Conversation: A Founder of the Soap Maker Method Discusses Its Sale

For Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, the quest began in 2001 in what they call a “dirty little flat” in San Francisco, where the two childhood buddies from Detroit first plotted to disrupt the all-but-impenetrable cleaning products industry long dominated by giants like SC Johnson and Procter & Gamble.

They started by mixing soap formulas in beer pitchers labeled “Do Not Drink” and wound up creating Method, an irreverent, design-driven, environmentally minded company that outsourced manufacturing. The company grew to $34 million in revenue and 39 employees in 2005, and more than $100 million and 100 employees in 2012. Those numbers remain modest compared to those of Big Soap, but a walk down the cleaning aisle in almost any supermarket reveals not just Method’s reach (Ginger Yuzu dish soap, Pink Grapefruit hand wash) but its impact on competitors (Clorox Green Works).

“We showed up at the party with a very different proposition,” Mr. Ryan said. “We’re superproud that we’ve had an influence.”

That influence will continue, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Lowry suggest, even though Method was acquired for an undisclosed price in September by the Belgian company Ecover, creating what they claim is now the largest green cleaning company in the world, with revenue “north of $200 million.”

In a conversation that has been edited and condensed, we recently asked Mr. Ryan why he and Mr. Lowry chose to sell, how they identified the right suitor, and what will happen to the Method brand.

Q. Was selling the company always a primary goal?

A. When we started the company, we knew we had two choices. One was to grow organically, which a lot of businesses do, and you control the business and grow slowly and steadily. We fundamentally believed that we would not have success in this competitive space unless we went after it fast and aggressively. So we had to take outside capital. And when we took that outside capital — at some point, you have to give it back with a return.

Q. You make soap, you sell it, you make more soap, you sell more of it. Why couldn’t you grow without being acquired?

A. Two primary reasons. One is just economies of scale. In the early years, we lost money on every product we sold. We were competing against companies that not only have a 100-year head start but have just built incredible efficiencies. They own their own plants. When you walk in a grocery store and that bottle of dish soap sells for $1.99, we could not make it for $1.99 in the beginning. We needed capital to accelerate growth, to get our volume to a place where the business would be profitable. Two is that the cost of doing business in the mass channel is really expensive. When you sell in a grocery store, you have to pay an upfront fee called slotting charges. And that takes a fair amount of capital. So growing organically is possible, but it’s really, really tough.

Q. You’ve built a brand that seems to resonate with consumers. Are you concerned about their reaction to the sale?

A. It was something that was heavy in our minds for a lot of years. The typical script for a socially driven company like ours is you get acquired by a major strategic. So look at Honest Tea, acquired by Coke. Kashi by Kellogg. Burt’s Bees by Clorox. Even Mrs. Meyer’s, in our space, by SC Johnson. I always justified it by saying, “Well, if that happens, it’ll give us the chance to work from a bigger, global stage, and we’ll try to change those companies from the inside out.” And once we did this deal, I was just so thankful we never had to go down that path. We recognized we had a partner at the table with identical mission statements, identical values and a real long-term commitment. It was just an opportunity too good to pass up.

Q. Did you say no to other offers because you didn’t see that cultural fit?

A. We can’t name names, but we did have, over the years, conversations with those usual suspects. And the movie looked pretty similar — full integration, we go from being a company to being an operating unit within a larger organization. The culture, the team, “the Method Method” that we spent the last 10 years building would have been nonexistent within 12 months.

Q. Will the Method brand continue to exist?

A. Very much so. We’ll be building our own plant in North America. We’re turning on TV advertising for the first time in our history. We’re expanding more aggressively in Europe and Asia than we would have done otherwise. We’re creating a company with a long-term focus on the future. When you’re private equity-backed, it’s a much more short-term focus in how you invest and build the organization. The big thing that’s changing now, we’re a house of brands, which is Method and Ecover. And we have to set up a business where they coexist in a way that they don’t cannibalize each other and reach a broader audience collectively.

Q. Obviously, you’re in the honeymoon phase. How do you protect against something going wrong?

A. At the end of the day, it’s like a marriage — there is a leap of faith. And the way that you can protect yourself the most is just really trusting your instincts of who you’re jumping in bed with. It’s just like a job interview or any other relationship. If you’re getting to a point where you’re having to lean on a lot of legalities or other ways to try to protect yourself, it’s probably not the right relationship. It just comes back again to, are these people you trust, who share the same vision?

