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The Risks of Online Transparency, Kathy Sierra; Personal Self-Defense & Guns in Nevada

First off: If you’ve not read Kathy Sierra’s recent post regarding death threats, please do so…else nothing I write below will be in context.

My cell phone went minor-berserk with the Twitter community tweeting about Kathy Sierra’s post and a the tremendous rally of the blogosphere commenting on this situation. Kenzer — as always — beat me to the punch with a post. So here I am at 4:30 am playing catch up…

I received my new issue of WIRED Magazine this morning. The cover story is: “The See-Through CEO | Fire the publicist. Go off message. Let all your employees blab and blog. In the new world of radical transparency, the path to business success is clear.” For the most part, I believe the article to be fairly dead-on. My 3 favorite excerpts:

[1] “You can’t hide anything anymore,” Don Tapscott says. Coauthor of The Naked Corporation, a book about corporate transparency, and Wikinomics, Tapscott is explaining a core truth of the see-through age: If you engage in corporate flimflam, people will find out. He ticks off example after example of corporations that have recently been humiliated after being caught trying to conceal stupid blunders.

[2] “Online is where reputations are made now,” says Leslie Gaines Ross, chief reputation strategist - yes, that’s her actual title - with the PR firm Weber Shandwick. She regularly speaks to companies that realize a single Google search determines more about how they’re perceived than a multimillion-dollar ad campaign. “It used to be that you’d look only at your reputation in newspapers and broadcast media, positive and negative. But now the blogosphere is equally powerful, and it has different rules. Public relations used to be about having stuff taken down, and you can’t do that with the Internet.”

[3] The reputation economy creates an incentive to be more open, not less. Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation. Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won’t work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it - or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your Google list of life.

Soooo…this brings us to Kathy Sierra’s situation and the overwhelming support and rally of the blogging community. Robert Scoble is taking the week off. Apparently he and his wife are caught up in this as well. Stephanie Booth, Michael Arrington, Seth Godin and hundreds more have weighed in on this already. I really hope they nail the person(s) involved. They need to go to jail and mingle with people like them who enjoy violence. Carve a feed icon in a soap-on-a-rope.

This stuff is terrifying. Especially for women. And I only say that having attended a workshop and learned firsthand how those fears play in to victimization. Our society all but trains women to be victims. How many rapists have had they eyes “nearly” scratched out…the women to afraid to “really hurt” their attacker!? I learned this from Tim Larkin, perhaps the world’s most famous and best self-defense trainer…Tim Larkin. (My Entrepreneurs’ Organization took a trip to Las Vegas and did a seminar with Tim Larkin a while back. And we’re doing another CCW permit class this year to qualify new members.)

Tim Larkin’s class really started me to rethink about personal safety and how to react to violence. His Target-Focus Training delivers real-world experience in dealing with violence and threats and is rooted in success stories and failures. How did that 90 year-old lady beat two robbers senseless? And how did the black-belt master get beaten and killed defending his family by a 125 pound teenager with no training whatsoever? Larkin has devoted his whole life to understanding how to win in violent situations?

Here’s a little background on his approach:

The one thing we’ve completely understood is that the only thing we can rely on is this: that violence is always going to be random. And therefore we have to take a principle-based approach. So what we do is give you good, grounded principles that are based in (and usable and understandable in) science… anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, physics… backed up with trauma data. Stuff that you could easily read about and the brain can easily understand.

I’ve seen a lot of folks in these Kathy Sierra posts talk about guns and CCW’s. Concealed weapons are not THE answer. I say that myself having lots of guns and having been trained back in ROTC/Rangers to use them to kill another human. Personal self-defense courses and TFT to use them as well, however, most violence is random and guns are usually out-of-the question. (Except for home-break-ins where they seem to give the homeowner a decided advantage.)

That being said, I believe that there has to be a certain “caution” by criminals to target gun-owners — particularly the loud and proud — knowing they’re not only most likely armed, but trained, able and willing to use their weapon in self-defense. I mean, why would you break in to a gun-owner’s house knowing that they are totally OK with filling you full of lead lest you get anywhere near their family!?

We take security and safety seriously. My wife is very practiced and capable with any of our many pistols, shotguns and rifles and she regularly carries when biking in the desert or traveling alone. And our kids have –and continue to be - raised properly around guns so that they treat them with the proper respect and safety they deserve. (I think I should blog on how to raise kids around guns sometime.)

With personal branding and transparency more than likely creating a lot of these “threats” online, there’s no doubt that these incidents of idiots throwing threats will increase. Hopefully IPv6 will solve a lot of this. Anonymity is OK…to an extent. Freedom of speech is to be protected so long as it does not infringe on another’s well being. God knows I’ve had my fair share of personal threats and they can be very rattling. There’s strength in numbers and community. The same transparency that has brought terror to Kathy can also bring safety. Maybe Tim Larkin can start teaching classes at BlogHer?

Technorati tags: kathysierra, kathy, sierra, blogging, social, transparency, privacy, security, guns, self-defense, CCW, permit, concealedweapons

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