Michael Bloomberg Looks To Influence News Coverage At Bloomberg News

From the NY Times:

At editorial meetings in Bloomberg L.P.’s headquarters this week, Michael R. Bloomberg gave clear signs that he would not be taking a hands-off approach as he returned to his old company.

Just two week’s removed from City Hall, and in his first days back at the media giant that he owns and that carries his name, Mr. Bloomberg surprised many employees by showing up at all of the 7:30 a.m. meetings where the day’s big journalistic decisions are made.

At the gatherings, in a glass-walled conference room, he spoke up to indicate what coverage interested him, like the traffic scandal involving Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey and the romantic problems of the French president, François Hollande, and what did not, like the suspension of Alex Rodriguez from baseball, according to three people briefed on the meetings.

This is not what employees at the company had expected upon Mr. Bloomberg’s return after three terms as the mayor of New York City. While in office, Mr. Bloomberg said publicly that he would never go back to running his old company. And only a few months ago, the company’s chief executive, Daniel L. Doctoroff, said in an interview that Mr. Bloomberg did not want “to get involved in the day-to-day at all.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s dive back into the news side of the organization has not only caught employees by surprise, but it has also worried some that the division’s editorial independence could be called into question. Generally, the owners of news organizations try to avoid any appearance of influencing coverage, particularly when they have political affiliations.

“There’s a discussion of the ethics of it,” said one current employee, who was at the editorial meetings and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “There’s this feeling that no one is there to say no to him.”

Of course Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman exert influence on their own news outlets as well, so frankly, why shouldn't Michael Bloomberg?

And after Bloomberg put so many journalists and p.r. people on his payroll to burnish his image and write the "history" of his mayorality, I really thought he would go back to Bloomberg News, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, et al. and turn them into propaganda vehicles like Bloomberg Views (the opinion wing of Bloomberg News.)

Now it looks like he is.

How much longer until he decides to influence not just the stories that get prominent coverage but also the content of those stories?

Fall-Out From Spying Scandal

Mayor Mike's company takes a hit:

A number of Wall Street firms are hoping to cut back on at least some of the popular features offered by Bloomberg LP — moves that could crimp the data distributor’s bottom line.

The firms, Citigroup, Barclays, Goldman Sachs and at least one other, are making the move after The Post broke the news that Bloomberg reporters had access to some proprietary client information.

They are looking to pull back on features such as chat and instant messaging in favor of their own more secure, proprietary services.

Barclays is considering creating its own Bloomberg-like products, such as messaging, sources tell The Post.

A Barclays spokesman wasn’t able to comment.


One major bulge-bracket New York-based bank, which declined to be identified because its plans are in the formative stage, also is exploring creating similar features for its staffers.

The moves by the banks are aimed at lowering the $20,000-a-year per terminal rental fee — or, in some cases, cut the number of terminals they rent.

Citigroup plans on rolling out both an instant messaging and an internal newsfeed known as CitiFX Wire for its foreign exchange traders and clients.

Citi’s wire service is internally created but also aggregates some news through an agreement with Dow Jones, a person familiar with the situation told The Post.

Both Dow Jones and The Post are owned by News Corp.

Depending on how well the product is received, the bank might roll it out more broadly and be able to offer it to new staff members instead of turning to Bloomberg.

Citi hopes it can introduce the products to new employees or those who don’t have Bloomberg terminals, a source familiar with the situation said.

A Citi spokesman said that the bank’s plans, in the works for the past two years, aren’t related to Bloomberg’s recent SpyGate.

Criminal banks and Wall Street firms moving their scummy business from one company engaged in spying and hacking owned by an oligarch (Bloomberg) to another company engaged in spying and hacking owned by an oligarch (Murdoch).   Well, at the very least Mayor Mikey will lose some money from this.   That means less money for his PAC to throw around post-City Hall.

Questions For The DOJ and FBI In The Bloomberg Spying Scandal

From a comment in an earlier post:

Were any civil laws broken with the unauthorized surveillance?

Did this activity violate any wiretap laws?

Were any criminal laws violated?

Was the information gathered for the use of insider traders?

How long has this unauthorized surveillance taken place?

Who knew about this surveillance using the Bloomberg monitors?

Is their a culture of illegal snooping taken place at Bloomberg ?