Q. While this was developing, how open were you with your employees?

A. You just can’t talk openly. It can do damage to the deal, but also, it’s a roller coaster, and you don’t want everyone riding the roller coaster with you. It’s incredibly distracting. There was a very small group that was in the know, and those were only the ones that were needed for due diligence. People knew we were looking and we were upfront about that, but they didn’t know to what extent, because we didn’t know to what extent. So when we did the announcement, there was initial shock, but over all it went well. And then for the next week, it was really challenging because what happened — what we were completely blindsided by — was how many people in their careers had been through a bad M.& A. transaction. There were a lot of bad movies that started being replayed. What I told everybody was, “Look, I’ve never been through a bad merger in my life, and I’m not about to start now.”

Q. Things have been tough in Europe. Any concerns about partnering with a European company and expanding there?

A. I like the idea of investing when something is at its lowest. [Laughs.] No, we have not had too many concerns about it. This business is firing on all cylinders. I was definitely, in the back of my head, concerned that things would get derailed by the European crisis, but who we’re dealing with is very long-term focused and they’re also very globally minded. Europe is a big part of their business, but they’re also expanding aggressively in Asia — we are as well — and North America.

Q. And everyone needs soap.

A. And everybody needs soap. It’s a dirty world out there.

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Deadly Explosions Hit Aleppo University

A series of deadly explosions struck the Aleppo University campus in Syria on Tuesday, antigovernment activists and Syrian state television reported, in what appeared to be a major expansion of the violent struggle for control of the largest city in the nearly two-year-old Syrian conflict. Each side blamed the other for the blasts.

Antigovernment activists also reported that violence convulsed some suburbs of Damascus, the capital, where members of the insurgent Free Syrian Army were engaged in combat with government forces in the Ain Tarma and Zamalka neighborhoods. The fighting erupted after a campaign of Syrian Air Force attacks over the past few days apparently aimed at expunging insurgents from strategic areas. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an antigovernment group based in Britain with a network of contacts in Syria, said at least 15 people were killed and dozens wounded in the explosions at Aleppo University, which was in a government-controlled part of Aleppo and had been conducting classes despite the mayhem and deprivation that have ravaged other parts of the city.

Aleppo, in northern Syria, has essentially been under siege since July, with insurgents and government forces in a stalemate. The city, which was once the commercial epicenter of Syria, has been struck by numerous shellings, bombings and airstrikes, but the university area had been largely spared until Tuesday.

Antigovernment activists said the university dormitories, which had been housing both students and civilians displaced by fighting elsewhere, were hit by one missile fired by Syrian military forces. They said buildings housing the architecture and humanities departments were also hit by missiles fired by the military.

Syria’s state-run SANA news service did not specify the number of casualties but said the explosions came on the first day of exams. SANA attributed the death and destruction to at least two rockets fired by what it called terrorists, the government’s blanket description for the armed insurgency against President Bashar al-Assad.

Photographs and video uploaded on the Internet by antigovernment groups showed extensive destruction of dormitory buildings, the hulks of several burned vehicles and bodies on the ground.

The United Nations has estimated that more than 60,000 people have been killed in Syria since the uprising against Mr. Assad began in March 2011.

Mr. Assad appeared to further distance himself on Monday from any thought of relinquishing power via a BBC interview with his deputy foreign minister, Faisal Muqdad. Mr. Muqdad suggested that Mr. Assad would run for re-election next year when his term expires. “We are opening the way for democracy, or deeper democracy,” he said. “In a democracy you don’t tell somebody not to run.”

Groups opposed to Mr. Assad have said they will not even consider political dialogue to resolve the conflict unless Mr. Assad resigns or is removed from power first. The special peace envoy from the United Nations and the Arab League, Lakhdar Brahimi, has urged Mr. Assad to step down and said he cannot be part of any transitional government. The Syrian government has accused Mr. Brahimi of bias toward the insurgency.

With diplomacy still deadlocked, more than 50 member states in the United Nations submitted an unusual written appeal to the Security Council on Monday to at least request an investigation by the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes and atrocities committed in Syria, by both the loyalist and the insurgent sides.

But whatever chance of such a move appeared to be ended on Tuesday by Russia, the biggest foreign defender of the Syrian government, which has vetoed three Security Council proposals on Syrian intervention since the conflict began.

“We consider this initiative ill-timed and counterproductive if we are to achieve the current priority goal — an immediate end to bloodshed in Syria,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “We are convinced that speculation about international criminal prosecution and the search for guilty parties will only serve to keep the opposing sides in hard-line positions and complicate the search for a path of political-diplomatic settlement of the Syrian conflict.”

Rick Gladstone reported from New York, and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon. Ellen Barry contributed reporting from Moscow.

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Media Decoder: Resignation Suggests Rift Between CNET and CBS

There are companies with divisions that spend billions of dollars on entertainment. There are also companies with divisions that review new gadgets and sometimes champion the spectacular ones — even those that challenge the status quo.

And when those divisions are owned by the same company, there is a chance that they will wind up in the kind of predicament that the CBS Corporation found itself in last week.

