America vs The Pillar

 America has posted two great articles on The Pillar story raising many important questions about how the data was obtained, the ethics of its use, and the future of information gathering and journalism.

Since America has asked about the hidden agenda of The Pillar, I naturally asked about the hidden agenda of America as a Jesuit publication. Namely that America seeks to limit and discredit the exposure of gay networks in the Church.

Gay Networks

Jesuits have on their tombstones three dates: the date of their birth, their entrance in the Society of Jesus, and their death. Nothing about the date they took vows, or their ordination. The importance of entrance into novitiate, even if one eventually leaves, has become apparent to myself (and others) in the way some (but not all Jesuits) treat anyone who entered the Jesuits as one of OURS. 

This was very evident to me more than two decades ago when a Jesuit discussed with me his ministry with all the openness that might be expected to a fellow Jesuit. As a part of that he confided that the American Assistancy (i.e the group of  American provinces) was controlled by a gay network and that choice of ministries very much depended upon whether you were part of that network. This was all before the sexual abuse scandal reached national prominence and before Don Cozzens raised the homosexual issue in his book on priests (that scuttled any hopes he might have had as a seminary rector to become a bishop, he subsequently took an academic position).

The Jesuit revelations struck me as true not only from his own credibility but also from the trends I had seen after novitiate. In novitiate it was apparent that one of the priests was gay, and he did engage in some border line behavior. It was also apparent that one novice out of more than a hundred was likely gay. After I left novitiate, my friends reported more people were coming out. So as more and more priests left after Vatican II its seemed natural to me that the homosexual element grew, and become much more open, and that this likely resulted in more gay people being attracted to the priesthood and religious life. 

The whole issue of gay culture in the church is legitimate, just as is the issue of political and culture agendas and their associated networks. The National Catholic Reporter has done a very good job at exposing conservative political and cultural networks that have such a large influence on our hierarchy.  If there are gay networks that have an influence we have a right to know about them. I suspect McCarrick could never have happened without the support of gay networks among the bishops.

Tabloids, scandal and spying: The U.S. Catholic Church has hit a new, dangerous low point.

1. A high-ranking priest may have broken his promise of celibacy. And what The Pillar’s report is alleging is not a moment of weakness but a pattern of leading a secret double life. No Christian should take delight in how this news came to light, but neither should anyone suggest it is not important or dismiss it with claims that we all sin, after all. The Pillar’s evidence, while compelling, remains only circumstantial.

2. The report qualifies as an investigation, but it raises significant questions of journalism ethics. A number of questions remain about The Pillar’s report, beginning with: Why was Monsignor Burrill investigated in the first place? It matters whether he was intentionally targeted or whether his actions came to light in the course of a wider search. It also matters where the data came from. The Pillar cites “commercially available records of app signal data.” But who was involved in the commerce matters, as does whether The Pillar purchased an already-completed dossier on Monsignor Burrill and reported on its findings or whether they paid for the raw data themselves

The code instructs editors: “Identify sources clearly. The public is entitled to as much information as possible to judge the reliability and motivations of sources” and “Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information” and “Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.” The Pillar report does not meet these standards.

 the story in The Pillar is complicated by the fact that neither the source for the data nor the funding for it have been disclosed. There is a difference between someone volunteering information for the good of society and someone trying to sell a tabloid dirty pictures of a celebrity misbehaving, or shopping around dirt on a political opponent.

3. The report raises major privacy concerns. As the New York Times Privacy Project (an excellent resource to understand what can seem intimidatingly complex) put it: “Within America’s own representative democracy, citizens would surely rise up in outrage if the government attempted to mandate that every person above the age of 12 carry a tracking device that revealed their location 24 hours a day. Yet, in the decade since Apple’s App Store was created, Americans have, app by app, consented to just such a system run by private companies.”

4. The report erroneously and unconscionably conflates homosexuality and the sexual abuse of children.

As my colleague, James Martin, S.J., and Steve Millies for Religion News Service have pointed out: The Pillar’s report peddled homophobic stereotypes for several paragraphs. Some have rightly asked if this much effort would have been undertaken for a cleric accused of sexual relations with a woman.

In a 2,800-word article, over 1,300 words suggest and explore a possible connection to the sexual abuse of minors, despite admitting at the outset that “there is no evidence to suggest that Burrill was in contact with minors through his use of Grindr.” The article mentions multiple examples of criminal, abusive behavior by priests alongside Monsignor Burrill’s story, as if they are related.

The Pillar’s report is further evidence of a tendency of some within the church to insist that the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church was caused by homosexuality, despite multiple studies on the subject concluding the opposite.

5. The report raises serious concerns about the potential for blackmailing church leaders.

Here is the saddest and most dangerous question to consider from this story: What next? What else is contained in this dataset, the provenance of which we still know nothing about? If a church bureaucrat could fall victim to this type of reporting, then it is reasonable to assume that the entire church—all of its members and the institution—is at risk for some sort of embarrassing data breach.

