United States: Free expression constrained by cultural and political factors

22 Aug 13 | Digital Freedom, Index Reports, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture, United States

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US media freedom fraying at the edges

Read our May 2017 review of threats to press freedom in the United States.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_empty_space height=”20px”][vc_column_text]

(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)

(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)

Freedom of expression is generally protected in the US, but political, legal, economic and cultural factors continue to constrain this fundamental right. The First Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits laws that abridge free speech, academic freedoms and the right to assemble are generally protected, and violence against journalists is rare.

National security is used excessively to justify free speech and privacy restrictions.

Revelations over the National Security Agency’s “Prism” programme, which it is claimed gives the US government powers of mass surveillance over web communications, have caused huge concern over the authorities’ attitudes to free speech and privacy.

Government transparency and accountability are also key concerns. The 1966 Freedom of Information Act and various state laws are meant to shine light on classified government documents, but many agencies do not comply with these laws or do so significantly later than mandated and with heavily redacted information. The aggressive prosecution and sentencing of WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning and the pursuit of Edward Snowden highlights the Obama administration’s attitude to whistleblowers.

Beyond security and secrecy, some of the greatest challenges to freedom of expression are linked to rapid shifts in technology and online behaviour so that is for digital section. Money is also key. The Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court case in 2010 extended first amendment rights to corporations and unions, threatening the free speech rights of individuals by diminishing the power of their voices to compete with billion-dollar industries. Although US libel laws generally protect the public interest — public figures must prove actual malice rather than mere negligence to win a suit — “Strategic lawsuits against public participation” (SLAPPs) sometimes silence criticism, as libel actions in the US remain expensive.

Despite these concerns, the state of free expression in the US is generally healthy.

Media Freedom

The US enjoys a free and diverse press, although aggressive political partisanship, the consolidation of media ownership and other financial troubles have threatened this freedom as traditional institutions struggle to stay afloat and adapt to an increasingly digital media landscape. Local and national newsrooms have shrunk, and reporters are overstretched , diminishing the quality of American journalism.

Laws against obscenity, indecency and profanity set out and enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restrict what content can appear on free-to-air broadcasting.

Most states have shield laws that protect journalists from revealing their sources, and the Obama administration is proposing a federal shield law, But the government’s prosecution of whistleblowers has raised real concern. The accessing of Associated Press reporters’ phone records in pursuit of leaks has also been a source of alarm.

The Obama administration has been criticised for its aggressive pursuit of whistleblowers and journalists and demands for source information in cases of government secrecy. While the president did sign a Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act into law in late 2012, the behaviour of the authorities when confronted with leaks has been heavy handed.

Meanwhile, physical attacks by police against journalists and bloggers covering the Occupy movements hurt the US’ ranking in several press freedom indices in 2012.

Digital Freedom

About 75 percent of the population is online, but affordable high-speed broadband remains elusive. Copyright legislation and surveillance currently represent some of the greatest threats to digital freedom of expression.

The latest Google Transparency report shows that the US requests more user data than any other country and issues the second most court orders for content removal behind Brazil. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalises the circumvention of copyright controls online without regard for how users intend to use the tools. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) were shelved in 2012 following highly publicised website blackout campaigns by internet activists and web companies, but intellectual property rights remain a concern with secret negotiations around the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement on-going. Efforts are also underway to reform the 1986 Electronic Communications and Privacy Act (ECPA), which allows the government to access private emails older than 180 days without warrant.

PATRIOT Act provisions and the fact that US telecommunications companies comply with millions of government requests for user data have given Americans cause to self censor their electronic communications. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA)[1], which passed through the House of Representatives twice but stalled in the Senate, would have compounded the threat of self censorship by granting companies greater immunity to share private user data with secretive government agencies. In June, it was revealed that the government has been secretly collecting the call records of Verizon customers under the PATRIOT Act and that the National Security Agency can access the servers of Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft and others to monitor users’ video calls, search histories, live chats, and emails. Concern is also growing over how domestic drones used for surveillance will affect individuals’ privacy] and how American web companies are in a sense privatising censorship through terms of service that restrict freedom of expression.

