Quotulatiousness

March 6, 2012

Australia’s “Ministry of Truth” founding document

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

A rather alarming report to the Australian government by Ray Finkelstein recommends setting up a News Media Council to exercise control over political speech in the media, both professional (TV, radio, and newspapers) and amateur (bloggers, Facebookers, Twitterers, and other private individuals posting their opinions to the internet). It appears to be directed at climate change sceptics, but the provisions of the proposed body of rules will allow a great deal of control over all political speech:

The historic change to media law would break with tradition by using government funds to replace an industry council that acts on complaints, in a move fiercely opposed by companies as a threat to the freedom of the press.

The proposals, issued yesterday by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, also seek to widen the scope of federal oversight to cover print, online, radio and TV within a single regulator for the first time.

Bloggers and other online authors would also be captured by a regime applying to any news site that gets more than 15,000 hits a year, a benchmark labelled “seriously dopey” by one site operator.

The head of the review, former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein, rejected industry warnings against setting up a new regulator under federal law with funding from government.

[. . .]

“News Media Council should have power to require a news media outlet to publish an apology, correction or retraction, or afford a person a right to reply,” the report states. It says this would be enforced through the courts.

The council would absorb the supervision of radio and TV current affairs by Canberra’s existing regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which ran the “cash for comment” investigation into talkback radio over many years.

The council would scrutinise online news sites that get more than 15,000 hits a year, clearing the way for government-funded action against amateur website operators who comment on news and current affairs. Greg Jericho, a prominent Canberra blogger on national politics, said: “The level of 15,000 hits a year, or about 40 hits a day, is seriously dopey.”

Some media executives privately dubbed the News Media Council as a potential “star chamber” because it would not have to give reasons for its decisions, which would not be subject to appeal

There’s a petition site at http://www.freespeechaustralia.com/ for those Australians who’d like to register their opposition to the new council.

Some excerpts from a Menzies House email from Timothy Andrews:

It is clear from the report, in particular paragraphs 4.31-4.42, that silencing climate realists is a major reason for these regulations: it is unashamedly explicit in this (and even uses the dirty trick of using polls from — wait for it — 1966 as evidence the media is pro-climate skeptic, and that — wait for it — only the ABC is unbiased!)

The size and scope of the proposed Super-Regulator is breathtaking. They will have the power to impose a “code of ethics”, force you to print views you don’t agree with as part of a ‘right of reply’, take you to court, and even make you take pieces down! Even personal blogs that get only 40 hits a day will be covered! To make matters worse, the SuperRegulator “would not have to give reasons for its decisions” and the decisions “would not be subject to appeal.” Even climate change websites in other countries like Watt’s Up With That will be covered by this!

[. . .]

11.69 Another aspect of jurisdiction concerns how the News Media Council will exercise its power over all internet publishers. Foreign publishers who have no connection with Australia will be beyond its reach. However, if an internet news publisher has more than a tenuous connection with Australia then carefully drawn legislation would enable the News Media Council to exercise jurisdiction over it.

Well, unless Australia is going to claim jurisdiction over the entire internet, I would imagine it will only prevent Australians from visiting foreign sites. I guess it’s a good thing that they’ve been getting friendlier with China: they can order up their national firewall from the same division of the People’s Liberation Army internet force.

James Delingpole points out that the usual suspects are involved in the process:

You can read the full 400 pages here, if you’re feeling masochistic. But Australian Climate Madness has a pretty good summary of the key issues of concern, starting with Pinkie Finkie’s proposal to create a new super-regulator called the News Media Council [missed a trick there, didn't he? surely Ministry of Truth would have been more appropriate] which will impose its idea of fairness and balance not only on newspapers but even on blogs with as few hits as 15,000 a year.

But whose idea of fairness and balance?

It’s an astonishing fact that of the 10600 submissions received by the inquiry no fewer than 9600 were boilerplate submissions from left-wing pressure groups, led by Avaaz “a global civic organization launched in January 2007 that promotes activism on issues such as climate change, human rights, poverty and corruption.”