The pastoral questions raised (but not answered) in The Pillar’s exposé of a USCCB official

Monsignor Burrill’s apparent moral failures are clear enough: first, a failure to maintain celibate chastity; second, a pattern of deception necessary to conceal that failure over years; and third, the hypocrisy of being in a position with responsibility, at the U.S.C.C.B., for addressing the sexual abuse scandal in the church (including the scandal of former Cardinal McCarrick’s decades-long pattern of deception), while he himself was not living with integrity. 

How did The Pillar identify Burrill? 

In a tweet posted the day after the article appeared, J. D. Flynn, one of The Pillar’s co-founders, explained that they analyzed the dataset they obtained “to identify patterns and trends in the context of the Catholic Church” and discovered, during that analysis, “an obvious correlation between hookup app usage and a high-ranking public figure.” But that simply leads to the questions: What made the correlation “obvious”? In what specific ways was it being looked for?

 If you filter that dataset to focus on a single device identifier, then what you have is a series of points, a single dotted line, showing where that phone has been over time. If that line is a close match to the known whereabouts of a person at those times, you can make a pretty solid inference that this device identifier belongs to that person’s phone. A New York Times report on this kind of dataset from 2019 said that even though no directly personally identifiable information is included in the dataset, “it’s child’s play to connect real names to the dots that appear on the maps.”

But you still have to pick one line out of the pile to start identifying it. There are two basic ways to start. You can either start with some names—proposed targets for investigation—and try to find the devices belonging to them by using their known addresses and travel patterns, then follow their dotted lines to look at where else they’ve been.

Or you can start with some significant locations and look at all the dotted lines going through those dots. Then, when you find a line that’s doing something or going somewhere it shouldn’t, you look at its consistent patterns of travel to connect that device to some specific person.

Why was Monsignor Burrill targeted? Did The Pillar receive a tip about him? And if so, did the tip allege some kind of misconduct related to his office (which The Pillar’s reporting did not find), or was it solely a tip about his failures in regard to celibacy? 

Or did The Pillar (or whatever source supplied the dataset) have a list of names of important church leaders that they worked through, identifying them by location patterns and then checking to see if they used any problematic apps? If so, how long is that list and how far down it did they have to go before finding a problem worth reporting on? Those two possibilities would suggest very different kinds of problems for the church to respond to.

It seems slightly more likely that The Pillar started with locations and then worked backward to names, for two reasons. First, the language in Mr. Flynn’s tweet about “discover[ing] an obvious correlation between hookup app usage and a high-ranking public figure” implies that they were looking at pings related to specific apps before they started connecting pings to names.

Second, on July 19, one day before The Pillar’s piece was published, Catholic News Agency published a story revealing that they had been approached in 2018 by a party who claimed to have technology “capable of identifying clergy and others who download popular ‘hook-up’ apps.” The Pillar’s founders, J. D. Flynn and Ed Condon, previously worked for C.N.A.; Mr. Flynn served as editor in chief from 2017 to 2020.

If there is a connection between the method used by The Pillar and the proposal made to C.N.A. back in 2018, then the broader focus of that proposal on “identifying clergy and others who download popular ‘hook-up’ apps” also suggests that the method starts at apps rather than with names.

In this locations-to-names approach, some of the further questions are similar to those regarding possible lists of names. How large were the lists of locations, and how were they developed? How prevalent were problematic patterns at those locations? Is Monsignor Burrill’s phone one among many devices for which such a pattern was detected, or was he one of a vanishingly small number of cases? Additionally, given that a location-based approach would probably start by filtering for pings from hookup apps, what list of apps was used, and what app data was included in the dataset? 

Finally, even if the specific methods used to de-anonymize the location data to point to Monsignor Burrill were sufficiently explained to allow the church to understand this scandal and pattern of sin more fully, there are still questions about how and by whom the data was obtained and analyzed. 

Given that it is far outside normal journalistic practice to obtain and de-anonymize data in order to reveal individual moral failings, greater transparency about such questionable methods is necessary. What data vendor sold the dataset? Did they know they were selling it to The Pillar and for use in publicly identifying individuals? 

And given that obtaining and analyzing such datasets can be quite expensive, who funded the acquisition and analysis of this data? If someone, as C.N.A. reported, has developed and is offering to some journalists a technological method for identifying, out of interest in church reform, some members of the clergy who are failing to live celibately, why are they opting to remain anonymous? There may be good reasons for anonymity, but it is best practice for journalists to describe in such cases why anonymity is being protected.

My Conclusion 

Seems that some person or persons, some organization, or some network is interested in exposing networks of gay officials in the church. Starting with use of gay apps by people visiting the bishops headquarters seems very logical. Of course they netted the general secretary. The question is how many other people are implicated. How many bishops when they visit D.C. used such an app?

The offer of The Pillar to meet with some of the general secretary's supervisors may have been about more than one person's behavior.  How many other people, especially bishops, does The Pillar have information about?  

Do they really have to have information to put themselves in a position to blackmail the bishops into whatever reforms they want?  Could not the mere possibility that they have information and will expose that information strike fear in the the hearts of most bishops?