A senior writer for CNET, the technology news Web site owned by CBS, resigned on Monday after the site was barred from presenting an award to a company being sued by CBS. Greg Sandoval, a former reporter for The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times who has spent the last seven years at CNET, said on Twitter that he no longer had confidence “that CBS is committed to editorial independence.”

Mr. Sandoval did not respond to an interview request. His resignation announcement came half an hour after another technology news site, The Verge, laid bare the details of the conflict.

The case started to unfold on Jan. 9, when CNET’s employees did something they do every year: cast votes for the Best of C.E.S. Awards, the official awards program of the Consumer Electronics Show. For the Best in Show award, the employees chose the Hopper, a digital video recorder sold by Dish Network that allows users to skip ads on prime-time network television shows. Dish had showed off the newest version of the Hopper at C.E.S., and CNET’s reviewers were impressed by it.

But CBS claims the Hopper is illegal. Along with several other network owners, it went to court last year over the ad-skipping feature; the litigation is pending.

The vote created a “legal conflict for CBS,” the CNET editor in chief, Lindsey Turrentine, said in an editorial on Monday afternoon that confirmed the substance of The Verge’s article. (The site suggested that “CNET’s reviews could be used by Dish in court to embarrass CBS or possibly refute the company’s evidence.”)

“All night and through to morning,” Ms. Turrentine wrote, “my managers up and down CNET fought for two things: to honor the original vote and — when it became clear that CBS corporate did not accept that answer — to issue a transparent statement regarding the original vote.”

But her managers were overruled. The case went all the way to the CBS chief executive, Leslie Moonves, who said that CNET should disqualify the Hopper and choose a new award winner.

CNET acquiesced. When it announced the winners on Jan. 10, CNET acknowledged that the Hopper was “removed from consideration due to active litigation involving our parent company,” causing an outcry by the Dish chief executive, Joe Clayton, who said Dish was “saddened that CNET’s staff is being denied its editorial independence because of CBS’s heavy-handed tactics.”

But CBS did not allow CNET to reveal that the Hopper had won Best in Show before being removed; when The Verge reported that on Monday, further cries of censorship sprang up on the Internet. Ms. Turrentine said she wished she could have overridden CBS’s decision. “For that I apologize to my staff and to CNET readers,” she said.

Mr. Moonves declined an interview request, but a statement from CBS called the case “isolated and unique” and noted that the Hopper “has been challenged as illegal” by it and other major media companies. The statement added, “In terms of covering actual news, CNET maintains 100 percent editorial independence, and always will.”

A version of this article appeared in print on 01/15/2013, on page B7 of the NewYork edition with the headline: CNET Clashes With Its Owner, and a Reporter Resigns.

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Well: For DTaP Vaccine, Thigh May Be Better Injection Site Than Arm

Children are less likely to develop bad reactions to the DTaP vaccine, a routine immunization shot that protects against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, or whooping cough, if they get it in their thigh instead of in their arm, a new study shows.

The research looked at more than a million children who were given injections of the vaccine. In many cases it causes some degree of redness or swelling around the injection site, which typically goes away after a day. But in rare instances a child can develop a more pronounced reaction, like severe pain or a swollen limb, that may require medical attention.

In the new study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, researchers found that children between the ages of 1 and 3 who were given the DTaP vaccine in their thigh instead of in their upper arm were around half as likely to have a local reaction that warranted a visit to a doctor, nurse or emergency room. Previous studies of children who received the vaccine between the ages of 4 and 6 found that they, too, had a lower likelihood of developing a local reaction requiring medical attention if they got the shot in their thigh instead of in their arm.

Why the vaccine would be less harsh on the thigh than the arm is not known for certain. But one possibility is simply that in children at that age, the thigh muscle is much larger than the deltoid, the muscle in the upper arm where shots are typically administered. If any inflammation ensues, it has more room to diffuse in the thigh, said Dr. Lisa A. Jackson, the lead author of the study and a senior investigator at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle.

“In little kids the upper arm is very tiny,” she said. “You’re injecting the same volume of vaccine in the upper arm as in the thigh, which is a larger area. I think it’s just that it’s a larger muscle mass.”

The benefits, however, may not extend to other immunizations. The study, for example, also looked at shots for influenza and hepatitis A, and in those cases there was no meaningful difference between vaccinating in the arm or thigh for either toddlers or children ages 3 to 6.

In many cases, doctors choose where to administer a shot according to their own preference. But in the case of DTaP, at least, it makes more sense in general to give the shot in the thigh, Dr. Jackson said.

“Unless there’s a compelling reason not to, I would say veer toward giving the DTaP vaccine in the leg,” she said. “There’s less chance of a concerning reaction if you give it in the thigh versus the arm. So that should be the normal practice.”