December 28, 2011

Uncovering the historical definition of “the press”

Filed under: History, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

Elizabeth sent me a link to this Dan Smyth post on what the US Founding Fathers understood the term “the press” to mean:

If the Founders wanted to protect in particular who today we call media, reporters, etc. with “freedom of…the press,” then surely the Founders could have written, for example, “freedom of … journalists” or “freedom of … newsmongers.”

Volokh describes how, with no significant exceptions, prominent writers the Founders often cited, including William Blackstone, Jean-Louis De Lolme, and George Tucker, connected press freedom with the right of every “freeman,” “citizen,” or “individual” to “write,” “print,” or “publish” his or her thoughts. This fact implies the Founders didn’t intend the press clause to protect the existing or future collection of “newsmongers” per se but rather to recognize the right of any person (or “freeman”) to use printing presses (Until 1694, England imposed licenses on publications, which the Founders abhorred). James Madison’s following first draft of the Bill of Rights’ speech/press clauses highlights this point: “The people [emphasis added] shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.” According to Johnson’s dictionary, “people” had such definitions as “a nation,” “men, or per[s]ons in general,” and “the commonality.”

Volokh provides much more evidence for the press clause’s “the press” being the printing press, particularly his evaluations of U.S. court cases from the Founding to 2011 that demonstrate judges have consistently interpreted the press clause as protecting any individuals who use the printing press, including newspaper advertisers and authors of letters to the editor, pamphlets, and books. Volokh describes how it was only the 1970s when some lower courts began interpreting the press clause’s “the press” to be a collection of journalists and not the printing press as a technology.

November 22, 2011

QotD: Our Charter of “rights” and “freedoms”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:14

On the evening of January 12, 1981, justice minister Jean Chrétien sat in front of the special parliamentary committee on the Constitution. “I am proposing that Section 1 read as follows: The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society,” he said.

“This will ensure that any limit on a right must be not only reasonable and prescribed by law, but must also be shown to be demonstrably justified.” Translation: “This will ensure that even though we pretend the public has rights that are fundamental to any free and democratic society, we can take them away at will, so long as we can convince a judge that such measures are justified.”

The language used by Mr. Chrétien would eventually become Section 1 of the Charter, which gives government the constitutional cover to infringe the supposedly “fundamental freedoms” that follow it. In order to figure out when such infringements are in fact justified, the Supreme Court came up with the Oakes test.

Using this two-step process, laws that violate our Charter rights must have a “pressing and substantial” objective, and the means of effecting the limit must be reasonable and proportional. The infringement has to be connected to the law’s objective; it has to be as minimal as possible; and it must balance the consequences of such a limitation, with the objective that is being sought.

Jesse Kline, “Freedom shouldn’t come with caveats, but it does”, National Post, 2011-11-22

September 27, 2011

Reaping the (censorship) whirlwind

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Mick Hume points out that the recent threat of police cracking down on the press — the Guardian in particular — was illiberal and unjustified, yet quite in line with what the Guardian had encouraged be done to Murdoch’s media empire.

It was, as all liberal-minded people (and Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail) agreed, an egregious assault on press freedom for the Metropolitan Police to threaten legal action to force the Guardian to reveal its sources. So there was much celebration and not a little smug satisfaction in media circles when the Met, under pressure from within and without the legal system, dropped the action last week.

Where, the Guardian editors and their outraged high-level supporters demanded, did the Met ever get the ‘ill-judged’, ‘misconceived’ and ‘perverse in the extreme’ idea that they could order the Guardian to tell them who leaked details of Operation Weeting, the phone-hacking investigation?

It’s a good question. Where on earth could Inspector Censor and PC Prodnose have got the notion that it was their business to investigate, arrest and prosecute journalists, or interfere with the operations of a free press? Step forward the moral crusaders at of the Guardian and its allies.

For years they have been demanding more police and legal action against the Murdoch press and those allegedly involved in phone-hacking, inviting the authorities to police the media more closely. Then these illiberal liberals throw their arms up in horror when the authorities try to take advantage of their invitation to investigate the high-minded ‘good guys’ at the Guardian as well as the lowlife at the defunct News of the World. Their naivety is only exceeded by their elitism. Give the state a licence to interfere with the press, and you should not be surprised if it tries to exploit it — even if today’s spineless state officials ultimately lacked the gumption to take on the Guardian.