What other unauthorized surveillance capabilities does Bloomberg news have at its disposal?

Have any records or documents been destroyed?

Is Bloomberg like Murdoch unfit to manage a major corporation?

Were any financial losses incurred by those who were spied upon?

And from another commenter:

Federal Wiretap Laws prohibit the interception of voice, wire or electronic communications. There are criminal penalties for wiretapping that is not authorized by a court order. It seems that the Bloomberg employee surveillance falls within the purview of Federal wiretap laws since the Bloomberg employees were engaged in the unauthorized interception of electronic/wire data and communications.

More clients are asking questions about what Bloomberg reporters were doing:

With new concerns emerging about practices at its news division, Bloomberg L.P., the sprawling financial services company founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, scrambled to shield its lucrative terminal business and appease nervous customers.

The report on Friday that a Bloomberg reporter had used the company's financial data terminals to monitor a Goldman Sachs partner's logon activity has set off a ripple effect of inquiries from other worried subscribers, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and the European Central Bank.

The revelations now stretch back to 2011, when UBS complained after a Bloomberg Television host alluded on air to his monitoring of the London-based rogue UBS trader Kweku Adoboli's terminal logon information to confirm his employment status at the bank. Then, last summer, executives at JPMorgan Chase questioned Bloomberg reporters' techniques after they were among the first to report on the trader Bruno Iksil, nicknamed the London Whale. ''I'm unaware of any record of a complaint from either bank on this issue,'' said Ty Trippet, a Bloomberg spokesman. The fallout continued on Monday. Bloomberg has now received roughly 20 inquiries about whether reporting practices violated the company's policies about getting access to subscriber information, including one from Bank of America. The bank also contacted Bloomberg to raise questions about the security of its employees' private information, people briefed on the matter said.

CNBC reports Bloomberg may have some legal problems over this:

The company also began to discuss possible legal ramifications. While people close to the company doubted that clients would threaten legal action, Bloomberg hired outside lawyers on Friday to steer it through the crisis. The lawyers, according to the people close to the company, have assured Bloomberg that there is no basis for a lawsuit, since the subscribers did not suffer any damages and the information obtained was more trivial than confidential. An early analysis conducted by Bloomberg further suggested that reporters rarely, if ever, published stories based solely on information gleaned from the terminals.

The people close to the company also noted that Bloomberg's sales agreement with subscribers disclosed that company employees had access to certain private information. While the agreement did not specify that Bloomberg News reporters were among those with access, the journalists are technically employees of Bloomberg L.P.

But some bank executives said the snooping could have violated a common confidentiality clause in their contracts with Bloomberg. In the clause, Bloomberg promises to keep large swaths of information ''in confidence,'' meaning that it won't be shared with ''third parties.''

One Wall Street executive, who asked not to be named because of a firm policy prohibiting employees from speaking to the media, said his company was involved in a sensitive situation last year and he now wondered if reporters were monitoring his activities.

''Looking to see who is in or not is sleazy but hardly earthshaking,'' he said. ''But if they knew what stocks I was clicking on and what yields I was looking at, that is spying.'' (Bloomberg officials have repeatedly said the functions used by reporters did not provide information on specific trades or securities.)

Another top Wall Street executive, who also asked not to be named, said although he did not know if his firm would take action, he planned to raise this issue with his board. ''I don't like it when something happens that hasn't occurred to me, and this had not occurred to me,'' he said. ''I feel violated.''

Of course the Obama DOJ may not be able to investigate the Bloomberg spying allegations because they are too busy spying on journalists themselves, as the Associated Press alleges.

Bloomberg Reporters Were Trained To Spy On Bloomberg Terminal Subscribers

More and more criminal by the day:

Reporters at Bloomberg News were trained to use a function on the company’s financial data terminals that allowed them to view subscribers’ contact information and, in some cases, monitor login activity in order to advance news coverage, more than half a dozen former employees said. 

More than 315,000 Bloomberg subscribers worldwide use the terminals for instant market news, trading information and communication. Reporters at Bloomberg News, a separate division from the terminal business, were nonetheless told to use the terminals to get an edge in the competitive world of financial journalism where every second counts, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the company’s strict nondisclosure agreements. 