Dr. Jackson stressed, however, that the absolute risk of a child having a reaction severe enough to warrant medical attention is still quite small, regardless of whether the shot is given in the arm or leg. The study found that it occurred in less than 1 percent of vaccinated children over all.

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Well: For DTaP Vaccine, Thigh May Be Better Injection Site Than Arm

Children are less likely to develop bad reactions to the DTaP vaccine, a routine immunization shot that protects against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, or whooping cough, if they get it in their thigh instead of in their arm, a new study shows.

The research looked at more than a million children who were given injections of the vaccine. In many cases it causes some degree of redness or swelling around the injection site, which typically goes away after a day. But in rare instances a child can develop a more pronounced reaction, like severe pain or a swollen limb, that may require medical attention.

In the new study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, researchers found that children between the ages of 1 and 3 who were given the DTaP vaccine in their thigh instead of in their upper arm were around half as likely to have a local reaction that warranted a visit to a doctor, nurse or emergency room. Previous studies of children who received the vaccine between the ages of 4 and 6 found that they, too, had a lower likelihood of developing a local reaction requiring medical attention if they got the shot in their thigh instead of in their arm.

Why the vaccine would be less harsh on the thigh than the arm is not known for certain. But one possibility is simply that in children at that age, the thigh muscle is much larger than the deltoid, the muscle in the upper arm where shots are typically administered. If any inflammation ensues, it has more room to diffuse in the thigh, said Dr. Lisa A. Jackson, the lead author of the study and a senior investigator at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle.

“In little kids the upper arm is very tiny,” she said. “You’re injecting the same volume of vaccine in the upper arm as in the thigh, which is a larger area. I think it’s just that it’s a larger muscle mass.”

The benefits, however, may not extend to other immunizations. The study, for example, also looked at shots for influenza and hepatitis A, and in those cases there was no meaningful difference between vaccinating in the arm or thigh for either toddlers or children ages 3 to 6.

In many cases, doctors choose where to administer a shot according to their own preference. But in the case of DTaP, at least, it makes more sense in general to give the shot in the thigh, Dr. Jackson said.

“Unless there’s a compelling reason not to, I would say veer toward giving the DTaP vaccine in the leg,” she said. “There’s less chance of a concerning reaction if you give it in the thigh versus the arm. So that should be the normal practice.”

Dr. Jackson stressed, however, that the absolute risk of a child having a reaction severe enough to warrant medical attention is still quite small, regardless of whether the shot is given in the arm or leg. The study found that it occurred in less than 1 percent of vaccinated children over all.

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Roche Hires Dr. John Reed to Lead Research Operations

The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche is turning to a prolific American academic scientist to revitalize its lagging research operations.

Dr. John C. Reed, the chief executive of the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in San Diego, will become head of Roche’s pharmaceutical research and early development group in April, the company announced Tuesday.

Dr. Reed, 54, has spent 21 years at Sanford-Burnham, formerly known as the Burnham Institute, the last 11 as chief executive.

During his tenure as chief executive, the institute grew rapidly, opened a new research site in Florida, and broadened its role from basic research to also doing drug discovery, in some cases in collaborations with pharmaceutical companies. It also received its largest donation ever, $50 million, from the credit card industry executive T. Denny Sanford, which led the institute to change its name.

Dr. Reed, 54, who holds both a medical degree and a Ph.D., is the author of more than 800 scientific papers, many dealing with why cancer cells do not commit suicide as errant cells are supposed to do. A triathlete, Dr. Reed used to get to his office around 3:30 a.m. each day, though now, with better computers, he works at home in the early hours.

“With his broad scientific and medical background, he is ideally positioned to drive Roche’s strategy of translating a better understanding of disease mechanisms into promising therapeutics,” Severin Schwan, the chief of Roche, said in a statement.

It is not unprecedented for drug companies to tap academic scientists to run research. Sanofi’s research and development is now run by Elias Zerhouni, the former director of the National Institutes of Health and professor at Johns Hopkins. Mark Fishman, a cardiologist at Harvard, was recruited to run research at Novartis, and Peter S. Kim, who heads research at Merck, was previously a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Reed, who has been on biotechnology company boards but never had a full-time corporate job, said in an interview that he was joining Roche to “have an opportunity to contribute on a larger stage, so to speak.”

At Roche he will oversee not only research but also early- and middle-stage clinical trials, something Sanford-Burnham does not do. He will supervise about 2,000 people with an annual budget in the billions, while Sanford-Burnham has about 1,200 people and a budget of around $175 million.

Dr. Reed, who will move to Basel, where Roche is based, said it was too early to discuss his agenda at Roche, other than to make its research more collaborative.

The operation Dr. Reed will run, called Pharma Research and Early Development, or pRED, does not include Genentech, the California biotechnology company that Roche fully acquired in 2009. In an effort to preserve the culture at Genentech, Roche left it autonomous, forming a group it calls gRED.

