The Chicago Tribune pulled the  DonorsChoose cartoon in the Doonesbury strip on the grounds that the cartoon promoted cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s self-interest in making an appeal for a particular charity contrary to Tribune policy.

Trudeau disputed that the cartoon ws in his self interest since the appeal was for a charity that he was not connected with. -db

From a commentary in The Washington Post, February 6, 2012, by Michael Cavna.

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BY PETER SCHEER—Why is it that the First Amendment Coalition, like other organizations that defend freedom of speech, is so often aligned in support of seriously unsavory characters?

Just last week FAC filed an amicus brief in the US Supreme Court in support of a local politician and serial liar (no redundancy intended) who claimed to have served in the Marines (a lie) and to have been awarded the nation’s highest military honor for heroism in combat (another lie). He has been prosecuted under the federal “Stolen Valor Act” for the speech-crime of claiming falsely to have received the Congressional Medal of Honor. (United States v. Alvarez).

In still other recent Supreme Court appeals, FAC has filed First Amendment amicus briefs in support of:

–persons who make and sell videos of the torturing of small animals (United States v. Stevens);

–hate-filled homophobes who picket near funerals for US servicemen, carrying signs saying “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” (Snyder v. Phelps); and

–companies that sell–to children!—graphically-violent video games featuring, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, “victims who are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces” (Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association).

Of course, FAC also assists many perfectly normal folks–even journalists!–whom you wouldn’t hesitate to hire as babysitters for your kids. Nonetheless, advocacy in support of the free speech rights of all manner of extremists and outcasts is central to our mission.

FAC gets involved in these cases because freedom of speech is a principle, not a litigation tactic. If you invoke freedom of speech only to protect ideas and viewpoints with which you agree, you can’t claim  to adhere to the First Amendment as a matter of principle. Selectivity in the application of free speech rights–advocating protection of some speakers, and not others, based on their views–is fundamentally at odds with the idea of freedom of speech.

In a democracy, the need for free speech protection is greatest for ideas and speakers that are opposed by the political majority.  The more unpopular, the greater the need. Although democracy depends on First Amendment freedoms, the First Amendment also serves as a vital check on democracy’s excesses. These include the majority’s impulse to validate its own views by invalidating–through censorship–views that it fears or dislikes.

The temptation is always great to carve out exceptions to freedom of speech for expression that is so hateful and offensive as to have zero social value. After all, so-called “hate speech” is barred to varying degrees in most liberal democracies (including, for example,  France, Canada, Germany, Great Britain and Australia). The United States is the notable exception–and we must continue to be.

Hate speech needs constitutional protection not because bigoted rants, lies and snuff videos deserve an audience–they don’t–but because speech having no social value can’t be proscribed without also suppressing speech that does have social value. Even more than we dislike hate speech we fear a government that has the power to decide what speech will be heard and what speech will be silenced.

Constitutional safeguards for speech that really matters–political speech, informed criticism of official policies, artistic expression–are at their strongest when protection is also intact for speech that makes you want to cover your ears.

The time to really worry about personal freedom in America is when you can no longer hear the voices you hate.
———–

Peter Scheer, a lawyer and journalist, is executive director of the First Amendment Coalition.

After Twitter announced last week they would engage in country-specific censorship, EFF’s Eva Galperin says there are ways to fight the plan including checking to see if Twitter makes use of the Chilling Effects Project which publishes a country’s censorship orders and puts it in an archive.

Galperin also says that a user can circumvent the censorship by changing the country listed in their profile. -db

From a commentary for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, January 27, 2012, by Eva Galperin.

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To cries of protest, Twitter announced last week that it will take a country’s laws and culture into account in conducting country-specific censorship.

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who is also the second largest shareholder in News Corp., recently invested $300 million in Twitter. -db

From the Courthouse News Service, January 27, 2012, by Adam Klasfeld.

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Press freedom took a hit in the United States in 2011 according to Reporters Without Borders who ranked contries according to their performance.

The U.S. now shares 47th place in a tie with Romania and Argentina. Much of the drop may be based on the harassment, beating and arrest of journalists covering Occupy Wall Street protests. -db

From the Courthouse News Service, January 26, 2012, by Adam Klasfeld.

