Beth Noveck on Open Government April 23
You are cordially invited to a special Information Society Project lunch speaker series featuring Beth Noveck discussing “Open Government and the First Amendment: Strengthening our Democracy through Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration” on Friday, April 23 at 12:15 p.m. in Room 128 of Yale Law School. This event is part of the Liberty Tree First Amendment Online [...]
MFIA Amicus in Illinois First Amendment case- with EFF
The Media Freedom and Information Practicum is proud to announce that, along with EFF, it has filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Illinois Court of Appeals to block the unmasking of an anonymous online critic of a local political candidate in the comments section of a local newspaper’s website.
Battle Over Message Board Flame War Must [...]
why surveillance matters
As a follow-up to Nabiha’s great post on terrorism and open access:
As Nabiha said, our interest in terrorism-related issues has to do with the barriers the government places to access.
Our interest in surveillance speaks more generally to the democratic conditions necessary for newsgathering. Newsgatherers cannot properly gather news if they know that they’re being watched. [...]
Tweet-Crime?
We’re starting to see more domestic coverage of l’affaire Elliot Madison, the self-described political anarchist who has been charged with using Twitter to apprise protesters of police movements at the recent G20 Summit.
Our own Laura DeNardis weighed in via this Reuters story, highlighting the double standard between Twitter activism in Iran and Pittsburgh.
Is there [...]
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, on newsgathering
I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, yesterday. I took the opportunity to ask him about Wikipedia’s relationship to legacy journalism, and his thoughts about the decrease in newsgathering, and what systems might take its place.
Because of its system of cross-references to “reliable” outside sources, Wikipedia depends on [...]
DHS Databases & Speech
Comparative Case Studies of Radical Rhetoric, according to the government’s own description, “is a research effort funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Directorate of Science and Technology (S&T), Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences Division (HFD). The goal of the research project is to determine whether various characteristics of the rhetoric expressed by groups are related [...]
Cyberbullying bill on the horizon
A cyberbullying bill introduced after a federal judge nullified the jury verdict in the MySpace suicide case has thankfully not been well received. The bill calls for up to two years in prison for electronic speech meant to “coerce, intimidate, harass or cause substantial emotional distress to a person”.
One of the bill’s opponents, R-Texas Gohmert, [...]
A note on anonymous speech
A First Amendment right to speak about politics anonymously was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in 1995, when the court held that a lone pamphleteer had the right to distribute political literature without having her identity revealed.
But anonymity online has been subject to concerns about the harm inherent in gossip and reputation demolishing. This has [...]
The other side of access
Our goal as a practicum, as Nabiha mentioned, is to perform a “sunlight” function traditionally served by legacy media. The structure of “new media”, as many have observed, is extremely conducive to open-access policy: you can now store, search, share, and discuss massive amounts of data and documents, both online and off.
There’s another side to [...]