Recently, gRED has been eclipsing pRED. Roche’s three best-selling drugs, the cancer medicines Rituxan, Herceptin and Avastin, were developed at Genentech. So have some of its most attractive experimental drugs, including T-DM1, a breast cancer drug that could win regulatory approval early this year.

The organization Dr. Reed will run, by contrast, has had its share of problems in recent years. Several hundred researchers were cut in a corporate reorganization. And last year Roche discontinued development of a heart drug after it failed to work in a late-stage clinical trial.

The troubles contributed to Roche’s decision in June to shut its campus in Nutley, N.J., the birthplace of valium. At that time, Jean-Jacques Garaud, head of the Roche unit that Dr. Reed will run, left the company and was replaced on an interim basis by Mike Burgess. Roche said Tuesday that Mr. Burgess would now also leave the company.

Sanford-Burnham said that Dr. Kristiina Vuori, its president and head of its cancer center, would take over as chief executive on an interim basis. Dr. Vuori, who is originally from Finland, has worked closely with Dr. Reed.

M. Wainwright Fishburn Jr., the chairman of Sanford-Burnham, said it was “bittersweet” to see Dr. Reed leave. While the institute will lose a very successful leader, he said, the move could advance the institute’s efforts to get drug discovery work from pharmaceutical companies.

“We have one of our own in one of the most influential positions around,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 15, 2013

A headline with an earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the drug maker. It is Roche, not Roches.

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IHT Rendezvous: 2012: The Year of Extreme Weather

The weather reports are in. 2012 was the hottest and the most extreme year on record in many places.

While parts of China are enduring the harshest winter in 30 years, the Antarctic is warming at an alarming rate. In Australia, out of control bushfires are partially the result of record-breaking weather (new colors were added to weather forecast maps, to account for the new kind of heat). In the United States, where Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New Jersey and New York and where extreme drought still lingers in the Midwest, the average temperature in 2012 was more than a whole degree Fahrenheit (or 5/9 of a degree Celsius) higher than average – shattering the record.

On Friday a long-term weather forecast for the United States was released, when the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee published a draft of the third Climate Assessment Report. Like last year’s weather, the assessment does not pull its punches.

“Climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways, including impacts from increased extreme weather events, wildfire, decreased air quality, diseases transmitted by insects, food, and water, and threats to mental health,” write the authors as part of their key findings.

Experts from 13 federal agencies, including NASA, the State Department and the Department of Defense put together the report under the auspices of the United States Global Change Research Program.

While some predictions have been adjusted upward from previous reports, the difference in tone in this newest assessment is striking. The second assessment, published in 2009, predicted of thresholds that will be crossed, while the 2013 draft presents a reality in which some of the changes are already irreversible.

“As a result of past emissions of heat-trapping gases, some amount of additional climate change and related impacts is now unavoidable,” wrote the authors in the executive summary.

Adaptation to climate change is discussed in the new draft, which is open for public comment before it is officially released early in 2014. The authors write:

Planning and managing based on the climate of the last century means that tolerances of some infrastructure and species will be exceeded. For example, building codes and landscaping ordinances will likely need to be updated not only for energy efficiency, but also to conserve water supplies, protect against insects that spread disease, reduce susceptibility to heat stress, and improve protection against extreme events.

The authors predict that within the next several decades, temperatures will go up between 2 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly 1 and 2 degrees Celsius. The experts discuss a possible 10 degree Fahrenheit (or more than 5 degrees Celsius) warming by the end of the century, in the case that not enough is done to curb emissions. (The World Bank recently released a report of the dangers of a world warmed by 4 degrees Celsius).

Sea levels could rise up to four feet, or 1.2 meters, within the century, according to the experts.

Though official assessments, predictions and studies like these serve to reinforce what many already fear, they do not necessarily lead to policy change. Andrew Restuccia predicted in a Politico article that the new report would ultimately do little to change the embittered climate-change politics in that country. He wrote:

But don’t hold your breath for serious action on climate change in Congress. Republicans and some moderate Democrats remain opposed to measures to address climate change. The Obama administration, meanwhile, is moving forward with its own efforts on climate change, including beefed-up fuel economy standards and greenhouse gas regulations for new power plants.

Sometimes official assessment reports provide substance for those who question man-made climate change.

My colleague Andrew C. Revkin recently reported on how a revision by Britain’s Weather and Climate Agency on short-term global temperature forecast became fodder for climate change deniers. The fact that the government agency had revised its numbers downward allowed climate change skeptics to argue that the world was not significantly warming after all.

In December, Alec Rawls, a climate-change skeptic, made a name for himself by leaking an unpublished Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one of the major global players in climate change assessment. Mr. Rawls tried to argue that the panel’s language on solar radiation was an admission that much of the warming trends were caused by the sun, not human activity.