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A South Carolina county will have to pony up nearly $600,000 to settle a censorship lawsuit brought by a group who publishes a monthly newsletter for prison inmates.

Before the settlement, prison officials at a county detention center only allowed inmates religious texts for reading materials. -db

From the First Amendment Center, January 26, 2012, by David L. Hudson Jr.

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In an incident reminiscent of  Cohen v. California, the Supreme Court police arrested a man in a corridor wearing a jacket with the words “Occupy Everything.”

For the Citizen Media Law Project, Andrew F. Sellars analyzes the case finding little basis for the arrest. “Here, in the halls of the very building that brought us Cohen, Grace, and every other major case which has safeguarded our liberties from the intrusion of government, we have absurd government intrusion, based on hypothetical harms, against a legitimate display of pure speech,” writes Sellars. -db

From a commentary for the Citizen Media Law Project, January 23, 2012, by Andrew F. Sellars.

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BY PETER SCHEER—Successful technology firms pride themselves on their capacity to disrupt the established order. The reference is usually to a technological advance that poses an existential threat to an entrenched industry or way of doing business. Think of Apple Computer’s impact on the cellphone and music industries, Google on the sale and delivery of advertising, or Amazon on book publishing–to name just a few.

But in their recent protests against anti-piracy legislation pending in Congress–the SOPA  bill—high-tech firms demonstrated, for the first time, their awesome capacity for “creative destruction” of a political establishment that they see as hostile to their interests. Literally within hours of Wikipedia going dark and Google’s covering its logo with the black band of censorship, members of Congress were running for the exits, disavowing their previously pledged support for SOPA.

Legislators barely hesitated before reneging on literally decades of accumulated political debts to Hollywood interests, the principal backers of the anti-piracy bill. These politicians cowered before the emergence of a new political institution—more powerful even than the traditional media, the so-called “Fourth Estate,” in its heyday. Call this new institution, the corporate power brokers of Silicon Valley and other digital meccas across the country, the Fifth Estate. Pulling the plug on SOPA was the occasion for their political coming out.

Shrewdly, the Fifth Estate selected a political strategy that relied entirely on symbolic expression. The online anti-SOPA protests involved no threats of violence, no coercion, no overnight camping in public parks or blocking of street traffic during rush hour. Municipalities were not required to pay overtime to police. Tasers guns and pepper spray remained holstered. And there were no injuries.

The Fifth Estate’s tactic of symbolic protest was the essence of constitutionally protected expression.

In this context it is worth noting that the First Amendment rights on display in this debate were secured by the US Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That misunderstood case is reviled in some quarters for its affirmation of the First Amendment rights of corporations. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision, a cottage industry has emerged to advocate legislation (or, God forbid, constitutional amendments) to curb the influence of corporations in the political sphere.

Their good intentions notwithstanding, those who believe corporations have no free speech rights (or that they should have, at most, a second-rate version of the free speech protections for individuals), should realize that only the First Amendment stands in the way of governmental punishment–legislative, regulatory or otherwise–against Google and other Fifth Estate corporations for their inciting of public opinion against SOPA-type legislation.

Think of how many members of Congress, humiliated (or at least humbled) by the anti-SOPA blow-back on the internet, would love to not only punish the Fifth Estate for its political impudence, but to neuter it permanently–for example, by blocking corporate acquisitions,  unleashing antitrust and SEC investigations, or instigating IRS scrutiny.

One does not have to be a Ron Paul supporter to appreciate that, for corporations (like Google, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft), there is nothing more intimidating than being in the cross-hairs of government law enforcement agencies, egged on by pissed-off members of Congress with power over the agencies’ budget appropriations.

Corporations, no less than individuals, need First Amendment protection for their criticism of government and advocacy of policies opposed by government. They need this protection for themselves, for their employees, and for their shareholders and customers.
—————
Peter Scheer, a lawyer and journalist, is executive director of the First Amendment Coalition (FAC). The views expressed here are his alone, not necessarily those of the FAC Board of Directors.

