{"id":39551,"date":"2012-09-06T14:15:12","date_gmt":"2012-09-06T13:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/?p=39551"},"modified":"2017-01-09T16:26:28","modified_gmt":"2017-01-09T16:26:28","slug":"obama-free-expression-megaupload-wikileaks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/?p=39551","title":{"rendered":"Obama’s free speech record"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Barack Obama\u2019s administration cast free speech aside in its pursuit of file sharers and whistleblowers, says Mark Rumold<\/strong><\/p>\n

Four years ago, President Obama\u2019s campaign platform<\/a> didn\u2019t include sweeping promises about promoting free speech. He wasn\u2019t elected because he swore to vigorously defend the First Amendment<\/a>, and to protect speakers no matter the content of their speech.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the President did campaign on a platform of government transparency. As a transparency advocate, I can confidently say that, by almost any measure, the President failed to live up to those lofty guarantees.<\/p>\n

But what about free expression<\/a>\u00a0—\u00a0a value so roundly cherished in the United States that a promise to support it would almost seem unnecessary? Without a clear benchmark or unambiguous campaign commitment on the issue, it\u2019s not so simple to assess his record. But sadly, like his commitment to transparency, the President\u2019s commitment to free speech was often collateral damage in his pursuit of other policy objectives.<\/p>\n

This was most evident in the administration\u2019s actions in two areas: intellectual property and national security<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The administration\u2019s often misguided attempts at combating online copyright infringement frequently resulted in harm to protected expression. For example, in 2010, working in close cooperation with industry trade groups like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, the administration began seizing the domains of websites that government officials deemed to contain infringing material<\/a>. Except that wasn\u2019t always the case: in at least two instances, the government seized — and refused to return — domain names without any apparent connection to copyright-infringing material. The seizures resulted in complete censorship of the sites for over a year.<\/p>\n

The same is true of the administration\u2019s heavy-handed treatment of Megaupload<\/a>, an online file-hosting service. In January 2012, the Department of Justice seized Megaupload\u2019s domains and servers, froze its assets, and attempted to have the site\u2019s founder, Kim Dotcom, extradited to the United States to face criminal charges. While the site undoubtedly hosted some infringing content, there was also a vast amount of non-infringing content stored on the site\u2019s servers — family photos and videos, personal documents, and other protected expression. All this unquestionably protected speech was swept up in the name of combating online copyright infringement.<\/p>\n

While the administration\u2019s pursuit of intellectual property enforcement caused collateral damage to protected expression, the administration\u2019s biggest tests — and, subsequently, biggest failures — in its commitment to free speech occurred in the national security arena.<\/p>\n

National security concerns caused the Administration to investigate and charge government whistleblowers under the Espionage Act<\/a> and led to the questionable prosecution of alleged terrorists for \u201ccrimes\u201d as innocuous as translating YouTube videos and writing vulgar and hateful poetry.<\/p>\n

Yet nowhere were the administration\u2019s First Amendment failings more evident than in its handling of Wikileaks<\/a>. After Wikileaks published thousands of confidential (and, in some cases, classified) State Department diplomatic cables, the administration\u00a0embarked on an unprecedented\u00a0intimidation campaign<\/a>. In particular, the Department of Justice\u2019s long-running grand jury investigation of Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange<\/a>, stands as a press-chilling stain on the administration\u2019s First Amendment record. The message the administration sent through its investigation is clear: if you publish classified information — and, in particular, classified information that portrays the government in an unflattering light — we may prosecute you. Classified information is published almost daily in the country\u2019s most reputable newspapers and magazines. Punishing the publication of truthful information about the government, absent a clear and present danger posed by the information\u2019s disclosure, is intolerable under the First Amendment. Yet this was precisely the administration\u2019s extraordinary approach. Indeed, the most enduring legacy of the Obama administration\u2019s commitment to free speech may be the long shadow in cast upon national security reporting.<\/p>\n

There were bright spots, however. The administration\u00a0made promoting free expression abroad a focal point of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton\u2019s international agenda. For example, in a thinly veiled jab at China<\/a>, Secretary Clinton stated, \u201cCountries that want to be open for business but closed to free expression will find that this approach comes at cost[.]\u201d Secretary Clinton similarly called on regimes in the Middle East to ease restrictions on free expression.<\/p>\n

But these are the easy cases — it\u2019s not politically difficult to champion the rights of those living beneath repressive regimes. The true test of an administration\u2019s commitment to free expression can only come in relation to the closer cases — those that strike near home or that implicate other policy goals. Seen through this lens, over the past four years, the Obama administration often abdicated its responsibility to protect free expression in pursuit of more politically expedient goals.<\/p>\n

Mark Rumold is the Open Government Legal Fellow at Electronic Frontier Foundation<\/a> (EFF)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Barack Obama gets ready to rally his troops at the Democratic National Convention, Mark Rumold<\/strong> says his administration has cast free speech aside in its pursuit of file sharers and whistleblowers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[744,581],"tags":[356,103,4923,4924,4925,571,227,273],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39551"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39551"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79116,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39551\/revisions\/79116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}