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…
New Media
Crony Capitalism, Free Markets, New Media, Technology
New Tech, New Media Promote Free-Enterprise Capitalism
Free-enterprise capitalism should be the only kind of capitalism, but manipulation of markets through state power leads to the corruption of markets. New tech, unavailable even ten years ago, levels a slanted playing field: Yelp and Uber wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the smartphone, which helps consumers stay informed anytime, anywhere, tipping the balance…
Defamation, Law, New Media, Twitter
On Courtney Love’s ‘Twibel’ Lawsuit
Censorship, New Media
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…
Censorship, New Media
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…
New Media
BuzzFeed gets cautious: puts in new polices for “community” posts: an uneasy attempt at control
BuzzFeed is riding high. The viral news site, which cuts its teeth on silly cat videos, is now part of the media big leagues where it breaks serious stories, like US journalists taking money from foreign governments, alongside the likes of CNN and the New York Times. And unlike many of its old-media counterparts, BuzzFeed…
Blogging, Free Speech, Liberty, New Media, Press
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…
Blogging, Free Speech, Law, Legislation, Liberty, New Media, Press
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…
Censorship, Corruption, Free Speech, Liberty, New Media
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…
Blogging, New Media, Twitter
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,…
America, Free Speech, History, Liberty, New Media, Press
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…
Free Speech, Law, New Media
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…
Free Speech, Law, New Media
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…
Law, Liberty, New Media
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…
Crime, Federal Government, Law, Liberty, New Media
The crying need to fix the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Because Aaron Swartz should never have been a criminal defendant: Over the past two years, Aaron was forced to devote much of his energy and resources to fighting a relentless and unjust felony prosecution brought by Justice Department attorneys in Massachusetts. His alleged crimes stemmed from using MIT’s computer network to download millions of academic…
Law, Liberty, New Media
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…
New Media
Good Slogan of the Day™
Blogging, Crime, New Media, Press
UK Journalist Arrested for Outing Blogger
New Media, Technology
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…
Free Speech, Law, New Media
Update on the ruling that Facebook likes are not protected speech
Here’s an update on the case of those plaintiff-employees who were fired for liking an elected sheriff’s opponent on Facebook, where a US District Court found that likes weren’t protected under the First Amendment: Now, in the 4th US Court of Appeals, the ACLU and Facebook have filed amicus briefs in support of the five…