Artistic Freedom

The First Amendment protects artistic freedom in the US, but fear of offence still motivates censorship and self-censorship. Nudity, pornography, obscenity and religious sensitivity are among the most common reasons visual art is censored from public space in the US. Censorship typically occurs at the gallery level where art is removed in response to controversy rather than through legal mandate. Donor funding can also dictate the type and content of art displayed. A US university removed a controversial climate change sculpture without warning in May 2012 when it upset a major donor from the energy industry. High sensitivity to political correctness and concerns about marketability sometimes lead artists to self-censor what they produce, and donor funding often dictates the type and content of art that is displayed. A growing trend of online crowdsourced funding for the arts is helping to overcome this barrier for specific projects.

Controversial books are still removed from or kept out of local public libraries across the country — in March 2013, for example, the Chicago public schools authority demanded the graphic novel Persepolis be removed from its classrooms — and music is regularly stripped of violent references  and profanity at stores and on radio due to private decisions or Federal Communications Commission mandates.

Increasingly strict copyright laws keep much art out of the public domain despite relatively liberal fair use provisions. Due to copyright extensions, which now extend to 70 years after the creator’s death, many creative works originally due to enter the public domain this year will not do so until 2052.

This article was originally published on 22 Aug, 2013 at indexoncensorship.org[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Join the Index mailing list and get an exclusive gift” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:28|text_align:left” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_separator color=”black”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]

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Letter from America: Intimidation of climate scientists threatens a chilling effect

01 Jul 11 | Uncategorized

As the rest of the world’s governing bodies and opinion polls have gradually come around to a consensus on climate change, the United States stands out as a particularly odd outlier: Supporters and deniers here have in fact grown further apart, with the issue more politically divisive today than it was just five years ago. Public concern about the climate has actually declined. Politicians who once acknowledged global warming have changed their minds. And in a particularly shocking vote earlier this spring, not one of the 31 Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee would vote for an amendment simply acknowledging that climate change exists (which is the position of the government’s own scientific bodies).

In the midst of all this, an even stranger thing has happened — scientists themselves have become controversial figures, now routinely harassed, investigated and attacked for their research.

In a particularly high-profile case, Virginia’s elected attorney general has spent most of the past year trying to subpoena the state’s prestigious public university for the academic records of a climate scientist, Michael Mann, whom he accuses of defrauding the public for grant money to support his research. Mann has not worked at the University of Virginia since 2005.

The latest tactic, inspired by the Climategate email scandal, has been for non-governmental activist groups to file public records requests about individual researchers in the hunt for personal information to discredit them. One such group, the American Tradition Institute, last week sued NASA to obtain records on any ethics or disclosure violations by James Hansen, a top climatologist who blew the whistle on censorship of scientists during the Bush Administration.

The trend is distressing for each of the researchers who’ve become unwitting targets. But, more broadly, academic and scientific organisations increasingly worry that such tactics will have a much wider impact — intimidating the entire scientific community and deterring work on a crucial area of public inquiry.

Exasperated with this trend, one of the country’s most respected scientific organisations (and the world’s largest general scientific body), this week released a formal statement decrying all the harassment. The board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science wrote:

“We are deeply concerned by the extent and nature of personal attacks on climate scientists. Reports of harassment, death threats, and legal challenges have created a hostile environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas and makes it difficult for factual information and scientific analyses to reach policymakers and the public. This both impedes the progress of science and interferes with the application of science to the solution of global problems. AAAS vigorously opposes attacks on researchers that question their personal and professional integrity or threaten their safety based on displeasure with their scientific conclusions.”

The scientific community has spent centuries perfecting the process of policing itself — peer review is designed to ferret out research fraud, and the revision and correction of earlier findings is a central element of the very idea of scientific progress.

All of this has been lost on aggressive climate deniers, who have been remarkably successful at creating the public impression of scientists as agenda-wielding partisans in a political war. For their part, cloistered researchers not used to communicating with the public have seemed baffled by attacks that can’t be repelled on data and evidence alone.

As the AAAS points out, the stakes go beyond even the implications for chilled speech. Because all of society will lose out when scientists are intimidated into staying away from climate research that’s needed to inform what we should do about the problem.

As the board put it:

“We are concerned that establishing a practice of aggressive inquiry into the professional histories of scientists whose findings may bear on policy in ways that some find unpalatable could well have a chilling effect on the willingness of scientists to conduct research that intersects with policy-relevant scientific questions.”