September 21, 2011

Not much “liberal” about Britain’s Liberal Democrats

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:45

Patrick Hayes reports from the Liberal Democrat conference:

What is the most ridiculous aspect of the Liberal Democrat 2011 conference? MP Sarah Teather’s cringeworthy attempt at a stand-up routine during her speech? Or maybe business secretary Vince Cable’s attempt to paint the current economic crisis as the equivalent of a war?

Actually, far and away the most farcical element of the four-day conference so far has been the fact that the Liberal Democrats persist in calling themselves ‘Liberals’, while at the same time announcing a range of policies that could deal a bodyblow to individual freedom. From plans to introduce parenting classes, to proposals to ban Page 3 girls and give the state powers to put investigative journalists behind bars, a rebranding as the Illiberal Democrats must surely be in the pipeline.

This trend was evident before the conference had even begun, with an unprecedented vetting of conference delegates that reportedly led to lots of members refusing to attend on the basis that the checks were ‘authoritarian, disproportionate and wrong’. Police advised that at least two individuals should be banned outright from the conference, with the Lib Dems agreeing in one of the cases.

July 8, 2011

A contrarian view on the News of the World closure

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Well, somebody had to point out the cloud to this lovely silver lining that everyone else is enjoying:

Around the world, miles of column inches and hours of television and radio debate have been devoted to the closure of the News of the World. And yet the gravity of what occurred yesterday, the unprecedented, head-turningly historic nature of it, has not been grasped anywhere. A newspaper of some 168 years’ standing, a public institution patronised by millions of people, has been wiped from history — not as a result of some jackbooted military intrusion or intolerant executive decree or coup d’état, but under pressure from so-called liberal campaigners who ultimately felt disgust for the newspaper’s ‘culture’. History should record yesterday as a dark day for press freedom.

In a civilised society we tend to associate the loss of a newspaper, the pressured shutting down of a media outlet, with some major corrosion of public or democratic values. We look upon the extinction of a paper for non-commercial reasons, whatever the paper’s reputation or sins, as a sad thing, normally the consequence of a tyrannical force stamping its boot and its authority over the upstarts of the media. Yet yesterday’s loss of a newspaper has given rise, at best, to speculative analysis of what is going on inside News International, or at worst to expressions of schadenfreude and glee that the four million dimwits who liked reading phone-hacked stories about Wayne Rooney on a Sunday morning will no longer be at liberty to do so. Many of those politically sensitive commentators who shake their heads in solemn fury upon hearing that a newspaper in a place like Belarus has closed down have barely been able to contain their excitement about the self-immolation of a tabloid here at home.

Many people, including us at spiked, had reservations about the News of the World’s mode of behaviour, especially following this week’s revelations of deplorable phone-hacking activity involving murdered teenager Milly Dowler and the families of dead British soldiers. The paper undoubtedly infuriated many people, too. Yet this was a longstanding public institution. Just because a newspaper is the private property of an individual — even if that individual is Rupert Murdoch — does not detract from the fact that it is also a public institution, with an historic reputation and an ongoing political and social engagement with a regular, in this case numerically formidable readership. That such a public institution can be dispensed with so swiftly, that a huge swathe of the British people can overnight be deprived of an institution they had a close relationship with, ought to be causing way more discomfort and concern than it is. How would we feel if other public institutions — the BBC, perhaps, or parliament — were likewise to disappear?

July 7, 2011

British tabloids

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

Brendan O’Neill views with some puzzlement the degree of outrage at the News of the World phone-hacking compared to earlier tabloid excesses:

Even some of those involved in the campaign recognise that there is a disparity between their earlier reaction to breaches of morality by tabloid newspapers and their reaction to this one. The campaigner who has successfully managed to get some big corporations to withdraw their advertising from the News of the World says she had previously learned to live with a ‘generalised, low-level irritation with the content of some of the tabloids’, yet following the Milly Dowler revelations those ‘years of irritation were transformed into rage’. Others have referred to the Dowler claims as ‘a tipping point’, arguing that we knew Murdoch’s tabloids were value-free and ethics-lite, but we didn’t know ‘they were this bad’.

