Bloggers: 1 step from censorship?

Federal Shield Bills Offer Rival Takes
On Who's A Journalist;
Bloggers Could Be Left Unprotected

February 23rd, 2009
by Michael Lindenberger
Source
The question of what makes a journalist is due for yet another round of debate, now that Congress is weighing two competing versions of a federal shield law for reporters.

Last Friday, the Senate introduced its own version of the Free Flow of Information Act, a follow-up to the House's action two days before. Both versions would provide new -- if limited -- protection against subpoenas for journalists, and both version contain a range of exceptions. Both bills were introduced in 2007 as well, with the House version passing overwhelmingly despite a veto threat. The Senate bill was passed easily out of committee only to die without a vote of the full chamber as the session ran out of time. (For details on the previous bills, see previous CMLP posts here, here, here, and here.)

Again, the 2009 bills differ in a key respect, namely in how they define journalists. The Senate bill is fairly straightforward and generous in this regard. It covers a person "who is engaged in journalism," and defines the latter by:

the regular gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public.

The House version, on the other hand, puts limits on who is covered in a way that potentially leaves most bloggers and many others outside the protective zone of the shield. From the bill:

The term "covered person" means a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person's livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person.

"Substantial" isn't defined, but one would assume that many bloggers, student journalists and even those who freelance for magazines or papers that pay poorly, could have a hard time utilizing the protections afforded by the bill, should this version become law.

It's an old question, this issue of who qualifies as a journalist. And it has been part of the debate over the so-called reporter's privilege for decades, at least since Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665 (1972), the 5-4 Supreme Court decision that ruled against press protections in 1972. The Louisville Courier-Journalreporter Paul Branzburg lost the case, but the fifth vote came from a sympathetic corner. Justice Powell voted with the majority to compel Branzburg's testimony, but penned an enigmatic concurrence that has been cited by many federal courts to bolster the idea that there is some protection, no matter how ill defined, stemming from the First Amendment:

The Court does not hold that newsmen, subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury, are without constitutional rights with respect to the gathering of news or in safeguarding their sources.

Branzburg, 408 U.S. at 709 (Powell, J., concurring). A federal statute establishing a qualified journalists' privilege would bring much-needed clarity and uniformity to this area of law, and it would also represent a historic step forward in vindicating the public's right to know. It'll be a shame, though, if a shield law passes with the House language that effectively shuts out most bloggers and other independent journalists. It will be journalism history, but with an asterisk.

Things I read - Jan 12, 2009 Oh Big Brother, where art thou?

The integration of new technology and traditional society proceeds at a mind numbing rate. The march to a One World Database, population control and genetic engineering is unstoppable bar a catastrophic natural disaster. Other references to this phenomenon can be found here.

UK Approves Police Hacking Home Computers

Oops, there goes another civil right.

America's demonization next step in New World Order?
An unusual twist on NWO. One wonders the cost in human lives and suffering as a means to such an end. Population control?

Anticipatory Conformity: Will the Growing Surveillance Panopticon Cause us to Self-censor?
How will our behaviour and culture change as a result of constantly being watched?

The Global Elite Speak
...Of a New World Order
Videos and Transcript. No you are not paranoid; they really are out to get you.


DNA Database Information Archive
The pace of technological innovation fare outstrips the ability of societies to put proper protections in place to retain civil rights. Part of the problem is that in the information age, few have time to keep up with the 'new' information available that affects the quality of life for our children. Here in one place, is a collection of articles on what we can expect from DNA mapping in government hands. Quite a shocking read. For the movie version, take a look at Gattaca.

Cyber Eyes, Net Cops and Pleasure Chips.

Here are two more articles the" I C U" progression on limiting internet freedom, increasing surveillance of people in general and 'protecting us from those nasty terrorists'. In the second article, the arrest of a cyber user seems a bit dodgy but one might justify it.

My contention is that there will be little difference in the future between arrests for explicit threats on the net and those which merely express opinions contrary to the established government propaganda. And arrests could well be international with extradiction legislation now in place between the USA, the EU and other countries. I think there is real danger here for freedom of speech on the net. See HR 1955 bill passed by Congress for the amorphous definition of 'domestic terrorist'. Are YOU a terrorist?