 

Letter from America: US companies outed for role in net censorship

01 Apr 11 | Uncategorized

Hillary Clinton offered a glowing narrative of the US role in Middle Eastern Internet freedom in a speech back in February that championed American values while chastising regimes that trample free expression.

“Our commitment to Internet freedom is a commitment to the rights of people, and we are matching that with our actions,” she declared. “Monitoring and responding to threats to Internet freedom has become part of the daily work of our diplomats and development experts. They are working to advance Internet freedom on the ground at our embassies and missions around the world. The United States continues to help people in oppressive internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers, and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online.”

All of this action certainly sounded good (and the image of America as benevolent global Internet expression cop surely flattered many Americans listening). But Clinton left out of her speech one messier topic – the role of US companies in facilitating those filters, sometimes even in supporting the Internet blockades State Department money then pays to help locals circumnavigate.

That element of the story out of the Middle East over the last few months has been largely obscured from public debate in the US over global Internet freedom. Some Internet advocates lamented that Clinton’s speech didn’t tackle the topic, or propose serious measures the US could take to halt the export of homegrown technology used (often with the knowledge of US companies) in censorship abroad.

Lately, though, this uncomfortable complication has been getting real attention.

“Ethical Quandary for Social Sites,” blared a New York Times headline on Monday. The story recounted the case of Flickr, the photo-sharing site (owned by Yahoo), which removed photos uploaded by an Egyptian blogger of images swiped by activists from the State Security Police headquarters. Flickr insisted the photos violated its policy that users may post only their own, original work. But activists jeered what appeared to be selective application of a policy some of Flickr’s own employees don’t follow themselves.

Facebook, meanwhile, was caught this week in a similar awkward spot over a fan page devoted to promoting a Third Palestinian Intifada. Israeli officials demanded Facebook remove the page, which had already amassed more than 200,000 friends. Facebook originally refused, arguing that content that is upsetting to some “alone is not a reason to remove the discussion.” But Wednesday, the social networking site reversed course and yanked the page (now with more than 350,000 followers), on the grounds that its peaceful discourse had dissolved into out-right calls for violence that violated Facebook policy.

That flip-flop has compounded claims that Facebook hinders protesters around the world just as much as it helps them, particularly given the company policy that porhibits activists from signing up for accounts without exposing their true identities.

In the media, stories questioning the role of less visible US technology companies have also proliferated.

“US Products Help Block Mideast Web,” warned the Wall Street Journal this week.

“Censorship: Made in the USA,” read the Huffington Post headline above a story written by Free Press campaign director Tim Karr.

Both pieces relied on revelations unearthed in a new report from the OpenNet Initiative by Jillian C York (a contributor to the new Index magazine) and Helmi Noman. The two found that American and Canadian-made software had been used to block socially and politically objectionable online content for more than 20 million web users in nine North African and Middle Eastern countries: Bahrain, the AUE, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Sudan and Tunisia.

“This is not simply a case of a general purpose, neutral tool being used for an end not contemplated by its maker,” reads the forward to the report. “The filtering products of today engage in regular communications with their makers, updating lists of millions of websites to block across dozens of content categories, including political opposition and human rights. When McAfee Smartfilter or Websense do their utmost to maintain lists of non-profit and advocacy groups their efforts directly affect what citizens in some authoritarian regimes can and cannot access online.”

The discovery is about as embarrassing as those images of Made-in-the-USA tear gas canisters that turned up in Tahrir Square, and US politicians have begun to take notice, too. Earlier this month, Dick Durbin, chairman of the Senate human rights subcommittee, wrote an op-ed for the popular Washington-based political site Politico under the banner “Tyrants can use Facebook, too.”

He finally said what Hillary Clinton did not.

“US technology companies allow millions around the world to express themselves more fully and freely,” the senator wrote. “But the industry has a moral obligation to ensure that its products and services do not help repressive governments. If U.S. companies are unwilling to take reasonable steps to protect human rights, Congress must step in.”

 

Shocking America

16 Dec 10 | News and features

As funders threaten to punish the US gallery that censorsed the first major US exhibition of gay art, Salil Tripathi looks at the fallout of America’s culture wars

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