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 [...]
A2K4 Panel II: Technologies of Dissent: Information and Expression in a Digital World
This panel explores A2K issues relevant to classic civil and political rights, particularly freedom of expression.
Political expression and dissent are increasingly exercised online, through technologies ranging from social networking tools, blogs, email, and cell phones to more concealed and complex technical approaches such as the use of distributed denial of service attacks to disrupt [...]
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. [...]
PATRIOT Act renewal bill has passed Senate Judiciary Committee
The PATRIOT Act renewal bill has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee without key civil liberties reforms attached.
Missed opportunities for reform include: requiring the government to show a connection to a suspected terrorist or spy in seeking Americans’ records through National Security Letters (NSLs); letting the “lone wolf” wiretapping authority expire; stopping the government from using [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Intelligence Fusion Centers
We are very interested in Fusion Centers.
For now, let’s just leave it at that.
Some current information: there evidently are 72 state-based intelligence fusion centers, and Janet Napolitano just announced that DHS is creating a new office to support them.
Things this office will do, according to Matthew Harwood at Security Management, include the following:
“It will survey [...]
Of FOIA & Free Access
It’s a point of no contention to folks here at LAMP that court documents are and should be legally required to be in the public domain. But public domain currently means paying 8 cents a page to read docs on PACER — the federal judiciary’s Public Access to Court Electronic Records database. This law student [...]
A reminder
Some of you may remember that a few weeks ago, Judge Jeffrey White (N.D. Cal) ordered the government to release additional records about telecommunications industry lobbying in the lead-up to the enactment of the immunity laws releasing them from liability for facilitating the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. Judge White’s deadline for the release of [...]
Is Tweeting a Crime?
Huffington Post is reporting that a WTO protester was arrested and charged with “hindering prosecution” for using Twitter to direct protester movements at a demonstration against the G20 economic summit in Pittsburgh.
FBI agents subsequently executed a search warrant at the man’s home, where they seized computers, political writings and anarchist literature.
In other news, you [...]
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 [...]
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Recent Posts
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