The Citizen Media Law Project is providing access to information on the SOPA and PIPA, the online piracy bills before Congress, and also to links for summaries and commentaries on the laws. -db

From the Citizen Media Law Project,  January 18, 2012, by CMLP Staff.

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The blackout of websites, including BoingBoing, Reddit and Wikipedia, to protest the online piracy laws before Congress was successful in igniting opposition against the laws writes Ian Paul in PCWorld.

Paul says that there were 2.4 million tweets on the topic during the first 16 hours on Wednesday and that the Los Angeles Times reported that 4.5 million signed Google’s petition against the laws. -db

From a commentary in PCWorld, January 18, 2012, by Ian Paul.

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It now appears now that Congressional bills to protect copyright on the Internet will be embroiled in a long, intense struggle even as President Barack Obama declared his opposition to key elements of the bills.

The technology industry opposes the bills out of concern that they will stifle free speech and innovation. -db

From The New York Times, January 15, 2012, by Jenna Wortham and Somini Sengupta with contribution from Nick Bilton.

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The First Amendment guarantees that the government not regulate the expression of those who sing “off tune” argues Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center.

That someone might offend someone else by doing a non-traditional rendition of the national anthem should not be grounds for censorship writes Policinski. -db

From a commentary for the First Amendment Center, January 4, 2012, by Gene Policinski.

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Leading Constitutional scholars say the online piracy legislation currently before Congress throttles constitutional rights, writes Corynne McSherry for the Electronic Freedom Foundation.

She says the revised legislation only gives lip service to the First Amendment and denies due process and free speech in ways described by the scholars. -db

From a commentary for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, December 14, 2011, by Corynne McSherry.

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The Justice Department seized the assets of a popular music blog, Dajaz1, reportedly for violations of copyright, but did not give the blog a day in court to fight the action.

Writing in TechDirt, Mike Masnick says it was an outrageous act, “I suspect that nearly all of you [readers] would say that’s a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.” After over a year, the government restored the blog’s domain. -db

From a commentary in TechDirt, December 8, 2011, by Mike Masnick.

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The Obama administration is still insisting that cables WikiLeaks released last year are classified even though the cables were released by the State Department in compliance with a Freedom of Information Act request.

The classified information concerned targeted killings, detention at Guantanamo, torture and rendition. -db

From a commentary for the American Civil Liberties Union, December 7, 2011, by Nathan Freed Wessler and Anna Estevao.

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The American Civil Liberties Union  of Michigan filed a lawsuit protesting the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority’s ban on a bus ad advocating the boycott of Israel for its Palestinian policy.

The Authority rejected the attempts of an Ann Arbor man to buy an ad, “Boycott Israel, Boycott Apartheid” along side a picture of a spider facsimile with a skull for a head. -db

From the Arab American News, December 3, 2011, by Nick Meyer.

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Congressional critics of the entertainment industry-backed online piracy law have introduced a bill that would change existing trade laws to reflect that illegally downloading copyright content from foreign-owned web sites would constitute foreign imports. That would allow the International Trade Commission the power to decide if the imports violated intellectual property rights.

The critics say this approach would avoid the problems of the proposed online piracy acts which give the government and industry too much power to take down sites. -db

From Broadcasting & Cable, December 2, 2011, by John Eggerton.

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A guide published by CNET describes the effects on the public of the Stop Online Piracy Act should it pass Congress and signed into law. The law would affect Internet free speech, security and innovation. -db

From a commentary for CNET, November 21, 2011, by Declan McCullagh.

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Totalitarian regimes around the world are successfully using the Chinese model of censorship against their citizens, reports David Rohde in a commentary for Reuters.

Rohde says the Stop Online Piracy Act would seriously erode the ability of the United States to fight the new tide of international Internet censorship. -db

From a commentary for Reuters, November 18, 2011, by David Rohde.

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The Stop Online Piracy Act would bring China-style Internet censorship to the United States, argues Rebecca MacKinnon in an op-ed in The New York Times.

MacKinnon said the bill before Congress, designed to protect intellectual property, would “inflict collateral damage on democratic discourse and dissent both at home and around the world.” -db

From an op-ed in The New York Times, November 15, 2011, by Rebecca MacKinnon.

