In what was once considered "the land of the free and home of the brave," America's federal government has grown hostile to free speech. And they're getting more aggressive by the day too.
Many of the attacks in the War on Free Speech have been reported on this blog, here's a short list:
- Blog Censorship is Coming, Blog Censorship is Coming …
- Free Speech vs. Political Control
- The FTC Goes After Bloggers
New Frontiers in the War on Free Speech
They'll do whatever it takes to snuff out dissent, so you can kiss the 4th amendment goodbye too ...
Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me?' ~Joseph Henry Jackson
Justice Dept. Asked For News Site's Visitor Lists
In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.
The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.
The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded "all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us" on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to "include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information," including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers' Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.
Still unclear is what criminal investigation U.S. Attorney Morrison was pursuing. Last Friday, a spokeswoman initially promised a response, but Morrison sent e-mail on Monday evening saying: "We have no comment." The Justice Department in Washington, D.C. also declined to respond.
Making this investigation more mysterious is that Indymedia.us is an aggregation site, meaning articles that appear on it were published somewhere else first, and there's no hint about what sparked the criminal probe. Clair, the system administrator, says that no IP (Internet Protocol) addresses are recorded for Indymedia.us, and non-IP address logs are kept for a few weeks and then discarded.
EFF's Bankston wrote a second letter to the government saying that, if it needed to muzzle Indymedia, it should apply for a gag order under the section of federal law that clearly permits such an order to be issued. Bankston's plan: To challenge that law on First Amendment grounds.
But the Justice Department never replied. "This is the first time we've seen them try to get the IP address of everyone who visited a particular site," Bankston said. "That it was a news organization was an additional troubling fact that implicates First Amendment rights."
This is not, however, the first time that the Feds have focused on Indymedia -- a Web site whose authors sometimes blur the line between journalism, advocacy, and on-the-streets activism.
Indymedia and their opinions certainly aren't my cup of tea, but I'll defend their right to speak freely. After all, free speech is like virginity. You either have it or you don't.
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. ~Noam Chomsky
U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets
America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon.
“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.
In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.
Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters.
“Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source.’”
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. ~John Milton
Spy Fears: Twitter Terrorists, Cell Phone Jihadists
Could Twitter become terrorists’ newest killer app? A draft Army intelligence report, making its way through spy circles, thinks the miniature messaging software could be used as an effective tool for coordinating militant attacks.
For years, American analysts have been concerned that militants would take advantage of commercial hardware and software to help plan and carry out their strikes. Everything from online games to remote-controlled toys to social network sites to garage door openers has been fingered as possible tools for mayhem.
This recent presentation — put together on the Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion and found on the Federation of the American Scientists website — focuses on some of the newer applications for mobile phones: digital maps, GPS locators, photo swappers, and Twitter mash-ups of it all.
Then the presentation launches into an even-more theoretical discussion of how militants might pair some of these mobile applications with Twitter, to magnify their impact. After all, "Twitter was recently used as a countersurveillance, command and control, and movement tool by activists at the Republican National Convention," the report notes. "The activists would Tweet each other and their Twitter pages to add information on what was happening with Law Enforcement near real time."
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. ~John Morley
Unfortunately, "we the people" have, in our collective conscience, grown too trusting of our politicians and governments. In taking a more skeptical approach however, you can see clearly the many nefarious intentions behind government actions and legislation.
Neither politicians and government bureaucracies don't give a damn about you, or your equality of opportunity.. They seek only power, using the rhetoric of "high moral duty," to justify the actions of tyrants. Choose groups and picking sides ... They pit one group against the other ... while setting themselves up as the "savior," of the group they have "chosen."
Free speech makes it harder for the Establishemt to remain in control (as witnessed by Hoffman-mania). So they're cracking down on blogs, monitoring social networks ... even passing "hate crime" legislation!
People dare not speak out against the government or its preferred groups anymore.
And once no one can say anything anymore, things that should be said get left unsaid, they fester and rot, turning into anger. And this is the real damage caused by the monitoring and censoring of free speech.
Yes. Free speech does mean some "crazy" people will peddle their garbage. But it also means they can be challenged freely and openly at any time too. Persuasion, education and free discussion are the way for a free people to move forward ... Not the totalitarian ideals of spies and legislation.
The law cannot make you love me, but it can prevent you from lynching me. And if you don’t lynch me, you may eventually come to love me. ~Dr. Martin Luther King
By working with, rather than against each other, we're all better off. Yet our government works in the complete opposite direction ... and it's only getting worse.