The company acknowledged that at least one reporter had gained access to information on Goldman Sachs after the bank complained to the company last month. On Sunday, Ty Trippet, a Bloomberg spokesman, said that “reporters would not have been trained to improperly use any client data.”

Matthew Winkler, editor in chief of Bloomberg News, underscored that the practice was at one time commonplace. In an editorial published on Bloomberg View late Sunday night, he said the practice of allowing reporters access to limited subscriber information dated back to the inception of the news arm of the giant financial information company founded by Michael R. Bloomberg. 

...

Bloomberg reporters also are accused of monitoring JPMorgan Chase executives’ login information last summer, when the bank suffered a multibillion-dollar trading loss, according to people briefed on the situation. The bank never formally complained to Bloomberg representatives about the practice.

The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department are also investigating whether reporters tracked employees. Bloomberg terminals sit in the highest echelons of power — including central banks, rival news organizations, Congress and even the Vatican. 

...

 

Bloomberg executives have not denied that they knew some reporters turned to the terminals to monitor when subscribers, who are mostly traders and finance executives, had logged on. On less frequent occasions, reporters also monitored chats between those subscribers and customer service representatives. Reporters could not see a subscriber’s specific securities, trades or which news articles they had read. 

Mr. Winkler did not expand on who may have been affected. He said the practices were a legacy left over from when reporters were considered part of the sales operation. Nearly 85 percent of the company’s $7.9 billion in 2012 revenue came from its terminal business. 

The news operation was assembled in the 1990s primarily as a way to sell more terminals. Reporters regularly accompanied sales representatives to sell subscribers on the wonders of the terminal, the desktop computers that provide a constant stream of headlines and data and sit upon many traders’ desks. 

The company has said the close relationship between journalists and the sales team meant there was a reason to allow reporters access to limited subscriber data to help with customer service and to customize news to subscribers’ needs. 

I have no doubt the Little Mayor and his company of criminals will get away with this.

That's what happens to companies as powerful as Bloomberg LP and people as power as Michael Bloomberg.

But it's becoming clear that everybody at Bloomberg knew this was happening - including Mike Bloomberg.

It would be nice if reporters would ask him about this pointedly at his next presser and not stop asking him until he answers.

Bloomberg News Reporters Spied On Bernanke And Geithner Through Bloomberg Terminals

Reporters at Bloomberg News channeling the hacks in the Nixon administration:

Both the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury Department are examining the extent to which Bloomberg-terminal usage by top officials might have been tracked by Bloomberg journalists, CNBC has learned.

A Fed spokesperson told CNBC that the central bank is looking into the situation and has been in touch with Bloomberg to learn more. A source said the Treasury Department is taking similar action.

Meanwhile, CNBC has learned from a former Bloomberg employee that he accessed usage information of the company's data terminals of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

The information appeared to concern general functions used by the officials and the frequency with which those functions — such as looking at a bond, equity markets or news — were accessed. The source said all Bloomberg journalists who knew of this capability of the terminal would have had access to the usage information of the officials.

The issue of Bloomberg journalists' access to individual data from the terminals was revealed in recent days when a reporter called a Goldman Sachs Group employee inquiring about a partner's employment status and noting the partner had not logged on to the terminal lately. The incident prompted a complaint from Goldman and led Bloomberg to terminate the ability of reporters to monitor subscribers.

In a statement on its website, Bloomberg said, "Having recognized this mistake, we took immediate action. Last month we changed our policy so that all reporters only have access to the same customer-relationship data available to our clients."

The former Bloomberg employee who worked in the editorial section recalled calling up the information on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner "just for fun" and displaying the information to new recruits "to show how powerful" the Bloomberg terminals were.

The former employee said he recalled seeing the functions used by the Fed Chairman and Treasury Secretary and the number of times those functions had been used. The person did not recall which specific functions he saw, but said it would have been at a broad level.

For example, he said it would likely have been information that the official accessed a page such as global equity indexes, though not which markets specifically. He said it also could have included information that the user looked up bond spreads, but the information would not have shown what specific bonds were searched by the user.

Still, with thousands of functions, the information could apparently get quite specific. And knowing how often a user looked up individual information and how often the user was logged in could provide valuable information.

A JP Morgan Chase source told CNBC that, "Multiple Bloomberg reporters very openly were using terminal login data to determine when traders were suspended and/or let go — during the London Whale situation, as well as during other rounds of layoffs."