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If passed in its present form, the Stop Online Piracy Act would subject articles to censorship in blocking articles from appearing on sites accused of piracy, writes Jessica Ray for 10,000 Words.

Even if one site contained content deemed illegal, the entire site could be blocked. Internet innovation and creativity would also take a hit. -db

From a commentary in 10,000 Words, November 16, 2011, by Jessica Roy.

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Philadelphia is facing a lawsuit over its refusal to run a billboard ad by the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) advocating prison reform .

In bringing the suit, the NAACP and the ACLU said the city has not been even handed in administrating its ad policy, accepting some political ads but refusing others. That would violate the First Amendment by discriminating according to viewpoint. -db

From a commentary for the Citizens Media Law Project, November 14, 2011, by Marc J. Randazza.

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A First Amendment scholar criticizes a federal court ruling the wearing of American flag T-shirts were disruptive and exempt from First Amendment protections.

David L. Hudson Jr. argues that the court was wrong in applying the “heckler’s veto” concept to the case that if the listeners to speech create a disturbance and silence a speaker, it constitutes disruption and allows the government to regulate the speech. -db

From a commentary for First Amendment Center, November 14, 2011, by David L. Hudson Jr.

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A Morgan Hill high school acted legally when it ordered students to conceal T-shirts bearing American flags on Cinco de Mayo, a federal judge ruled.

Because Mexican American and Anglo students had previously wrangled about clothing on Cinco de Mayo, Live Oak High School officials reasonably anticipated campus disruption and safety problems, U.S. District Judge James Ware of San Francisco said.

A lawyer for the students wearing the U.S. flag said he would appeal, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

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BY EDWARD WASSERMAN–A comment posted to London’s Guardian newspaper said it best: “Censorship, like everything else in the West, has been privatized.”  The writer, somebody called “edensasp,” was referring to news that Wikileaks—the online whistleblower that has been embarrassing governments and corporations worldwide by disclosing their secrets–was suspending operations.

Why? Had its leader, the mercurial Julian Assange, been indicted? Had the black choppers swooped in and taken him out? No, nothing that cinematic. It was the bankers. A handful of big money handlers decided they wouldn’t process donations to Wikileaks, it had exhausted its reserves, and it was going broke.

The fund cutoff started in December 2010. That’s when Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union, Amazon and Bank of America discovered their patriotic duty.

At the time, five of the world’s top news organizations—The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais, Le Monde and Der Spiegel—had begun publishing articles based on a remarkable trove of U.S. State Department cables shared with them by Wikileaks. The organizations had spent months sifting from among the documents, eliminating those they thought might cause needless harm. They then launched a barrage of articles derived from candid reports from U.S. diplomats that exposed official lies, both our country’s and dozens of others’.

But official lies have their supporters too, and there was a huge fuss. Because the secret cables were American—even if the people whom the secrecy protected often were not—U.S. politicians led the charge against Wikileaks. Assange was denounced as “a high-tech terrorist,” law-makers demanded his head, and Attorney General Eric Holder launched a criminal investigation of his operation.

And so the money-handlers were stirred to action. Within days Wikileaks was under a financial stranglehold, and it now says its revenues dropped from $140,000 a month to less than a tenth that.

Why did the companies do it? PayPal, the flagship paymaster of the digital world, said it forbids payments to anything that “encourages” illegal activity, and MasterCard said its “rules prohibit customers from directly or indirectly engaging in or facilitating any action that is illegal.”

Really? “Indirectly facilitating” an illegal act? Think about that. It’s a formulation a second-year law student could tear apart as not just unenforceable, but unintelligible. Doesn’t selling gasoline “indirectly facilitate” speeding? How much of what we consider normal commerce would escape that catchall?  Shouldn’t Bank of America require you to apply for your next ATM withdrawal, just in case?

Besides, what was the illegal act that was facilitated? Nobody has suggested the publications that used the material acted illegally.

And don’t we normally punish after conviction, not before? (Nearly a year later, Wikileaks hasn’t even been charged.)

The explanation was hogwash, of course. It seems obvious the money-handlers’ actions were political, not legal. The financial industry isn’t particularly popular right now, and in the wake of the worst banking meltdown in generations Obama administration officials had made a special point of denouncing the consumer finance sector for its furtive charges and extortionate rates. With regulation looming, tossing a bone to the Justice Department had to make sense.

