Tag Results
16 posts tagged censorship
16 posts tagged censorship
Controlling your media (by Sowingthewinds, via @agapevitae)
Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
For more than a year now, EFF has encouraged mainstream press publications like the New York Times to aggressively defend WikiLeaks’ First Amendment right to publish classified information in the public interest and denounce the ongoing grand jury investigating WikiLeaks as a threat to press freedom.
Well, we are now seeing why that is so important: at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on July 11th, some members of Congress made it clear they also want New York Times journalists charged under the Espionage Act for their recent stories on President Obama’s ‘Kill List’ and secret US cyberattacks against Iran. During the hearing, House Republicans “pressed legal experts Wednesday on whether it was possible to prosecute reporters for publishing classified information,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
In addition, the Washingtonian’s Shane Harris reported a month ago that a “senior” Justice Department official “made it clear that reporters who talked to sources about classified information were putting themselves at risk of prosecution.”
Leaks big and small have been happening for decades—even centuries—and the most recent are comparable to several others. No journalist has ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act and it has generally been accepted, even by Congress’s own research arm, that the publication of government secrets by the press is protected speech under the First Amendment. Yet the government is actively investigating WikiLeaks and now threatening others for just that.
The mainstream media may see little in common with Assange’s digital publication methods or his general demeanor, but what he is accused of is virtually indistinguishable from what other reporters and newspapers do every day: poke, prod, and cajole sources within the government to give up classified information that newspapers then publish to inform the public of the government’s activities.
FJP: All so true. Read on.
(via onaissues)
June 26, 2012
As you all know our members write many books, and we tweet parts of these books for all to read, free of charge. However, in the last few days Twitter has implemented a policy of censorship. The accounts do not spam anyone, they do not follow anyone, they do not DM anyone, they do not mention anyone, they simply tweet quotations from our books. These books have over two million followers, delivering potent content to several million people.
There are currently four censored/suspended accounts:
@DearObesePeople with tweets from this book The Revolutionary Diet Book (this account did not even tweet any links, so the censorship is now certain, no longer a question of accidental spam suspension)
@NihilManifesto with tweets from this book The Active Nihilist’s Manifesto
@AntiProSports with tweets from this book The Anti-Professional Sports Manifesto
@AntCorporations with tweets from this book The Anti-Corporations Manifesto
We ask all of our followers and readers to contact twitter asking them lift their suspension and censorship of these books, you can contact twitter via @Support and @Twitter
You can also email them via this page Twitter Suspensions and ask them to revoke the suspensions/censorship.
by Claudia Trevor-Wright, June 21, 2012
An Open Letter to the Michigan House of Representatives:
I write to you today wearing several hats — I am a health educator and an attorney. I am also the mother of a four-year-old son, and tremendously fortunate to be expecting another son in August. Over the past few weeks, I have had the distinct displeasure of following the criminal trial of former Penn State Assistant Coach Jerry Sandusky. He stands accused of over 50 separate counts of sexually abusing ten children over a 15-year period. One witness testified that Sandusky anally raped him repeatedly, causing tearing and bleeding from his rectum. Another testified that Sandusky forced him to perform oral sex. A third witness testified he screamed for help while being raped in Sandusky’s basement.
You may ask — what does your silencing Representative Lisa Brown for her use of the word “vagina” have to do with these horrendous allegations?
According to the Rape Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 44 percent of victims of sexual violence are under age 18, and for 93 percent of them, their attackers are trusted adults. Their attackers are family members or acquaintances. These children remain silent. In fact, most instances of sexual violence still go unreported. These children have every incentive to keep silent about their abuse. They may be deeply ashamed. They may blame themselves. They may be confused. Their safety or the safety of their loved ones may have been threatened. They may not have words to express the horrible things that are happening to them. In this silence, they remain vulnerable to continued abuse. And in this silence, they suffer. The World Health Organization reports these children are more likely to experience depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, and to consider suicide.
Yet here you stand — in your position of tremendous authority — raising the volume of that silence to a deafening roar.
[…]
What does it say to him and the other sons and daughters of this world that grown men find the use of the word “vagina” — the medically accurate term for a part of the human body — to constitute a lack of decorum? “Vagina” is not a slur. “Vagina” is not slang. It is, in fact, the only appropriate word to be used when referring to this body part, which I suspect is why it was repeatedly used in the legislation being debated at the time.
Your actions say that the human body is inherently shameful. Your actions say that talking about our bodies makes other people — grown adults — uncomfortable. Your actions tell us all to remain silent.
