Posts tagged law

It’s a fairly basic constitutional issue for the press, whether or not there is a reporter’s privilege. It’s something a lot of people outside the press don’t really understand, don’t really care about. I think the basic issue is whether you can have a democracy without aggressive investigative reporting and I don’t believe you can. So that’s why I’m fighting it.

James Risen, reporter, New York Times, in a talk at the National Press Club. ‘Reporter’s Privilege’ Under Fire From Obama Administration Amid Broader War On Leaks.

Background: The Obama Justice Department continues its attempts to force Risen to testify against CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling by arguing that Reporters’ Privilege does not exist when the information revealed is considered illegal.

In this case, the CIA’s Sterling is charged with leaking classified information about a plot against the Iranian government that Risen then used in his book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.

Via the Huffington Post:

While the Obama administration hasn’t prosecuted those responsible for torture during the Bush years, it is taking a strong stand against a former official believed to have supplied information to the media about use of torture and other controversial tactics during the previous administration.

In January, the Justice Department charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou with disclosing classified information to the media; The FBI claims to have evidence linking him to a 2008 New York Times story detailing the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.

In another notable case, the DOJ charged Thomas Drake under the Espionage Act, claiming the former National Security Agency official provided classified information of gross NSA mismanagement to a Baltimore Sun reporter. The government’s case collapsed in 2011 and Drake pleaded guilty only to a misdemeanor.

The crackdown hasn’t gone unnoticed among reporters, with tension recently spilling out into the White House briefing room after the administration praised Anthony Shadid and Marie Colvin, journalists who died while covering the bloody conflict in Syria.

Jake Tapper, the senior White House correspondent for ABC News, asked White House Press Secretary Jay Carney how public support of those journalists’ work “square[s] with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistleblowers to court.”

“There just seems to be a disconnect here,” Tapper added. “You want aggressive journalism abroad; you just don’t want it in the United States.”

Google-NSA: A Relationship That Dares Not Speak Its Name

Via Wired:

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the National Security Agency’s decision to withhold from the public documents confirming or denying any relationship it has with Google concerning encryption and cybersecurity.

That’s despite the fact that Google itself admitted it turned to “U.S. authorities,” which obviously includes the NSA, after the search giant’s Chinese operation was deeply hacked. Former NSA chief Mike McConnell told the Washington Post that collaboration between the NSA and private companies like Google was “inevitable.”

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, invoking the Freedom of Information Act, had sought such documents following the January 2010 cyberattack on Google that targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attack was among the considerations that prompted Google to consider abandoning China, and Google announced that it was “working with the relevant U.S. authorities.”

The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post followed up, saying Google had contacted the NSA following the attack.

EPIC sought documents seeking to know what type of collaboration there was between Google and the NSA and, among other things, records of communication between the NSA and Google concerning Google’s e-mail service Gmail.

In response, the NSA invoked a so-called “Glomar” response in which the agency neither confirmed nor denied the existence of records on the topic at all. EPIC sued and lost in the lower courts.

On appeal, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the NSA’s conclusion that admitting the existence of relevant documents would harm national security. (.pdf)

Read More.

Twitter’s terms of service make absolutely clear that its users ‘own’ their own content. Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users.

Ben Lee, lawyer, Twitter, to the BBC. Twitter resists US court’s demand for Occupy tweets

The News: A New York state court asked Twitter to release posts written by New Inquiry Senior Editor Malcolm Harris who was arrested last fall during Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City.

Twitter said no.

Via the BBC:

Mr Harris’s lawyer had tried to block access to the postings, but a judge ruled that once the messages had been sent they became the property of Twitter, meaning the defendant was not protected by Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful search and seizure.

Twitter’s lawyers argued that the judge had misunderstood how the service worked, noting that the Stored Communications Act gave its members the right to challenge requests for information on their user history.