And they’ve gotten away with it, largely because of the news media’s own deep ambivalence about Wikileaks.  McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef recently reported that support for WikiLeaks was generally weak among U.S. journalists. A committee of the Overseas Press Club of America, she noted, had decided Assange was “not one of us,” the National Press Club wouldn’t comment on whether he should be charged criminally, and such renowned media champions as Floyd Abrams, who helped represent the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, and Lucy Dalglish, head of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, question whether Wikileaks deserves the protections journalists warrant.

Assange has helped arm his critics by releasing in September, without editorial review, the unpublished remnants of the 250,000-document State Department trove that the five news organizations had so carefully picked through last December.

Still, the logic under which critics deny Wikileaks standing as a journalism organization is, to me, baffling. At considerable risk, it acquires information of vast public significance and makes it publicly available. Its disclosures have made headlines worldwide, and have been credited with helping nourish pro-democracy forces with solid information about their own corrupt governments. That sounds like journalism.

Some say Wikileaks has been secretive and irresponsible. If so, it has plenty of company. Any number of perfectly legitimate news organizations resist scrutiny and can be irresponsible in the stories they mangle, overplay or ignore.

That’s regrettable, but the First Amendment doesn’t guarantee a responsible media. It guarantees a media free of censorship. And the principle is the same, regardless of whether the censors are government apparatchiks or private-sector toadies who decided, out of self-interest, to pin a deputy’s badge on their lapels.

Copyright Edward Wasserman 2011
———–
Edward Wasserman is the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.

A policy under consideration by the Seattle School Board would give principals the authority for prior review of high school newspapers and allow a stop to publication if they detected libel, obscenity and violations of the school’s educational mission.

Critics argue that the principal would gain censorship powers and take responsibility for content out of students’ hands with the result that legal liability would rest solely on the administration. -db

From the Seattle Times, November 7, 2011, by Brian M. Rosenthal.

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With the Chinese government employing more than 50,000 censors to monitor the Internet for politically deviant opinion, bloggers are using humor and satire to get their message across before the censors close in.

There is always a strong element of fear and uncertainty for the bloggers as they never know where the line is between the acceptable satire and a criminal offense. -db

From a feature in The New York Times Magazine, October 26, 2011, by Brook Larmer.

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The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Philadelphia for rejecting an ACLU ad for changes in the criminal justice and education systems. The city says it does not accept any political or advocacy ads.

The ACLU pointed out a number of instances in which the political ads ran in the airport including one advocating for solutions to climate change. -db

From the American Civil Liberties Union, October 19, 2011, by Sarah Roberts.

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A Rice University professor claims that a Texas environmental agency censored his report on Galveston Bay by deleting  certain references to climate change, sea-level rise and man’s role in the changes.

An agency spokesperson said it would be irresponsible to publish whatever came to it. The professor said the deletions were based on politics rather than science. -db

From the Houston Chronicle, October 10, 2011, by Harvey Rice.

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The Catawba Valley Community College dropped charges against a student, allowing him back on campus after they suspended him for two semesters for criticizing the college’s aggressive marketing of a debit card company to its students.

But the college has yet to change its policy regarding free speech online and is still requiring the student to notify the college when using computers on campus. -db

From a commentary for Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), October 14, 2011, by Adam Kissel.

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The Electronic Freedom Foundation criticizes a plan concocted by the Conservative government and the Christian group, Mothers’ Union to provide filters to customers who want to block sites offering pornography, gambling, information about self-harm, etc.

Eva Galerin and Jillian C. York say that the plan’s flaws include the vagueness of the blocked categories, the unknown origins of the list of sites and the leeway for overblocking. -db

From a commentary for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, October 13, 2011, by Eva Galperin and Jillian C. York.

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The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of a California man held criminally liable for lying about his military exploits. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the man’s lies were permissible under the First Amendment.

A dissenting judge wrote that the Supreme Court had already established that false statements of fact are not protected speech. -db

From the Courthouse News Service, October 17, 2011, by Barbara Leonard.