Your discomfort and your inability to engage in discourse regarding matters of biology using medically accurate terminology perpetuate an environment in which silence thrives, and predators serially offend for years uninterrupted.
That is truly shameful.
Sincerely,
Claudia Trevor-Wright, MA, JD
Artists in Tunisia have begun circulating a petition calling for international solidarity from arts organizations in condemning the country’s government for censoring an art exhibition and siding with Salafist Islamic fundamentalists following riots incited by an art fair in the capital city.
After the 10th edition of a Tunisian art fair, “Printemps des arts,” which featured work from several local galleries as well as a curated exhibition of works by independent Tunisian artists, thousands of protesters took to the streets in the worst wave of violence since the 2011 revolts that ousted President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and began what would become the Arab Spring. Among the works the extremists objected to was Nadia Jelassi’s “Celui qui n’a pas…,” which includes sculptures of veiled women in the midst of a pile of stones. Another work featured a string of ants coming out of a child’s schoolbag to spell the word “Allah.” The primarily fundamentalist mob threw rocks and homemade bombs, set fires, destroyed many of the artworks at the exhibition at the Abdelliya Palace, and clashed with police, according to Reuters.
The petition, however, is not directed at the fundamentalists that incited the violence, but the moderate Islamist government that has since backed the Salafists and shut down the fair, even after many of the artists began receiving death threats via phone, text message, and social networking sites. The text reads, “M. Mehdi Mabrouk, Minister of Culture, contributed to blacklisting of creators by deciding to close the space Abdelliya and by suing the organizers of the exhibition, thus exposing the artists to popular condemnation and trial by the mob.”
[…]
By Maryn McKenna, June 14, 2012
NeverSeconds’ first school-lunch photo, May 8, 2012. The tubular thing is mashed potatoes in a crust.
For the past two months, one of my favorite reads has been Never Seconds, a blog started by 9-year-old Martha Payne of western Scotland to document the unappealing, non-nutritious lunches she was being served in her public primary school. Payne, whose mother is a doctor and father has a small farming property, started blogging in early May and went viral in days. She had a million viewers within a few weeks and 2 million this morning; was written up in Time, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and a number of food blogs; and got support from TV cheflebrity Jamie Oliver, whose series “Jamie’s School Dinners” kicked off school-food reform in England.
Well, goodbye to all that.
This afternoon, Martha (who goes by “Veg” on the blog) posted that she will have to shut down her blog, because she has been forbidden to take a camera into school.
[…]
9-Year-Old Who Changed School Lunches Silenced By Politicians | Wired Science | Wired.com
#Fukushima residents report various illnesses
The in the vid mentioned blog of Emiko Numauchi (Numayu) was shut down but now she has her own blog here. Dissensus Japan has translated several of her posts here. This Woman! She keeps fighting! THIS!
(vid by AlJazeeraEnglish)
(via anonymissexpress)
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(via anonymissexpress)
In a frightening example of how the state is tightening its grip around the free Internet, it has emerged that You Tube is complying with thousands of requests from governments to censor and remove videos that show protests and other examples of citizens simply asserting their rights, while also deleting search terms by government mandate.
The latest example is You Tube’s compliance with a request from the British government to censor footage of the British Constitution Group Lawful Rebellion protest, during which they attempted to civilly arrest Judge Michael Peake at Birkenhead county court.
Peake was ruling on a case involving Roger Hayes, former member of UKIP, who has refused to pay council tax, both as a protest against the government’s treasonous activities in sacrificing Britain to globalist interests and as a result of Hayes clearly proving that council tax is illegal.
Hayes has embarked on an effort to legally prove that the enforced collection of council tax by government is unlawful because no contract has been agreed between the individual and the state. His argument is based on the sound legal principle that just like the council, Hayes can represent himself as a third party in court and that “Roger Hayes” is a corporation and must be treated as one in the eyes of the law.
The British government doesn’t want this kind of information going viral in the public domain because it is scared stiff of a repeat of the infamous poll tax riots of 1990, a massive tax revolt in the UK that forced the Thatcher government to scrap the poll tax altogether because of mass civil disobedience and refusal to pay.
When viewers in the UK attempt to watch videos of the protest, they are met with the message, “This content is not available in your country due to a government removal request.”
We then click through to learn that, “YouTube occasionally receives requests from governments around the world to remove content from our site, and as a result, YouTube may block specific content in order to comply with local laws in certain countries.”
