New Media

Snowden @ Cato Surveillance Summit

This inaugural Cato Institute Surveillance Conference will explore these questions, guided by a diverse array of experts: top journalists and privacy advocates; lawyers and technologists; intelligence officials … and those who’ve been targets of surveillance. Most notably is Edward Snowden, a former NSA Contractor and renowned whistleblower who leaked classified information from the National Security…

On Courtney Love’s ‘Twibel’ Lawsuit

New media is still new to many, including the law: In a landmark case that will set a major precedent for online speech, Courtney Love has become the first person ever in the United States to go to trial over a libelous tweet and be cleared by a jury. This is a particularly noteworthy case…

Pakistan’s YouTube ban

We have now completed a full year with the YouTube ban in place, forcing some to do without one of the most popular internet sites in the world, many others to resort to proxies of various kinds, putting up with the nuisances these ‘by-pass’ mechanisms cause. So, what has the ban, slapped on after an…

Iran removes filters from Twitter and Facebook

We’ll see: A number of web users in Iran reported late on Monday that they could access Facebook and Twitter without restrictions, raising hopes that the authorities have finally lifted the filtering on the social networks. It was not immediately clear whether Iran had in fact permanently unblocked access to the both websites or the…

Old Journalism Turns on New Journalism

As the government infiltrates more of Americans’ lives, traditional journalists are battling new media rather than a surveillance state: But this is about far more than just the NSA story: beneath the surface — and increasingly above the surface — what we are seeing is an immune-system response from the journalism establishment, or what Clay…

Government’s Only Recognized Dateline is a Bottom Line

Government protections come at a price: Also this past July, the Department of Justice issued a review of their news-media policies. While some protections were provided to “professional” reporters, it’s clear that any journalist who isn’t employed by a major news company would not enjoy the same protections. As Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Morgan Weiland…

Blogs complement journalists in Russia

Rather than simply deprecate bloggers’ work, press-restricted Russians know that they gain vital news from intrepid electronic pamphleteers: ….two Russian bloggers, Sergei Mukhamedov and Irina Gundareva, who use their blogs to expose corruption and challenge the established order in the different areas in which they live. Mukhamedov is based in Moscow and says he set…

Twitter’s Abuse-Reporting Button Gets Abused

Inevitability, it becomes an I-don’t-like-opinions-other-than-my-own button: Unfortunately, some of the negative effects of a report abuse button that people have feared seem already to have happened. Shortly after the function became available on certain smartphone apps, accounts like @transphobes – which retweets the kinds of violent threats and hate trans women and men get online,…

In Defense of Partisan Journalism

Jack Shafer makes the good – and historically sound – case: Greenwald’s collaborations with source Edward Snowden, which resulted in Page One scoops in the Guardian about the National Security Agency, caused such a rip in the time-space-journalism continuum that the question soon went from whether Greenwald’s lefty style of journalism could be trusted to…

Patent troll threatens free speech

Although patent troll Personal Audio LLC – that is, a non-producing patent holder seeking to extort money from productive, successful businesses – seeks to shakedown podcasters for money, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is fundraising to stop them: We’d like to enlist your help to fight this troll. One way to defeat a troll is to…

Copyright trolls dish it out, can’t take it

Trying to shut down bloggers critical of their vile, parasitic tactics: Copyright trolls try to make money by suing Internet users under various copyright laws. Their tactics include targeting large groups of anonymous “John Doe” defendants for downloading files on BitTorrent, seeking their identities, and exploiting the massive damages in copyright law in order to…

Roundup of government attempts to circumvent First and Fourth Amendment protections of Twitter subscribers

….As Americans, we should be free to express ourselves online without fearing that our personal information and communications will end up in government hands – unless law enforcement obtains a probable cause warrant. But in several recent court cases, the government attempted to sidestep the warrant procedure by using subpoenas – which require a far…

Sen. Wyden’s Internet-Freedom Agenda

Having led the fight, sadly unsuccessful, against renewal of a warrantless wiretapping law, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has a 2013 agenda of cyberspace freedom: Access to the Internet—meaning, net neutrality and more. “Internet service providers, wired or wireless, must be barred from practices that discriminate against specific content,” he said. The FCC’s order on…

Good Slogan of the Day™

When your government shuts down the Internet, shut down your government.” Anonymous hacks Syrian government sites after regime shuts down most of that country’s Internet. Via Anonymous Hackers Swat At Syrian Government Websites In Reprisal For Internet Blackout – Forbes.

Saudi Arabia objects to .bible as top-level domain

Of course they do. They’re also concerned about a few others: And yet as you go down the list of Saudi objections, you wonder what the pattern might be: .casino, .virgin, .vodka, .poker, .hot, .dating (yes, you did read that right), .bar, .baby (really), .africamagic (a disgraceful reference to black magic, apparently), .adult, .tatar, .shia…