and am often so busy I feel breathless. Second, I write about books; I’m not a literary agent or an acquisitions editor at a major publishing house. I haven’t even published a book of my own (though I hope to, someday).

But, even if I had the knowledge they seek, why should I use it to benefit them? Reading and editing a manuscript would take a helluva long time. What’s more, it’s work, work that other people get paid for.

All these requests have come from men. None of these men are professional writers. I am not in regular contact with any of them; they are once-removed from my daily life: the brother of a friend, the husband of a friend, and  the father of a friend. They don’t ask how I am. They don’t stop to consider if I’m busy. They don’t seem to read my (published!) writing, since their manuscripts are in genres I don’t write about.

When I get these requests, I feel incredibly stingy. I get angry and anxious and think uncharitable thoughts about them.  It seems to me that they are all entitled jerks who have no respect for me or my career. Sure, they might think I can steer them on a path toward publication, but also seem to think I have nothing better than sit around and read their stupid manuscripts. They’re so out of line I can hardly think straight.

I blew off the first request. I flat-out refused the second two. I still haven’t responded to the fourth one, which I received this morning. This last request seems very problematic, since it comes from someone I’ve known since childhood and who’s sick.

So, Cary, what do I do? Am I right in refusing these people? If so, what’s the best way to tell them that I can’t do it? And how do channel some generosity of spirit toward them? How do I stop getting so upset? Right now, I feel like a mean-spirited jerk.

Sincerely,

Angry Books Writer

Dear Angry Books Writer,

You are absolutely right that such work is not to be expected casually or for free. It is very demanding work.

So here is what I suggest: Think of an hourly rate that would make you happy. Don’t think of the “correct” rate or the “going” rate. Think of a number that makes you smile. Think of a number that is high enough to discourage most casual requests.

This is what a person — whom I was paying to advise me — advised me to do when I received such requests. It seemed weird at first. I thought, well, I should just charge what is the correct rate. She said no, forget correct. How much do you want? What would make you happy? And what would discourage casual requests? You don’t really want to do this work all that much anyway, right? So, OK, a number came to me. It seemed high. It seemed almost silly it was so high. But it felt good to me! So I said it out loud. And the person advising me said, OK, when people ask you for this kind of work, quote that number. And I did.

I ended up accepting some work at that price. Surprisingly, I enjoyed doing the work. The person desiring my services was happy to pay that rate. Neither one of us felt cheated. We were both pleased.

It turns out that stuff is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it. It turns out — surprise, surprise! — that you can make an agreement with one individual based on what each of you wants and it will work out fine. Amazing.

That one piece of advice was worth all the money I paid this person for her advice, and more. It solved the problem. It made me happy. I’m grateful to the person who gave me that advice. And now I am giving that advice to you. It makes me happy to be able to give it to you. Really, it does. Because I have benefited greatly from it.

As to your desire to respond with empathy, how can you not have empathy for someone who wants to publish a manuscript? Poor bastard. How can you not have empathy for the person? That doesn’t mean you have to become their servant.

When somebody asks you if you would do this kind of work for them, tell the person that you do occasionally take on such projects, in a selective way, and here is your hourly rate. And see what happens.

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Cary Tennis

Cary Tennis writes Salon's advice column, leads writing workshops and creative getaways, publishes books, plays guitar, performs in art galleries, writes an occasional newsletter and tweets as @carytennis.

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