In truth, there has been a distinct lack of journalistic integrity amongst some of the tabloids (and other media outlets) for many years now. For example, in 1988 the News of the World hounded the mentally ill EastEnders actor David Scarboro, not only revealing that he was in a psychiatric institution but also publishing photos of the institution and describing Scarboro as ‘mad’. Forced, under the glare of tabloid publicity, to flee the institution, Scarboro committed suicide by leaping off Beachy Head. He was just 20 years old. More famously, or rather infamously, the Sun libelled Liverpool football supporters following the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, falsely claiming that they had pickpocketed and urinated on dead and dying fans. There are many other instances over the past 30 years where the tabloids have used harassment and intimidation to get stories that have sometimes ruined people’s lives or denigrated the dead.

Yet none of those episodes gave rise to a widespread anti-tabloid campaign that galvanised prime ministers, opposition leaders, the respectable media, political activists and lawyers, as the Milly Dowler revelations have. Nor did they result in three-hour emergency debates in the House of Commons, with politicians battling it out to see who could express the most vociferous disdain for tabloid culture. The most striking thing about the anti-Murdoch campaign that has been so speedily consolidated over the past 48 hours is that it includes a smorgasbord of people who are normally at each other’s throats — from Conservative MPs to left-wing agitators, from big businesses such as William Hill and Coca-Cola (which are withdrawing their adverts from the News of the World) to religious spokespeople.

May 11, 2011

Michael Geist: the “Lawful Access” legislation does not criminalize hyperlinking

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

At least, on a reasonable person’s reading of the proposed law, it doesn’t criminalize hyperlinks to material that “incites hatred”:

The source of the latest round of concern stems from the Library of Parliament’s Parliamentary Information and Research Service legislative summary of Bill C-51. On the issue of hyperlinking, it states:

Clause 5 of the bill provides that the offences of public incitement of hatred and wilful promotion of hatred may be committed by any means of communication and include making hate material available, by creating a hyperlink that directs web surfers to a website where hate material is posted, for example.

I must admit that I think is wrong. The actual legislative change amends the definition of communicating from this:

“communicating” includes communicating by telephone, broadcasting or other audible or visible means;

to this:

“communicating” means communicating by any means and includes making available;

The revised definition is obviously designed to broaden the scope of the public incitement of hatred provision by making it technology neutral. Whereas the current provision is potentially limited to certain technologies, the new provision would cover any form of communication. It does not specifically reference hyperlinking.

Michael is much more informed about this issue than I am, so I find his confidence as a welcome balm to all the concern raised about this issue. The bill itself, of course, remains a civil liberty disaster in other ways, even with this issue addressed:

As I have argued for a long time, there are many reasons to be concerned with lawful access. The government has never provided adequate evidence on the need for it, it has never been subject to committee review, it would mandate disclosure of some personal information without court oversight, it would establish a massive ISP regulatory process (including employee background checks), it would install broad new surveillance technologies, and it would cost millions (without a sense of who actually pays). Given these problems, it is not surprising to find that every privacy commissioner in Canada has signed a joint letter expressing their concerns.

May 10, 2011

Superinjunctions

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:08

British law is already difficult enough for outsiders to suss out, but the recent use of superinjunctions to prevent even the hint that a story is being legally suppressed makes it even tougher:

The high profile are gagging, the press is losing the ability to speak, and now the Twitterati is vomiting up half-digested rumours. All the signs are that Britain is in the grip of the legal virus known as ‘injunctionitis’.

It makes for an unedifying spectacle. In between news of uprisings in the Middle East, the killing of Osama bin Laden and the marriage of Will’n’Kate, the British press has been running another set of stories about what it is forbidden from reporting. The reason for this is the increasingly problematic use of the injunction, a legal prohibition issued by a judge that prevents a particular story from being published. While these have been issued for a few years now with largely little public knowledge — especially after the use of so-called superinjunctions, which forbid people from mentioning the fact that an injunction exists — over the past year or so, the injunction in all its forms has started to make the news all by itself. Which, you’d be correct in thinking, rather defies the point.