“Law enforcement agencies… are becoming increasingly aggressive in their attempts to obtain information about what people are doing on the internet,” Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney, writes at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If internet users cannot protect their own constitutional rights, the only hope is that internet companies do so.”

A depressing hope, but good for Twitter.

If we are fixing prices for our benefit, we don’t seem to be very good at it.
A publishing executive to David Carr over a lawsuit filed by the US Justice Department over price collusion on e-book sales. The New York Times, Book Publishing’s Real Nemesis.
The Death Penalty Around the World Via the Guardian: Methods of execution included beheading, electrocution, hanging, lethal injection and various kinds of shooting (by firing squad, and at close range to the heart or the head). No stonings were recorded in 2011, but public executions were known to have been carried out in Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Somalia. The data comes from Amnesty International and is available for download at the Guardian. Amnesty’s 2011 Death Penalty Report is here.

The Death Penalty Around the World

Via the Guardian:

Methods of execution included beheading, electrocution, hanging, lethal injection and various kinds of shooting (by firing squad, and at close range to the heart or the head). No stonings were recorded in 2011, but public executions were known to have been carried out in Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Somalia.

The data comes from Amnesty International and is available for download at the Guardian. Amnesty’s 2011 Death Penalty Report is here.

Killing Reporters Now a Federal Offense in Mexico

The Mexican senate passed a bill yesterday that makes killing reporters — and any infringement on freedom of information — a federal offense. As we noted earlier, 40 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2006 with very little follow through in police investigations.

The hope is that elevating such crimes to the federal level will lead to better investigations and prosecutions. The belief being that there’s less corruption at that level.

Via Reporters Without Borders:

The federal senate’s 95 members yesterday unanimously passed an amendment to article 73 of the constitution allowing the federal courts and investigators to deal with crimes that threaten the work of journalists and freedom of information. The amendment was already approved by the lower house last November.

The amendment says: “The federal authorities will also be able to try crimes under state jurisdiction when they are linked to federal crimes or when they are crimes against journalists, persons or installations that affect, limit or impinge on the right to information or the freedoms of expression and publication.” 

Mexico is ranked 149 out of 179 countries on Reporters Without Borders annual press freedom index.

Just like I told a French journalist and to the lady at the Washington Post, pirates are thieves and they do steal. Yeah yeah, “when I steal your DVD, you have no DVD, but when I copy a file, you still have a file” – I get that BS. We all know that it’s BS too. However, SOPAs and PIPAs create tyranny. If given the choice between thieves and tyranny, I’d rather stay with the thieves.

Suren Ter, creator of YouHaveDownloaded.com to Privacy Online News.

You Have Downloaded indexes IP addresses that have been used to download torrent files. If you visit the site, it will display what files have been downloaded on your network. 

The site, says Ter, is a proof of concept to show visitors what the entertainment industry might see as it tracks downloads across peer-to-peer networks.

H/T: Slashdot.

Mexico Proposes Elevating Journalist Murders to Federal Crime Via the Committee to Protect Journalists: With near impunity in the murders of journalists a persistent reason for the terror and self-censorship among Mexican news organizations, legislators say the national Senate is on the verge of passing a constitutional amendment that would allow federal authorities to take over cases of crimes against freedom of expression. Passage would mean that the typically less corrupt and more effective federal police and prosecutors would move aside state authorities to tackle cases of murdered journalists or those living under threat. Since 2006, more than 40 journalists have died or disappeared in Mexico, according to CPJ research. Due to a mixture of negligence and pervasive corruption among law enforcement officials, particularly at the state level, crimes against the Mexican press are almost entirely unsolved. The failure to investigate abuses has encouraged further crimes, forcing journalists to steer clear of sensitive topics such as violence, corruption and narco-trafficking. The result is that citizens have been stripped of their right to vital information. Image: Poster used for a 2008 Knight Cabot conference on Journalism in Mexico.