I have added a sexy bonus tidbit at the end....sort of a treat after all this bad news. Hope you like it.

Eagle Eye Adviser Watches
Over Tech Privacy
John Scott Lewinski
January 10, 2009
Source

Eagleeye01lgWhile the paranoia-driven thrills in Eagle Eye were exaggerated for the benefit of popcorn-selling fiction, the adviser brought on to comment on the movie's use of surveillance technology warns the world that the premise is hardly far-fetched.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, appears prominently in the featurettes packaged onto the Eagle Eye special edition DVD, which was released last month. A professor of privacy law at Georgetown University, Rotenberg insists that efforts by any government to consolidate surveillance also consolidate power.

"Camera networks are growing in most major cities," said Rotenberg, a graduate of Harvard and Stanford Law School. "Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. While those networks are supposedly built to provide security, most of what the cameras see are people living, working, visiting. Those people aren't criminals or terrorists."

Eagle Eye examines the "what ifs" of such surveillance networks run amok as a mysterious villain omnisciently pushes Shia LaBeouf into criminal acts in and around our nation's capital. The DVD's producers invited Rotenberg to speak on the real world's ability to monitor you via cameras, cellphone monitoring and internet taps.

"In Washington, one camera operator can have access to 5,000 cameras at any given time," Rotenberg said. "That approaches omniscience. We need to ask, 'Should those cameras be used? Should they be put in residential neighborhoods?' It's not too difficult to peer into someone's private home in that case."

While such antiterrorism tactics became a hot political issue in the post 9/11 era, Rotenberg made it clear that surveillance issues go beyond how you might feel about Vice President Dick Cheney. The cameras are tools, and how they're used is key.

For example, Rotenberg explained that law enforcement agencies could well have the public's best interest at heart when installing such cameras, but "many of the networks can be accessed in different ways. So, are they really secure? Someone inside the agency or inside the company providing the cameras might not be so ethical."

Eagle Eye's shadow baddie is a hell's toss from ethical, and Rotenberg applauded the writers and filmmakers' efforts to consider just how far the proliferation of surveillance could go.

Monitoring and debating the ethics of the growing surveillance world is the primary motivation of Rotenberg and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"We're probably the leading privacy organization in the country right now," he said. "We testified before the 9/11 Commission -- the relationship between privacy and security. While defending against terrorism, surveillance could be used to limit freedom."

To document the growing surveillance web around D.C., EPIC started Observing Surveillance, a collection of photos and other resources.

"I don't think the public is as aware as it should be or needs to be," Rotenberg said. "I'm afraid people think all of this is going to happen no matter what.

"I would compare the construction of surveillance networks to the creation of Frankenstein's monster. While the original technological quest seemed justified in the beginning, the 21st century may have created our biggest threat to privacy."


Online Threat to Kill
Obama Leads to Arrest

Kevin Poulsen
January 09, 2009
Wired Online
Obama_mail_500px A Southern California man was charged Thursday with threatening a presidential candidate, for posting a racist note to a Yahoo message board in October expressing displeasure over Barack Obama's candidacy, and predicting "he will have a 50 cal in the head soon."

Walter Edward Bagdasarian, 47, was found with an arsenal of six weapons when Secret Service agents raided his La Mesa home in November, according to court records (.pdf). He had three handguns and three rifles, including a 30.06 with a telescopic sight and a Remington .50 caliber muzzle-loading rifle.

Bagdasarian is not accused of actually plotting against Obama, and he was released last month on a $100,000 real estate bond. Bagdasarian's attorney did not return a phone call Friday.

The post in question showed up on a Yahoo Finance board on Oct. 22, about two weeks before the election, under the handle "californiaradial." The message was titled "Shoot the nig."

"County fkd for another 4+ years, what nig has done ANYTHING right???? Long term???? Never in history, except sambos."

"Fk the niggar, he will have a 50 cal in the head soon," the message concludes.

The message thread has been deleted by Yahoo, but traces in Google's cache show that several other users announced that they were reporting californiaradial's comments. In subsequent posts, the author calls one critic a "crybaby," but does offer an explanation for the apparent threat. "I was drunk."