In fact, over the past few weeks, the attempts by certain individuals to gag the press has resulted in an outbreak of calculated press indiscretion. There has been the tale of the unnamed English actor who employed the services of Helen Wood, a prostitute whose previous clients include footballer Wayne Rooney. Of course, given the injunction, Wood couldn’t do a proper bonk-and-blab about the actor, but there was enough detail there for a salacious few pages’ worth. Then there was the unnamed Premier League footballer who had allegedly been having an affair with Big Brother 7 victim/star Imogen Thomas. She has since been frequently pictured looking disconsolate in a series of fetching bikinis.

It’s bad enough when the government uses its powers to suppress public discussion of items of importance to “national security” (with the definition as loose as possible). It’s much worse when the courts are allowing private individuals and corporations to have their own version of court-imposed censorship, as there’s no possibility of it being a “national security” issue.

It has not just been the tabloids making news of the unreportable. There has also been the case of ex-Royal Bank of Scotland boss Fred Goodwin who took out a hyper-injunction, which absurdly forbids anyone from even talking about the subject of the injunction to the lawmakers themselves — namely, parliament. (Although, of course, someone did, hence we know about its existence if not any of the details.) And things became even crazier when a prominent member of the media, BBC journalist Andrew Marr, revealed that he himself had violated his own profession’s freedom by taking out an injunction in 2008 to hush up an infidelity. In fact, as The Times gleefully reported, there are over 30 high-profile injunctions currently in operation involving a whole heap of public figures, from footballers to politicians.

So, in at least one area, we’re back to there literally being two different kinds of law, differentiated by the wealth of the plaintiff.

February 9, 2011

Fifteen years ago

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

John Perry Barlow wrote the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in
bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

January 26, 2011

QotD: The elephant in the living world

Filed under: Economics, Japan, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

Here in peaceful and progressive Canada, it is so easy to feel smug towards larger countries that get their hands dirty in the world arena. Especially that one country built on the conquest and near eradication of its peaceful natives who have received hardly any compensation or even an apology. You know, the one founded on belligerent exceptionalism and manifest superiority over other cultures that was turned into a national religion that has historically led to imperialist conquest and mass slaughter. This country still has an actual federal law that requires all foreigners to carry their papers with them at all times, or risk being deported by any policeman who can, simply on a whim, question and detain them. The country so primitive and barbaric that it actively uses the death penalty, shrugging off international protests about it just as coldly as it does in important environmental issues. Its provincial masses bitterly cling to their traditional values while their media feeds them a constant diet of mindless pap and actively hushes up embarrassing facts. They rarely travel abroad, being not just obsessed with ethnic purity and deeply suspicious, even afraid, of anything foreign, but also unapologetically sexist and classist, especially towards this one minority they consider dirty, criminal and less evolved. We can only sigh in relief that sun is finally setting on the once so unstoppable economic juggernaut… of Japan.

Ilkka, “The elephant in the living world”, The Fourth Checkraise, 2011-01-20

Is Julian Assange a modern Senator Joe McCarthy?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:42

Jim Goad asks if the actions of WikiLeaks are the modern-day equivalent of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade:

Upon superficial inspection, still-living superstar hacker Julian Assange and long-dead commie-stalker Joseph McCarthy seem like natural-born enemies and political polar opposites. Technically, the Arctic and Antarctica are polar opposites, too, but are they really that different?

Comparing anyone to infamous anti-communist zealot Joseph McCarthy, as he is popularly understood in pop culture, is to accuse them of being a torch-carrying megalomaniac with a sociopathic disregard for the damage wrought by their ruthless, Spanish Inquisition-style paranoid purges, persecutions, pogroms, and perennial pickin’ on people. “McCarthyism” is considered a smear because we all must admit it was a shameful moment in American history when some upstart cheesehead Senator dared to suggest the American government was being infiltrated with communist sympathizers. Blot from your minds forever the fact that certain Soviet “cables” decrypted after McCarthy’s death seem to have at least partially vindicated him, and let us never teach in our public schools that communist governments murdered at least a hundred million human beings.