Mexico Proposes Elevating Journalist Murders to Federal Crime

Via the Committee to Protect Journalists:

With near impunity in the murders of journalists a persistent reason for the terror and self-censorship among Mexican news organizations, legislators say the national Senate is on the verge of passing a constitutional amendment that would allow federal authorities to take over cases of crimes against freedom of expression. Passage would mean that the typically less corrupt and more effective federal police and prosecutors would move aside state authorities to tackle cases of murdered journalists or those living under threat.

Since 2006, more than 40 journalists have died or disappeared in Mexico, according to CPJ research. Due to a mixture of negligence and pervasive corruption among law enforcement officials, particularly at the state level, crimes against the Mexican press are almost entirely unsolved. The failure to investigate abuses has encouraged further crimes, forcing journalists to steer clear of sensitive topics such as violence, corruption and narco-trafficking. The result is that citizens have been stripped of their right to vital information.

Image: Poster used for a 2008 Knight Cabot conference on Journalism in Mexico.

Massachusetts Gives Bloggers Covering Trials Same Privileges As Traditional News Media

Well played, Massachusetts. Well played.

Crowdsourcing the Hunt for Humans and Aliens Two unrelated stories this morning that we’d like to relate: 1. The US State Department is running a competition at the end of the month called Tag Challenge. The social game involves participants tracking “suspects” in five different cities in North America and Europe with the only clue being the person’s mug shot. Teams will have a day to find the suspect and the goal is to see how social media and crowdsourcing help and enable law enforcement to capture fugitives. Big Brother is offering the winning team $5,000. Wired has the story here. 2. The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has launched a Web site to crowdsource its hunt for alien life. For a long time now people have been able to install an app on their computers that donates unused processing power to help sift through SETI data but now they want actual human intelligence and analysis involved. Via the BBC: The project is being run by Dr Jillian Tarter, winner of the TED Prize in 2009 and director of the Seti Institute’s Center for Seti Research. She has devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings elsewhere. She hopes Seti Live will help build upon the community of scientists and technologists already involved in the search. “There are frequencies that our automated signal detection systems now ignore, because there are too many signals there,” she said. “Most are created by Earth’s communication and entertainment technologies, but buried within this noise there may be a signal from a distant technology. “I’m hoping that an army of volunteers can help us deal with these crowded frequency bands that confuse our machines. By doing this in real time, we will have an opportunity to follow up immediately on what our volunteers discover.” Image: Screenshot from the State Department’s Tag Challenge Web site.

Crowdsourcing the Hunt for Humans and Aliens

Two unrelated stories this morning that we’d like to relate:

1. The US State Department is running a competition at the end of the month called Tag Challenge. The social game involves participants tracking “suspects” in five different cities in North America and Europe with the only clue being the person’s mug shot. Teams will have a day to find the suspect and the goal is to see how social media and crowdsourcing help and enable law enforcement to capture fugitives. Big Brother is offering the winning team $5,000. Wired has the story here.

2. The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has launched a Web site to crowdsource its hunt for alien life. For a long time now people have been able to install an app on their computers that donates unused processing power to help sift through SETI data but now they want actual human intelligence and analysis involved.

Via the BBC:

The project is being run by Dr Jillian Tarter, winner of the TED Prize in 2009 and director of the Seti Institute’s Center for Seti Research.

She has devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings elsewhere.

She hopes Seti Live will help build upon the community of scientists and technologists already involved in the search.

“There are frequencies that our automated signal detection systems now ignore, because there are too many signals there,” she said.

“Most are created by Earth’s communication and entertainment technologies, but buried within this noise there may be a signal from a distant technology.

“I’m hoping that an army of volunteers can help us deal with these crowded frequency bands that confuse our machines. By doing this in real time, we will have an opportunity to follow up immediately on what our volunteers discover.”

Image: Screenshot from the State Department’s Tag Challenge Web site.

Want an Open Internet? There's a Blueprint for That

Yesterday Jihii wrote about an effort originating in the Reddit community to crowdsource a privacy bill to protect people’s online rights.