A Quartz story (www.qz.com) said Bloomberg employees had accessed a transcript of a call of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to the company's help desk. The story said the information was not used in any editorial pieces written by journalists.

Did The Little Mayor know about this when he was still running the day-to-day operations of Bloomberg LP?

Did The Little Mayor know about this activity once he left the day-to-day operations at Bloomberg to somebody else and started running the city?

What does The Little Mayor think now that the word "Bloombergian" has some of the same associations as "Nixonian"?

Why The Bloomberg LP/Bloomberg News Data Breach Matters

From the NY Times:

A shudder went through Wall Street on Friday after the revelation that Bloomberg News reporters had extracted subscribers’ private information through the company’s ubiquitous data terminals to break news. 

The company confirmed that reporters at Bloomberg News, the journalism arm of Bloomberg L.P., had for years used the company’s terminals to monitor when subscribers had logged onto the service and to find out what functions, like the news wire, corporate bond trades or an equities index, they had looked at. Bloomberg terminals, which cost an average of more than $20,000 a year, are found in nearly every banking and trading company. 

Bloomberg said the functions that allowed journalists to monitor subscribers were promptly disabled after Goldman Sachs complained that a Bloomberg reporter had, while inquiring about a partner’s employment status, pointed out that the partner had not logged onto his Bloomberg terminal lately.

The incident led to broader concerns about the line at Bloomberg between its lucrative terminal business and the hypercompetitive newsroom, threatening to undermine the credibility of both. In a secretive world that thrives on opacity, traders and financial firms jealously guard every speck of information about their activity to avoid tipping their hand on their trades and investments. 

...

Jonathan Corpina, a managing partner at Meridian Equity Partners, said the incident was a reminder that nothing — not even the seemingly secure Bloomberg terminal — was private. “It concerns people that what they are doing is being watched and monitored by people who shouldn’t be watching and monitoring it,” Mr. Corpina said.

Indeed it does concern people that what they're doing is being watched and monitored by people who shouldn't be watching and monitoring it.

Which is why people don't want the state collecting all that data on their kids and handing it over to Murdoch and Gates.

It's that simple.

Bloomberg LP/Bloomberg News Data Breach Story And InBloom

There's an inBloom connnection to this Bloomberg LP/Bloomberg News data breach/spying story that I'm going to get to in a moment.

First the latest on the Bloomberg LP/Bloomberg News data breach/spying story from The Guardian:

The financial services news group Bloomberg was facing questions on Friday about how reporters used information about clients gleaned from its widely-used terminals.

The New York Post reported that journalists at Bloomberg had been caught using the financial news service's $20,000-a-year terminals to "spy" on Goldman Sachs bankers.

The Guardian also understands that JP Morgan also has concerns about how Bloomberg used information from its terminals while pursuing stories about Bruno Iksil, the trader known as the London Whale, who was blamed for massive losses at the bank last year.

Bloomberg said it had blocked journalists' access to client data within 24 hours of receiving a complaint from Goldman.

The concerns raised by Goldman could be a major headache for Bloomberg, which makes most of its money from renting the terminals to traders. It now faces complaints from other Wall Street banks that believe they too were spied upon by reporters in a breach of confidentiality.

The Post said that a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner was still with the firm, saying that he had not logged into his terminal for some time.

More than 300,000 of the world's most influential people in finance including top bankers, treasury officials and hedge fund managers have access to a Bloomberg terminal. Almost all users are identified by name and their terminals are often highly tailored to give them access to the financial information they need. Access to the types of information those users are looking up would give a reporter invaluable insight.

"Limited customer relationship data has long been available to our journalists, and has never included clients' security-level data, position data, trading data or messages," Bloomberg said in a statement. Bloomberg has now blocked journalists from accessing that data.

In a memo to staff Friday, Bloomberg chief executive Daniel Doctorof
said it had been a "mistake" to allow reporters to have access to
"limited customer relationship management data". "Since our founding
more than 30 years ago, the proper safeguarding of customer data has
been a central tenet of Bloomberg's culture," he wrote.

