11 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
It’s easy to look at access to the internet — “the freedom to connect,” as Hillary Clinton called it — as a black-and-white proposition. Either you have it, or you don’t. Either your government allows the free flow of information online (as is the case in much of the West), or it doesn’t (as in China, Iran or Burma).
But equally important is the question of the quality of access, warned Nasser Weddady, the outreach director for the American Islamic Conference. He spoke Sunday at the National Conference for Media Reform in Boston on a panel parsing the status of global internet freedom and solutions needed to expand the universal right to information.
“Quality of access is about censorship, or lack of it, but it’s also about secure access,” Nasser said. “This is a fundamental issue that is discussed insufficiently. Look at what’s just happened in the Middle East: hundreds of thousands of people converted from being citizens to being activists, and those people aren’t necessarily aware of the security consequences of being online.”
The same online tools that allowed activists to organize online may also in many cases allow repressive governments to identify and punish them.
“A radical solution is to make sure that people who are online are actually online safety,” Weddady said.
Free expression advocates looking for ways to do this would be wise to argue against censorship not just as a human rights issue, but as an economic one too, suggested Emily Parker, an official with the US State Department and a former journalist.
“If you’re [a business] operating in a country that has heavy censorship requirements, you’re going to have to spend a lot on hardware, spend a lot of senior management bandwidth just dealing with censorship,” she said. “That’ going to have costs as well.”
Brett Solomon, the executive director of Access, echoed this too.
“There’s no possibility in the modern world to be a prosperous functioning state,” he said, “without significant Internet penetration.”
30 Mar 2011 | Uncategorized
Xavier Alvarez told some pretty big lies about his military service during a 2007 municipal water-board meeting in California — that he retired as a US Marine after 25 years, during which time he was awarded the prestigious Medal of Honor. When it turned out Alvarez had never even been a Marine at all (let alone many of the other things he has claimed to be over the years – a Detroit Red Wings hockey player, an Iranian hostage crisis hero), the water board member was convicted under a 2006 federal law making it a crime to lie about receiving military honours.
Last week, an appeals court reaffirmed a lower-court ruling throwing out the conviction on logic that has been praised by free-speech advocates: The First Amendment, the court concluded, protects fibs told about military service, rendering the Stolen Valor Act unconstitutional. Other courts have disagreed about the constitutionality of the law, and the final word come could eventually from the Supreme Court.
Several judges dissented, arguing that “the right to lie is not a fundamental right under the Constitution.” But Chief Judge Alex Kozinski countered that criminalizing lies about military service could lead to making even more mundane falsehoods illegal.
“If false factual statements are unprotected,” he wrote, “then the government can prosecute not only the man who tells tall tales of winning the congressional Medal of Honor, but also the JDater who falsely claims he’s Jewish or the dentist who assures you it won’t hurt a bit. Phrases such as ‘I’m working late tonight, hunny,’ ‘I got stuck in traffic’ and ‘I didn’t inhale’ could all be made into crimes.”
(JDate, which must surely be making its debut here in sweeping legal scholarship, is a popular online dating site for Jewish American singles.)
24 Mar 2011 | Awards, Middle East and North Africa, News
The 11th annual Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards, sponsored by SAGE, were presented tonight (24 March) at a ceremony in London hosted by Jonathan Dimbleby
16 Mar 2011 | Digital Freedom, Index Index, minipost
Thanthawut Taweewarodomkul, who operated an anti-government website, has been sentenced to 13 years in prison on charges of lese majeste and breaching the Computer Crime Act. He was arrested in April 2010, during the anti-government Red Shirt protests, on the charge that his website carried an article that insulted the king. His sentencing comes at a time when another website editor, Chiranuch Premchaiporn, faces a long prison sentence for not being quick enough to take down comments critical of the king that had been left on her website by a user.
