An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.
The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.
(via infoneer-pulse)
To what extent is it reasonable that when the government makes an independent allegation of copyright infringement, we complain that only the rightsholders can make that determination, but when they act on information received from a rightsholder organization, we complain about them being blind puppets?
Not, of course, that the MPAA holds many copyrights itself; its members do. To what extent does that change the equation?
This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, “suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks” and “scarves or towels around their heads” were heard grumbling at the protesters’ unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as “Cyco,” explained to his anarchist colleagues how “you can make plastic explosives with bleach,” and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – “Gotta slow the traffic that’s going to make them money” – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.
Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that’s because, more or less, they did.
The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling “very pressured” by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: “We’re in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don’t cut it,” he said. “And it’s actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that.” Though when Cleveland’s NEWS Channel 5 broadcast that footage, they headlined it “Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence.”
In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage. (“They teach you how to make all this stuff out of simple household items,” one of the kids says on a recording quoted in the FBI affidavit about a book he has just discovered, The Anarchist Cookbook. Someone asks him how much it says explosives cost. “I’m not sure,” he responds, “I just downloaded it last night.”) It’s a perfect example of how post-9/11 fear made law enforcement tactics seem acceptable that were previously beyond the pale. Previously, however, the targets have been Muslims; now they’re white kids from Ohio. And maybe you could argue that this is acceptable, if the feds were actually acting out of a good-faith assessment of what threats are imminent and which are not. But that’s not what they’re doing at all. Instead, they are arrogating to themselves a downright Orwellian power – the power to deploy the might of the State to shape a fundamental narrative about which ideas Americans must be most scared of, and which ones they should not fear much at all, independent of the relative objective dangerousness of the people who hold those ideas.
This 50 Shades of Grey thing is perfectly fun to sit back and watch.
But it’s an interesting library discussion. The book isn’t only being challenged or removed—it isn’t being made available in the first place. Librarians and library leaders are choosing not to include the book in the collection. If the library purchased the book, like they did in Flordia, they’re now going back and pulling it after reading reviews (though not before reading the book itself).
Discuss?
You know, judging from the number of libraries listed in WorldCat as owning 50 Shades of Grey, for every library that’s made an adverse decision there’s 100 that haven’t, and I’m willing to bet that at most of those places there hasn’t even been a complaint. Indeed, our library owns it, and it has the longest request list I’ve ever seen; a better indication of public demand and entertainment value I’ve never seen.
(via libraryjournal)
The most persuasive argument against permitting plaintiffs to proceed with early discovery arises from the clear indicia, both in this case and in related matters, that plaintiffs have employed abusive litigation tactics to extract settlements from John Doe defendants. Indeed, this may be the principal purpose of these actions,” Judge Brown wrote. “I find counsel for [plaintiff] K-Beech has already engaged in improper litigation tactics in this matter, and find it highly probable that [plaintiffs] Patrick Collins Inc. and Malibu will likely engage in similar tactics if permitted to proceed with these mass litigations,” he continued. “Such conduct cannot be condoned by this Court.
(via infoneer-pulse)
Federal authorities who seized a popular hip-hop music site based on assertions from the Recording Industry Association of America that it was linking to four “pre-release” music tracks gave it back more than a year later without filing civil or criminal charges because of apparent recording industry delays in confirming infringement, according to court records obtained by Wired.
The Los Angeles federal court records, which were unsealed Wednesday at the joint request of Wired, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Coalition, highlight a secret government process in which a judge granted the government repeated time extensions to build a civil or criminal case against Dajaz1.com, one of about 750 domains the government has seized in the last two years in a program known as Operation in Our Sites.
Apparently, however, the RIAA and music labels’ evidence against Dajaz1, a music blog, never came. Or, if it did, it was not enough to build a case and the authorities returned the site nearly 13 months later without explanation or apology.
» via ars technica
Over the next two weeks, Portland’s school district will install filtering software on laptops issued to high school students, in order to block access to pornography, social networking sites and video streaming sites when the laptops are at home.
Access to those sites is blocked now only at school, through the school network. The current filter doesn’t work when laptops are off school property.
I’ll quote my own comment on the article here:
Peter Eglinton is wrong about the law. The entire purpose of the E-Rate requirement is that federal money not be spent on an internet connection that allows kids to look at porn; there is no requirement in the law or regulations to filter anything other than the connection being paid for by the government. And, as Deborah Caldwell-Stone pointed out, there’s absolutely no requirement to block social networking or video sites.
The attempt to justify this by pointing to other methods of accessing the same content (i.e., home computers) both fails as a First Amendment justification for this suppression of off-school-grounds, non-disruptive speech when it comes to kids whose families aren’t wealthy enough to own a home computer and makes it clear that attempting to implement filtering at home is an exercise in futility for those kids who do have access to a family computer.
Furthermore, unless parents are given the password for turning the filter (or at least the non-obscenity parts) off, it violates the general principle (both legal and in private practice at movie theaters &c.) that parents have the right to choose to allow their children access to any non-obscene material they wish.
My experience in being served a national security letter and its accompanying perpetual gag taught me that our liberties are guaranteed not by the Constitution, but by our willingness to insist that our Constitutional liberties be honored.
Last year, I bought a laptop in Singapore, and brought it with me to Australia. It worked fine for reading the Economist online and what passes for journalism in Singapore, but one day I searched for the Sydney Morning Herald, and there were no hits: it’s as if it didn’t exist. A little poking around revealed that to be able to view Australian sites, I had to register my browser to be in Australia, which also requires a credit card with a billing address there. What’s more, switching countries like this would delete all my bookmarks, terminate my paid subscription to the Economist and stop me from being able to read even single issue of the Singaporean Straits Jacket. And needless to say, the laptop is locked to prevent me from installing another browser that would allow me to get around these limits. Does this sound ridiculous, a perverse fantasy of some balkanized Web of the dystopian future? Nope: it’s all true, except that my “laptop” is actually an iPad and my “browser” is iTunes/iBooks. Since my iTunes account has a Singaporean billing address, the Kindle application does not show up in my search results. If I switch countries, I will lose access to everything I’ve previously downloaded. And if I do bite the bullet and switch to Australia, a good chunk of apps, music and more on offer will no longer be available on iTunes, iBooks or Amazon, and I’ll pay around 50% extra on what remains. But I chose not to, and thus didn’t buy 3 or 4 books I wanted to, because their publishers would not sell them to me. Why? Because publishers insist on selling e-books the way they sell printed books, and customers simply don’t figure in the equation.
(via infoneer-pulse)