He said the company had appointed Bloomberg executive Steve Ross to
the new role of client data compliance officer, to review how clients'
data is handled. "Client trust is our highest priority and the
cornerstone of our business, and we are deeply committed to ensuring
the complete integrity and confidentiality of our clients' data in all
situations and at all times," he wrote.

Bankers said they believed the reporters had access not only to log-in information but also to whether the users had called the help desk and what information they had wanted help with. "I don't think anyone realised how much information the news desk had access to," said one Wall Street executive.
Goldman confirmed that it had recently confronted Bloomberg executives after it emerged reporters could determine which of its employees had logged into Bloomberg's terminals and how many times they had used particular functions.

"We brought this matter to the attention of the news organisation, and senior management at the company assured us that they were taking immediate measures to address the problem," a Goldman spokesman said. He declined to comment on specific incidents.
Bank sources told the Post that in one incident a Bloomberg reporter asked a bank executive whether a Goldman partner had left the firm, noting that he had not logged into his Bloomberg terminal in some time.

Former Bloomberg staff, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the company's culture as "porous". In early years Bloomberg reporters would assist on the help desk and even go on client pitches. "They didn't grow up in a culture where you walled off information," said one former insider. "I don't think it's a deliberate policy, I just think that it was something no one was really concerned about."

But Wall Street executives said the company had been far too big for too long to allow its past to be an excuse for what they see as a clear breach of confidentiality. Bank executives were not keen to talk on the record while they continue to discuss the issue with Bloomberg. "Every terminal comes with a boiler-plate contract that clearly talks about confidentiality. They know they are collecting extremely sensitive and private information," said one banker. "Privacy is privacy. The fact that an organisation can, at the very least, monitor the whereabouts of our staff is clearly a concern," said another.

Okay, so here we have this large conglomerate called Bloomberg with lots of separate entities within that conglomerate.

The news entity is not supposed to have access to the data that is being collected by the financial services entity.

But somehow they are given that access and use it without the knowledge of the company's clients to their advantage.

Now let's think about another large conglomerate called News Corporation.

As part of a deal with a bunch of states, News Corporation, along with the Gates Foundation, is going to develop a data storehouse for the confidential information of students all over NY State.

News Corporation will have a for-profit education entity that will be separate from this data storehouse entity called inBloom Inc. and the data will not be shared between the two.

But can you imagine how employees from one part of the News Corporation conglomerate, say the for-profit education part, magically get access to the data from the part that helps out with the data storehouse?

Or how the reporters from the news part get access to the data, just the way the reporters from Bloomberg News got access to the Bloomberg LP data?

I bet you can.

If Bloomberg News can get confidential info and data on Bloomberg LP's clients' terminals, you can bet Murdoch's hackers and data breachers are going to be able to get their hands on the student data and use it to their advantage too.

The blueprint for this is contained in this Bloomberg LP/Bloomberg News data breach/spying incident.

Mark down the day - May 10, 2013.

We got a glimpse of the future at inBloom Inc.

Bloomberg LP Terminals Used To Spy On Users

The spymaster is at it again:

Irked Goldman Sachs brass recently confronted Bloomberg LP over concerns reporters at the business news service have been using the company’s ubiquitous terminals to keep tabs on some employees of the Wall Street bank, The Post has learned.

The ability to spy on Bloomberg terminal users came to light recently when Goldman officials learned that at least one reporter at the news service had access to a wide array of information about customer usage, sources said.

In one instance, a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner at the bank had recently left the firm — noting casually that he hadn’t logged into his Bloomberg terminal in some time, sources added.

Goldman later learned that Bloomberg staffers could determine not only which of its employees had logged into Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals but also how many times they had used particular functions, insiders said.

The matter raised serious concerns for the firm about how secure information exchanged through the terminals within the firm actually was — and if the privacy of their business strategy had been compromised.

“You can basically see how many times someone has looked up news stories or if they used their messaging functions,” said one Goldman insider.

“It made us think, ‘Well, what else does [Bloomberg] have access to?’ ”

Bloomberg’s terminals have become the lifeblood of Wall Street trading shops, particularly those that mine the terminals’ reams of data to help make daily trading decisions.

Wall Street firms pay about $20,000 a year to rent each terminal — allowing the company founded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to ring up annual revenue of more than $6 billion.

The little man wants to control everything, doesn't he?

Shame he won't use that information to hold the criminals at Goldman accountable.