As Andrew reported at time, his claims were mostly debunked.

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Opinionator | The Stone: What is a 'Hacktivist'?

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

The untimely death of the young Internet activist Aaron Swartz, apparently by suicide, has prompted an outpouring of reaction in the digital world. Foremost among the debates being reheated — one which had already grown in the wake of larger and more daring data breaches in the past few years — is whether Swartz’s activities as a “hacktivist” were being unfairly defined as malicious or criminal. In particular, critics (as well as Swartz’s family in a formal statement) have focused on the federal government’s indictment of Swartz for downloading millions of documents from the scholarly database JSTOR, an action which JSTOR itself had declined to prosecute.

I believe the debate itself is far broader than the specifics of this unhappy case, for if there was prosecutorial overreach it raises the question of whether we as a society created the enabling condition for this sort of overreach by letting the demonization of hacktivists go unanswered. Prosecutors do not work in a vacuum, after all; they are more apt to pursue cases where public discourse supports their actions. The debate thus raises an issue that, as philosopher of language, I have spent time considering: the impact of how words and terms are defined in the public sphere.

“Lexical Warfare” is a phrase that I like to use for battles over how a term is to be understood. Our political discourse is full of such battles; it is pretty routine to find discussions of who gets to be called “Republican” (as opposed to RINO – Republican in Name Only), what “freedom” should mean, what legitimately gets to be called “rape” —and the list goes on.

Lexical warfare is important because it can be a device to marginalize individuals within their self-identified political affiliation (for example, branding RINO’s defines them as something other than true Republicans), or it can beguile us into ignoring true threats to freedom (focusing on threats from government while being blind to threats from corporations, religion and custom), and in cases in which the word in question is “rape,” the definition can have far reaching consequences for the rights of women and social policy.

Lexical warfare is not exclusively concerned with changing the definitions of words and terms — it can also work to attach either a negative or positive affect to a term. Ronald Reagan and other conservatives successfully loaded the word “liberal” with negative connotations, while enhancing the positive aura of terms like “patriot” (few today would reject the label “patriotic,” but rather argue for why they are entitled to it).

Over the past few years we’ve watched a lexical warfare battle slowly unfold in the treatment of the term “hacktivism.” There has been an effort to redefine what the word means and what kinds of activities it describes; at the same time there has been an effort to tarnish the hacktivist label so that anyone who chooses to label themselves as such does so at their peril.

In the simplest and broadest sense, a hacktivist is someone who uses technology hacking to effect social change. The conflict now is between those who want to change the meaning of the word to denote immoral, sinister activities and those who want to defend the broader, more inclusive understanding of hacktivist. Let’s start with those who are trying to change the meaning so that it denotes sinister activities.

Over the past year several newspapers and blogs have cited Verizon’s 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report, which claimed that 58 percent of all data leaked in 2011 was owing to the actions of “ideologically motivated hacktivists.” An example of the concern was an article in Infosecurity Magazine:

The year 2011 is renowned for being the year that hacktivists out-stole cybercriminals to take top honors according to the Verizon data breach report. Of the 174 million stolen records it tracked in 2011, 100 million were taken by hacktivist groups.

Suddenly, things are looking black and white again. Regardless of political motivation or intent, if there are victims of the attacks they perpetrate, then hacktivism has crossed the line. Not OK.

Meanwhile an article in ThreatPost proclaimed “Anonymous: Hacktivists Steal Most Data in 2011.”

The first thing to note is that both of these media sources are written by and for members of the information security business — it is in their interest to manufacture a threat, for the simple reason that threats mean business for these groups. But is it fair to say that the threat is being “manufactured”? What of the Verizon report that they cite?

The problem is that the headlines and articles, designed to tar hacktivists and make us fear them, did not reflect what the Verizon report actually said. According to page 19 of the report only 3 percent of the data breaches in the survey were by hacktivists — the bulk of them were by routine cybercriminals, disgruntled employees and nation states (83 percent were by organized criminals).

The “most data” claim, while accurate, gives a skewed picture. According to Chris Novak, the Managing Principal of Investigative Response on Verizon’s RISK Team, interviewed in ThreatPost, 2 percent of the 90 actions analyzed in the report accounted for 58 percent of the data released. The interview with Novak suggests that this data loss came from precisely two hacktivist actions — both by spin-offs of the well-known hacktivist group Anonymous — and that these large data dumps stemmed from the actions against the security firm HB Gary Federal, which had publicly announced their efforts to expose Anonymous, and a computer security firm called Stratfor). That means that in 2011 if you were worried about an intrusion into your system it was 33 times more likely that the perpetrator would be a criminal, nation state or disgruntled employee than a hacktivist. If you weren’t picking fights with Anonymous the chances would have dropped to zero — at least according to the cases analyzed in the report.

