Tim May writes:

On Tuesday, October 9, 2001, at 09:12 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote:

...

A large portion was B-roll of me typing dummy entries into Microsoft Passport, [...] They used about 7 seconds of what I said.

About right. Four hours of your time for 7 seconds of commentary.

No wonder the networks are gradually going broke.

"Typing dummy entries." Typical. Faking the news.

(I had a sort of similar experience in '95 when the BBC wanted to interview me. [...])

I share Tims experience regarding the impact of interviews. I was doing some presswork for the chaos computer club - http://www.ccc.de/ and found out that especially TV costs you a hell of time and often thorow away everything substantial or even the whole interview at all. TV wants to "visualize", but crypto or hacking can't be visualized in a TV compatible way. While TV is worest the same is true for 98% of the journalists I have met: They don't try to understand the komplex things you are talking about and if they finnally might understand you they still misquote you. This shouldn't supprise you. This shouldn't supprise me because journalists are information dealers trying to get maximum value from minimum effort. Since "trouth" doesn't really attribute to value of an information they sell, why should they care about? The problem is that they are used to people beeing proud to be interviewed. If you consider an interview as buiseness they are totally set up. "Sure I can explain tis DDOS thing to you, my consulting fee is 1000E per day" makes them really angry. On the other hand talking to journalists may help sometimes to influence actions of the goverment. E.g. the Chaos Computer Club got a lot of press coverage in the 80s which lead to involvment of the hacker community in the law-making process for cybercrime and to an 'hacking is not a crime per se' legistation which i consider a good thing. So between writing code and talking to journalists, what are the other choices? drt