H/T to Ilkka for the link.

December 10, 2010

The Economist: “America … should learn from its mistakes in the past decade and stick to its own rules”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

A very good column in The Economist seems to cover the issues quite well:

BIG crimes deserve tough responses. In any country the theft and publication of 250,000 secret government documents would deserve punishment. If the leak costs lives, let alone the careers and trust that have already perished amid the WikiLeaks disclosures, the case for action is even stronger.

[. . .]

For the American government, prosecution, not persecution, offers the best chance of limiting the damage and deterring future thefts. The blustering calls for the assassination of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder now in custody in London awaiting extradition to Sweden on faintly mysterious charges of sexual assault, look both weak and repellent. If Mr Assange has broken American law, it is there that he should stand trial, just like Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the stolen documents. If not, it may be some consolation that the cables so far reveal a largely flattering picture of America’s diplomats: conscientious, cool-headed, well-informed, perceptive and on occasion eloquent.

[. . .]

If America sticks to those standards now it will display a strength and sanity that contrasts with the shrill absolutism and cyber-vandalism of the WikiLeaks partisans. Calling Mr Assange a terrorist, for example, is deeply counterproductive. His cyber-troops do not fly planes into buildings, throw acid at schoolgirls or murder apostates. Indeed, the few genuine similarities between WikiLeaks and the Taliban — its elusiveness and its wide base of support — argue against ill-judged attacks that merely broaden that support. After a week of clumsy American-inspired attempts to shut WikiLeaks down, it is now hosted on more than 700 servers around the world.

The big danger is that America is provoked into bending or breaking its own rules, straining alliances, eroding credibility and — because it will not be able to muzzle WikiLeaks — ultimately seeming impotent. In recent years America has promoted the internet as a menace to foreign censorship. That sounds tinny now. So did its joy of hosting next year’s World Press Freedom Day this week. Chinese and Russian glee at American discomfort are a sure sign of such missteps.

H/T to John Perry Barlow for the link.

Update: This certainly matches what I expected Julian Assange’s personality to be like:

Defectors include Daniel Domscheit-Berg, otherwise known as Daniel Schmitt, who made a high-profile exit from WikiLeaks in September, and Herbert Snorrason, an Icelandic student. Both resigned in September. Snorrason is quoted as telling Assange, in an online chat log acquired by WiReD:

And you’re not even fulfilling your role as a leader right now. A leader communicates and cultivates trust in himself. You are doing the exact opposite. You behave like some kind of emperor or slave trader.

Snorrason’s departure was fomented by this declaration from Assange:

I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier and all the rest. If you have a problem with me, piss off.

And he did.

October 23, 2010

Has Molly Norris become an un-person to the Society for Professional Journalists?

Filed under: Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:45

Matt Welch sees little positive effort and much bitchiness from one of the organizations that should have been front-and-centre to help Molly Norris:

On Sept. 15, it was announced that Molly Norris, the Seattle-based alt-weekly cartoonist who suggested, then eventually backed away from and repudiated, the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” protest against Comedy Central censoring bits of a South Park episode, had gone into hiding with the FBI’s assistance so as to hopefully avoid being murdered by Islamic assassins. It was a dark, dark day for American journalism and the freedom of expression. On Sept. 20, the Washington Examiner newspaper wrote an editorial criticizing the professional journalism/free speech community for its comparative silence on the issue.

[. . .]

I don’t expect journalism organizations to share my priorities. But I do expect them to do more than raise an eyebrow when a cartoonist goes into hiding after being threatened with death, then act all bitchy when someone calls them out on it.

September 10, 2010

Clarifying the clarification

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:10

It’s going to scroll off the front page soon, so I thought I’d better put in a link to this post about the ongoing confusion in Britain over photography and the right of the police to confiscate images or recordings in certain circumstances. I’ve updated the post twice with more information from The Register.

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