In effect, these infosecurity media outlets cited two actions by Anonymous spin-offs, implicated that actions like this were a principle project of hacktivism, and thereby implicated a larger, imminent threat of hacktivism. Meanwhile, the meaning of hacktivist was being narrowed from people who use technology in support of social causes to meaning individuals principally concerned with infiltrating and releasing the data of almost anyone.

Now let’s turn to an attempt to maintain the broader understanding of hacktivism. Several months ago I attended a birthday party in Germany for Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who was turning 34. As it happened, Domscheit-Berg had also been the spokesperson for Wikileaks and, after Julian Assange, the group’s most visible person. He had left the organization in 2010, and now he had a new venture, OpenLeaks. The party was also meant to be a coming out party for OpenLeaks.

The party was to be held in the new headquarters and training center for OpenLeaks — a large house in a small town about an hour outside of Berlin. I was half-expecting to find a bunker full of hackers probing Web sites with SQL injections and sifting through State Department cables, but what I found was something else altogether.

When I arrived at the house the first thing I noticed was a large vegetable garden outside. The second thing I noticed was that a tree out front had been fitted out with a colorful knit wool sweater. This was the effort of Daniel’s wife Anke — “knit hacking,” she called it. And around the small town I saw evidence of her guerilla knit hacking. The steel poles of nearby street signs had also been fitted with woolen sweaters. Most impressively, though, a World War II tank, sitting outside a nearby former Nazi concentration camp for women had also been knit-hacked; the entire barrel of the tank’s gun had been fit with a tight colorful wool sweater and adorned with some woolen flowers for good measure. I interpreted these knit-hackings as counteractions to the attempts to define hacktivist as something sinister; they serve as ostensive definitions of what hacktivism is and what hacktivists do.

Of course the birthday party had elements of hackerdom understood more narrowly. There were some members of the Chaos Computer Club (a legendary hacker group), and there was a healthy supply of Club Mate — the energy drink of choice of European hackers, but the main message being delivered was something else: a do-it-yourself aesthetic — planting your own garden, knitting your own sweaters, foraging for mushrooms and counting on a local friend to bag you some venison. What part of this lifestyle was the hacktivism part? Daniel and his friends would like to say that all of it is.

The intention here was clear: an attempt to defend the traditional, less sinister understanding of hacktivism and perhaps broaden it a bit, adding some positive affect to boot; more specifically, that hacking is fundamentally about refusing to be intimidated or cowed into submission by any technology, about understanding the technology and acquiring the power to repurpose it to our individual needs, and for the good of the many. Moreover, they were saying that a true hacktivist doesn’t favor new technology over old — what is critical is that the technologies be in our hands rather than out of our control. This ideal, theoretically, should extend to beyond computer use, to technologies for food production, shelter and clothing, and of course, to all the means we use to communicate with one another. It would also, of course, extend to access to knowledge more generally — a value that was inherent in Aaron Swartz’s hacking of the JSTOR data base.

Our responsibility in this particular episode of lexical warfare is to be critical and aware of the public uses of language, and to be alert to what is at stake — whether the claims made by the infosecurity industry or the government, or the gestures by the hacktivists, are genuine, misleading or correct. We are not passive observers in this dispute. The meaning of words is determined by those of us who use language, and it has consequences. Whether or not Aaron Swartz suffered because of the manipulation of the public discourse surrounding hacking, his case is a reminder that it is important that we be attuned to attempts to change the meanings of words in consequential ways. It is important because we are the ones who will decide who will win.

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Peter Ludlow is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. His most recent book is “The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics.”

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Recipes for Health: Skillet Beet and Farro Salad

“Comforting” isn’t a word I usually associate with salads, but this week I put together five grain salads that fit that bill. Over the years I have developed a number of delicious whole grain salads that combine various grains with vegetables, herbs and often nuts, tossed in a tangy dressing. I have also married many a grain and vegetable in a pilaf. I decided to bring both concepts together in hearty salads that I’m calling “skillet salads;” each one is heated through in a skillet just before serving.

You can get ahead on all of these by cooking the grains or noodles ahead. Whole grains freeze well and keep in the refrigerator for three days. Then it’s just a question of preparing vegetables, herbs and dressing. Even if you don’t cook the grains ahead you can prepare the other ingredients while they’re simmering.

I make a meal of these at lunch, and serve smaller portions as sides or starters for dinner. If you want to serve the warm, tangy grains on a bed of salad greens I recommend spinach or sturdy greens like frisée or dandelion greens that will stand up to the heat of the salad and won’t wilt beyond recognition when topped with something warm.