You can also search by country to discover that Google, the owner of You Tube, has complied with the majority of requests from governments, particularly in the United States and the UK, not only to remove You Tube videos, but also specific web search terms and thousands of “data requests,” meaning demands for information that would reveal the true identity of a You Tube user. Google claims that the information sent to governments is “needed for legitimate criminal investigations,” but whether these “data requests” have been backed up by warrants is not divulged by the company.
“Between July 1 and Dec. 31 (2009), Google received 3,580 requests for user data from U.S. government agencies, slightly less than the 3,663 originating from Brazil,” reports PC World. “The United Kingdom and India sent more than 1,000 requests each, and smaller numbers originated from various other countries.”
With regard to search terms, one struggles to understand how a specific combination of words in a Google search can be considered a violation of any law. This is about government and Google working hand in hand to manipulate search results in order to censor inconvenient information, something which Google now freely admits to doing.
You Tube’s behavior is more despicable than the Communist Chinese, who are at least open about their censorship policies, whereas You Tube hides behind a blanket excuse and doesn’t even say what law has been broken.
Anyone who swallows the explanation that the videos were censored in this case because the government was justifiably enforcing a law that says scenes from inside a court room cannot be filmed is beyond naive. Court was not even in session in the protest footage that was removed, and the judge had already left the courtroom.
The real reason for the removal is the fact that the British government is obviously petrified of seeing a group of focused and educated citizens, black, white, old and young, male and female, go head to head with the corrupt system on its own stomping ground.
In their efforts to keep a lid on the growing populist fury that has arrived in response to rampant and growing financial and political tyranny in every sector of society, governments in the west are now mimicking Communist Chinese-style Internet censorship policies in a bid to neutralize protest movements, while hypocritically lecturing the rest of the world on maintaining web freedom.
Via a combination of cybersecurity legislation and policy that is hastily introduced with no real oversight, governments and large Internet corporations are crafting an environment where the state can simply demand information be removed on a whim with total disregard for freedom of speech protections.
This was underscored last year at the height of the Wikileaks issue, when Amazon axed Wikileaks from its servers following a phone call made by Senator Joe Lieberman’s Senate Homeland Security Committee demanding the website be deleted.
Lieberman has been at the forefront of a push to purge the Internet of all dissent by empowering Obama with a figurative Internet kill switch that he would use to shut down parts of the Internet or terminate websites under the guise of national security. Lieberman spilled the beans on the true reason for the move during a CNN interview when he stated “Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too.”
Except that China doesn’t disconnect the Internet “in case of war,” it only ever does so to censor and intimidate people who express dissent against government atrocities or corruption, as we have documented. This is precisely the kind of online environment the British and American governments are trying to replicate as they attempt to put a stranglehold on the last bastion of true free speech – the world wide web.
Ethiopian netizens are outraged and expressing their concern on different social media platforms as the Ethiopian government increasingly engages in blocking and surveillance of selected websites, blogs and Facebook pages. The report about Ethiopia’s authorities engaging in online censorship came about after all previously blocked websites and blogs became available for three successive days during Ethiopia’s Easter celebration in early April.
[…]
Ethiopia: Netizens Outraged as Ethiopia Steps Up Internet Censorship · Global Voices
As an 8 year Veteran of Online Activism, as well as actually organizing protests (G-Summits: G7, G8, G20, crashing a Vice-Presidential Speech ”Dick Cheney”, University revolts in Paris France, Impeach Bush Protests, #Occupy World, etc…), I thought I would discuss online Censorship; especially…
by Steven Musil April 9, 2012
Country’s minister of information and communication says national intranet will create a “clean Internet.”
Millions of Internet users in Iran could soon be permanently cut off from the Web, social networks, and e-mail.
In a statement released last week, Reza Taghipour, the Iranian minister for Information and Communications Technology, announced it plans to establish a national intranet within five months in an effort to create a “clean Internet,” according to an International Business Times report. “All Internet Service Providers (ISP) should only present National Internet by August,” Taghipour said in the statement.
Web sites such as Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo will be blocked and replaced by government-administered services such as like Iran Mail and Iran Search Engine, according to the report. The government has already begun a registration process for those interested in using the Iran Mail that will verify and record user’s full name and address.