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An anti-gay proselytizer is challenging Canada’s hate laws in a landmark case before the Supreme Court pitting the right to free speech against the right be free of hateful campaigns.

Proponents of the law claim the law has been narrowed in response to criticism, but opponents contend that the law can quell legitimate expression. -db

From The Globe and Mail, October 12, 2011, by Kirk Makin.

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The public should be consistent in supporting the free speech rights of entertainers, writes Ken Paulson for the First Amendment Center. “There’s a tendency to defend the free speech of those whose views we share, while condemning the abrasive comments of those on the other side. Too often we let politics trump principles,” says Paulson.

Paulson was referring to Hank Williams Jr.’s recent comparison of President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler and to Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks saying she was embarrassed that President George W. Bush was from  her home state of Texas. -db

From a commentary for the First Amendment Center, October 4, 2011, by Ken Paulson.

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The Sun of Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California has been awarded the 2011 College Press Freedom Award from the Student Press Law Center and the Associated Collegiate Press. The editors and staff continued to publish The Sun as the administration ordered it shut down.

“The administrators of Southwestern College threw everything they had at these journalists, even threatening them with a trumped-up criminal investigation, and through it all, the journalists kept on doing exactly what journalists are supposed to do: Pursue the story, wherever it led. Their reporting exposed gross mismanagement at the college, including the deliberate wasteful spending of millions of dollars to conceal how badly the school had missed its budget estimates,” said Frank LoMonte of the SPLC. -db

From a press release from the Student Press Law Center, September 29, 2011

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Web filtering in which key words can trigger a cutoff of sites hurts education by uncritically banning students from vital Internet sources, writes Ken Paulson in a commentary for the First Amendment Center.

Paulson says that names of terrorist groups or words such as breasts or buttocks can trigger censorship and the First Amendment Center site has been blocked by some schools.  Paulson finds this lamentable, “There’s nothing sexy about the First Amendment Center’s website. Our goal is to publish a daily report that can be used in any classroom in America. We strive to be nonpartisan, apolitical and as tasteful as possible. We know that if parents and educators know that we’re a safe and trusted destination, their children and students are more likely to turn to us for research and term papers on the First Amendment.” -db

From a commentary for the First Amendment Center, October 4, 2011,by Ken Paulson.

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A Sam Houston State University professor removed an insult to President Barack Obama posted by a student on the student free speech wall. Incensed by the censorship, students reported the vandalism to the campus police.

Rather than come to the aid of the student in support of the First Amendment, the police threatened students with a charge of disturbing the peace and required them to remove all profanity or take the wall down. -db

From a commentary for  FIRE, September 23, 2011, by Adam Kissel.

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A jury in Irvine, California found 10 Muslim students guilty of disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador at UC Irvine. They were sentenced to three years probation and 56 hours of community service.

One legal scholar said the students’ speech directed toward depriving another of First Amendment rights was not protected but felt the criminal misdemeanor charges were excessive after the university had disciplined the students. -db

From the Los Angeles Times, September 23, 2011, by Nicole Santa Cruz, Lauren Williams and Mike Anton.

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The FBI arrested Jubair Ahmad for “glorifying violent jihad” when he uploaded a video to YouTube that included images of armored trucks hit by IEDs, footage of terrorist leaders, pictures showing Abu Ghraib and U.S soldiers with an attack dog.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that speech is not protected that  is “directed to, coordinated with, or controlled by foreign terrorist group.” But there is no evidence that Jubair  Ahmad  colluded with any terrorist group, and writes Justin Silverman for the Citizens Media Law Project, even though some observers think Jubair Ahmads postings did not constitute advocating violence, the Court ruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio, “The constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force….” -db

From a commentary in the Citizens Media Law Project, September 19, 2011 by Justin Silverman.

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Current laws and codes of conduct aren’t enough to prevent United States companies from helping repressive regimes censor the Internet and control information that have abetted human right abuses, according to a report from a Canadian security firm.

The Global Online Freedom Act, a law under consideration, would prohibit U.S. companies from helping governments restrict the Internet. -db

From the National Journal, September 20, 2011, by Josh Smith.

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