Perhaps, then, a trend, because yesterday also saw the launch The Internet Blueprint, an effort by Public Knowledge, a Washington DC-based digital advocacy group, that crowdsources technology bills that members of Congress can then pick up and run with.

The idea is certainly interesting. What we saw recently in the fights over SOPA and PIPA — and see generally over everything else — is reactive protests against proposed laws drafted with little public input and often by the lobbyists whose groups will most benefit from them.

The Internet Blueprint attempts to turn this process on its head by proactively promoting Internet-related laws that are written in public, by the public (and with Public Knowledge lawyers massaging them into proper DC legalese). Visitors to the site can vote up and comment on particular bills, vote on ideas they think should become proposed bills, and contact their representatives to get behind completed bills.

Via Public Knowledge:

While it can be reasonably easy to get people to agree on broad principles, conflict can often come when it is time to focus on details. That is especially true when it comes to legislative language – a single word (or even a single comma) can change the impact of a bill. That is why The Internet Blueprint goes beyond broad concepts and proposes concrete legislative language. The bills on The Internet Blueprint could be introduced and passed as-is.

The Internet Blueprint is a place for everyone – individuals, organizations, and companies – to come together and make it clear what is important to them. When you visit the site, the first thing you will see is a list of complete bills. Along with the text there is a headline, a short explanation, and a more detailed explanation of both the problem and our solution.

Public Knowledge has seeded the site with a few completed bills that focus on copyright policy and openness in international intellectual property negotiations. You can view them here.

ACTA Protests in Europe

Over the past few weeks protests have erupted across Europe against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Act, an international treaty that would standardize criminal targeting and enforcement in counterfeit goods, generic medicine and copyright infringement on the Internet.

Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

ACTA has several features that raise significant potential concerns for consumers’ privacy and civil liberties for innovation and the free flow of information on the Internet, legitimate commerce and for developing countries’ ability to choose policy options that best suit their domestic priorities and level of economic development.

ACTA is being negotiated by a select group of industrialized countries outside of existing international multilateral venues for creating new IP norms such as the World Intellectual Property Organization and (since TRIPs) the World Trade Organization. Both civil society and developing countries are intentionally being excluded from these negotiations. While the existing international fora provide (at least to some extent) room for a range of views to be heard and addressed no such checks and balances will influence the outcome of the ACTA negotiations.

To date, 31 countries have signed the treaty, including the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and most members of the European Union.

For more information about ACTA, see University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist’s ACTA tracker and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s ACTA topic page.

Images: Anti-ACTA signs from European protests, via OWNI.

This Court should not depart from well-established precedent by being the first court of appeals ever to deny the existence of a reporter’s privilege with respect to confidential source information in the criminal trial context…. Confidentiality is essential for journalists to sustain their relationships with sources and to obtain sensitive information from them. Without it, the press cannot effectively serve the public by keeping it informed.

Attorney’s for Jeffrey Sterling, the former CIA officer who is accused of leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen, to the US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Secrecy News, Reporter’s Privilege at Issue in Sterling Leak Case.

Prosecutors in the case want to compel New York Times reporter James Risen to testify against Sterling in order to reveal that Sterling passed along information that the CIA has a program in place to disrupt Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Reporter’s Privilege is a law or statute in 31 states. Known as Shield laws, they protect journalists from having to testify, reveal or otherwise make known their sources, or how, where and from whom they received confidential information.

Speaking of Piracy

On Thursday the House Judiciary Committee will vote on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Meanwhile the Protect IP Act is making its way through the Senate.

As the Center for Democracy and Technology writes, “If passed, these bills would cripple online innovation, chill online free expression, subvert the inner workings of Internet security, and compromise user privacy.”

At 1WebDesign, they’ve put together the following list of resources for background on SOPA and PIPA:

Don’t Censor the Net has resources for signing petitions and contacting representatives here.