U.S. Secret Service agents in Los Angeles traced the post to Bagdasarian through the IP address. When they interviewed him, Bagdasarian reportedly admitted authoring the message.


Here is a bonus article for anyone who likes sex.
What do you think?

‘Sex chip’ being developed by scientists

Shhhhh - Cyber censorship sleeping.

Of all the articles about Gaza, this is one of the scariest for me: it effectively means censorship on the net of organising activities for those who disagree with government. It also means a blogger in one country potentially could be charged by and deported to another country for violating 'censor' laws (this is not far fetching, the EU is currently implementing such a plan for member states.) I am afraid this is the writing on the wall for internet freedom (see yesterday's post here).

Freedom of speech is in grave danger of disappearing in cyberspace. Our connections in this realm are very fragile. Read and weep.

Gaza war sparks torrent

of fiery comment on the Internet

Pro-Palestinian commentary pushes Internet chat to become rear-guard battleground of public opinion.

Source
PARIS - European and US media and social network websites are struggling to cope with a deluge of reader comments sparked by the Gaza conflict, most fiercely partisan and some explicitly anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim, according to the sites' administrators.

Emotions on both sides are running high as the war enters its third week, and the Internet has become a rear-guard battleground of public opinion.

The torrent of highly-charged commentary -- especially when it violates in-house rules or national hate-speech laws -- poses at least two serious problems, representatives of the sites said.

One is logistic. All major news media sites filter reader views, and vetting hundreds, or thousands, of submissions -- not all of them coherent or concise -- is labour-intensive.

"The number of comments has exploded since the start of the conflict in Gaza," said Alberto Piccinini, an editor at the left-wing Il Manifesto in Italy.

"The debate is very lively, often virulent," he said, adding that most comments were pro-Palestinian and that some were bordered anti-Jewish.

The influx of views was so heavy at discussion forums of some French media sites that administrators simply shut the doors.

"The moderators were overwhelmed," said Clemence Lemaistre of 20minutes.fr.

Some published comments were seen as anti-Jewish by some readers while other remarks were viewed as anti-Muslim by other readers, prompting chat mediators to reject all contributions at the end.

The same action was taken at left-leaning Liberation, where the comments "very quickly degenerated into a spiral of hate and insults, with no end in site," the newspaper said in an editorial.

Two online debates hosted by BBC attracted nearly 40,000 comments.

Social network sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace do not vet content before it goes online, depending on community members to signal posts that may go beyond the pale.

But all these websites confront the even thornier problem of where to draw the line between an opinion that might virulent but acceptable, and one that could be interpreted as a racist insult.

The criteria for exclusion are not always clear, and rarely made explicit on a case-by-case basis.

Yassine Ayari, a 29-year old engineer in Paris, said that a pro-Palestinian discusssion group he created on website on December 29 was shut down on Wednesday by the website's administrators.

"My aim was to link up as many people as possible to centralise initiatives of support for Gaza," he said, adding that the group attracted more than 1000 members.

The space was blocked hours after Ayari receiving a boilerplate warning by email from the website, which followed up with a second email stating that "hateful, threatening, or obscene groups are not allowed."

Neither email, however, specified what was objectionable, and Ayari said he was careful to remove potentially injurious comments.

According to Facebook spokeswoman Debbie Frost, "The goal is to strike a very delicate balance between giving Facebook users the freedom to express opinions and beliefs, while also insuring that individuals and groups do not feel threatened or endangered."

That balance can shift depending on cultural norms and national laws. "There are no legal restrictions on comment in the US," said YouTube spokesman Scott Rubin.

The video-sharing platform "gives the power to our community to control the comments of their videos," but draws the line at "hate speech or incitement to violence."

Digg, a site that builds discussion groups around news items, has borrowed from a popular US parenting technique to keep debate civil.

If alerted to a statement that may cross the line, "our first step is to place that commenter in a 'time out' which prevents them from commenting, though they are able to access their account," said spokeswoman Jen Burton,

This technique works with people "who are otherwise good but occasionally lose their cool in an argument or just start acting out," she said in an email.