Iranian Internet users have grown accustomed to censorship. The country’s government cut off access to the Internet a few times earlier this year, the latest of which blocked access to all encrypted international sites outside the country that operate on Secure Sockets Layer protocol. Many Iranians use proxy servers over Virtual Private Networks to circumvent government efforts to block access to foreign news sites and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
Taghipour told the Islamic Republic News Agency in January that a firewalled national Internet would soon become operational but no specifics were given as to when that would happen. The creation of such a vast “intranet” has worried cyber activists in Iran because it would give the government an advantage in its cyber cat-and-mouse battle with opponents.
More on C-Net: Iran expected to permanently cut off Internet by August
(via anonymissexpress)
March 22, 2012 | By Jillian C. York
In the wake of a horrific rampage, in which Mohamed Merah (now dead after a 32-hour standoff with police) reportedly murdered three French soldiers, three young Jewish schoolchildren, and a rabbi, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has begun calling for criminal penalties for citizens who visit web sites that advocate for terror or hate. “From now on, any person who habitually consults Web sites that advocate terrorism or that call for hatred and violence will be criminally punished,” Sarkozy was reported as saying.
Apart from the obvious flaws in Sarkozy’s plan—users, can, of course, use anonymizing tools to view the material or simply access it from a variety of locations to avoid appearing as “habitual” viewers—there are numerous other reasons to be concerned about criminalizing access to information.
First, there’s no guarantee that criminalizing access to hate speech or terrorist content will end the very real problems of hate crime and terrorism. Extremist violence didn’t start with the Internet and it won’t end with it, either.
Second, who defines “hate speech”? In France, that definition includes Holocaust denial, which in the past resulted in Yahoo! discontinuing auctions of Nazi memoribilia (the collectors of which are not, by any stretch, all sympathizers). And negative comments about France’s Muslim community have also resulted in criminal penalties, most notably in the case of actress Brigitte Bardot, who has been convicted five times for “inciting racial hatred.” While Holocaust denial and comments about Muslims such as those made by Bardot may be deplorable, they should not be criminal.
Finally, while Sarkozy is not—yet—calling for websites to be blocked, it wouldn’t be a stretch; after all, France already offers mechanisms for blocking child pornography and “incitement to terrorism and racial hatred.” If Sarkozy were to decide censorship is the answer, one major risk would be overblocking: there’s nary a country in the world that censors the Internet without collateral damage (in Australia, for example, testing on a would-be censorship regime found the site of a dentist blocked, among others).
EFF has serious concerns about the implications of Sarkozy’s comments. When a democratic country such as France decides to censor or criminalize speech, it is not just the French that suffer, but the world, as authoritarian regimes are given easy justification for their own censorship. We urge French authorities to judge crime on action, not expression.
French President Sarkozy Sees Opportunity for Censorship, Seizes It | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Obama And ISP’s To Launch Largest Digital Spying Scheme In History (Must Read)
If you download potentially copyrighted software, videos or music, your Internet service provider (ISP) has been watching, and they’re coming for you.
Specifically, they’re coming for you on Thursday, July 12.
That’s the date when the nation’s largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users’ bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials.
Word of the start date has been largely kept secret since ISPs announced their plans last June. The deal was brokered by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and coordinated by the Obama Administration. The same groups have weighed in heavily on controversial Internet policies around the world, with similar facilitation by the Obama’s Administration’s State Department.
The July 12 date was revealed by the RIAA’s CEO and top lobbyist, Cary Sherman, during a publishers’ conference on Wednesday in New York, according to technology publication CNet.
The content industries calls this scheme a “graduated response” plan, which will see
-Time Warner Cable
-Cablevision
-Comcast
-Verizon
-AT&T
and others spying on users’ Internet activities and watching for potential copyright infringement. Users who are “caught” infringing on a creator’s protected work can then be interrupted with a notice that piracy is forbidden by law and carries penalties of up to $150,000 per infringement, requiring the user to click through saying they understand the consequences before bandwidth is restored, and they could still be subject to copyright infringement lawsuits.
Response: This is much worse than SOPA/PIPA and ACTA. It doesn’t necessarily censor the internet but it spys on everything you do. Your ENTIRE web history will be watched and recorded and might even assist the government. This was coordinated by Obama and his administration with the help of the MPAA and RIAA.
What is so dangerous about this is that this is not a law it is a policy adopted by several companies. That means this will not be debated in Congress and you will agree to be spied on by signing a contract with the company.
Internet censorship is becoming a reality and now the corporate elite will legally be able to spy on you. If we spread this and cause an uproar like what we did with SOPA, maybe they will back down. Either way people NEED to know about this.
(via socialuprooting)
Before SOPA they tried to kill the VCR!