Skillet Beet and Farro Salad

This hearty winter salad can be a meal or a side dish, and warming it in the skillet makes it particularly comforting. Cook your farro until you see that the grains have begun to splay so they won’t be too chewy and can absorb the dressing properly.

For the Salad:

2 medium or 3 small beets, roasted

1 cup farro, soaked for 1 hour in 1 quart water

Salt to taste

1 ounce lightly toasted pistachios (scant 1/4 cup)

1/4 cup chopped fresh herbs, such as parsley, tarragon, marjoram, chives, mint

Freshly ground pepper

For the Dressing:

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar

1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

Salt to taste

1 small garlic clove, minced or pureéd

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons walnut oil

Crumbled feta for garnish (optional)

1. Roast the beets and meanwhile cook the farro. Place in a medium saucepan with the soaking water and bring to a boil. Add salt to taste, reduce the heat, cover and simmer 45 minutes to an hour, until the grains have begun to splay. Turn off the heat and allow to sit for 15 minutes or longer in the water. Drain through a strainer set over a bowl.

2. While the farro is cooking, make the vinaigrette. Whisk together the vinegars, salt, garlic, and mustard. Whisk in the oils. Pour into a wide frying pan or saucepan and add to the farro, along with a couple of tablespoons of the farro cooking water. Peel and dice the beets and add, along with the herbs and pistachios. Stir over medium heat until heated through and serve, with a little feta sprinkled over the top if you wish.

Yield: Serves 6

Advance preparation: The cooked farro and the roasted beats will keep for 3 or 4 days in the refrigerator.

Nutritional information per serving (6 servings): 304 calories; 19 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 5 grams polyunsaturated fat; 11 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 27 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 61 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 6 grams protein

Note: If you want to reduce the fat and calories in this dish, substitute buttermilk for some of the oil. Be careful not to allow the dressing to come to a boil when you heat it in the pan or the buttermilk will curdle.

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Recipes for Health: Skillet Beet and Farro Salad

“Comforting” isn’t a word I usually associate with salads, but this week I put together five grain salads that fit that bill. Over the years I have developed a number of delicious whole grain salads that combine various grains with vegetables, herbs and often nuts, tossed in a tangy dressing. I have also married many a grain and vegetable in a pilaf. I decided to bring both concepts together in hearty salads that I’m calling “skillet salads;” each one is heated through in a skillet just before serving.

You can get ahead on all of these by cooking the grains or noodles ahead. Whole grains freeze well and keep in the refrigerator for three days. Then it’s just a question of preparing vegetables, herbs and dressing. Even if you don’t cook the grains ahead you can prepare the other ingredients while they’re simmering.

I make a meal of these at lunch, and serve smaller portions as sides or starters for dinner. If you want to serve the warm, tangy grains on a bed of salad greens I recommend spinach or sturdy greens like frisée or dandelion greens that will stand up to the heat of the salad and won’t wilt beyond recognition when topped with something warm.

Skillet Beet and Farro Salad

This hearty winter salad can be a meal or a side dish, and warming it in the skillet makes it particularly comforting. Cook your farro until you see that the grains have begun to splay so they won’t be too chewy and can absorb the dressing properly.

For the Salad:

2 medium or 3 small beets, roasted

1 cup farro, soaked for 1 hour in 1 quart water

Salt to taste

1 ounce lightly toasted pistachios (scant 1/4 cup)

1/4 cup chopped fresh herbs, such as parsley, tarragon, marjoram, chives, mint

Freshly ground pepper

For the Dressing:

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar

1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

Salt to taste

1 small garlic clove, minced or pureéd

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons walnut oil

Crumbled feta for garnish (optional)

1. Roast the beets and meanwhile cook the farro. Place in a medium saucepan with the soaking water and bring to a boil. Add salt to taste, reduce the heat, cover and simmer 45 minutes to an hour, until the grains have begun to splay. Turn off the heat and allow to sit for 15 minutes or longer in the water. Drain through a strainer set over a bowl.

2. While the farro is cooking, make the vinaigrette. Whisk together the vinegars, salt, garlic, and mustard. Whisk in the oils. Pour into a wide frying pan or saucepan and add to the farro, along with a couple of tablespoons of the farro cooking water. Peel and dice the beets and add, along with the herbs and pistachios. Stir over medium heat until heated through and serve, with a little feta sprinkled over the top if you wish.

Yield: Serves 6

Advance preparation: The cooked farro and the roasted beats will keep for 3 or 4 days in the refrigerator.

Nutritional information per serving (6 servings): 304 calories; 19 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 5 grams polyunsaturated fat; 11 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 27 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 61 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 6 grams protein

Note: If you want to reduce the fat and calories in this dish, substitute buttermilk for some of the oil. Be careful not to allow the dressing to come to a boil when you heat it in the pan or the buttermilk will curdle.

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

Read More..