tagged w/ Freedom of Speech
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Few things as repugnant as Westboro Baptist’s “God Hates Fags” screeds at military funerals. The Supreme Court will soon hear the question of whether free speech protections cover Westboro’s lunatic fringing. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.Few things as repugnant as Westboro Baptist’s “God Hates Fags”... more
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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is getting involved in the legal fight over the anti-gay protesters who show up at military funerals with inflammatory messages like "Thank God for dead soldiers."
The court agreed Monday to consider whether the protesters' message, no matter how provocative and upsetting, is protected by the First Amendment. Members of a Kansas-based church have picketed military funerals to spread their belief that U.S. deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq are punishment for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality.
The justices will hear an appeal from the father of a Marine killed in Iraq to reinstate a $5 million verdict against the protesters, after they picketed outside his son's funeral in Maryland.
A jury in Baltimore awarded Albert Snyder damages for emotional distress and invasion of privacy, but a federal appeals court threw out the verdict. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the signs contained "imaginative and hyperbolic rhetoric" protected by the First Amendment.
The funeral for Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder in Westminster, Md., was among many that have been picketed by members of the fundamentalist Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. Westboro pastor Fred Phelps and other members have used the funeral protests to spread their belief that U.S. deaths in the Iraq war are punishment for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality. One of the signs at Snyder's funeral combined the U.S. Marine Corps motto with a slur against gay men.
Other signs carred by members of the Topeka, Kan.-based church said, "America is Doomed," "God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11," "Priests Rape Boys" and "Thank God for IEDs," a reference to the roadside bombs that have killed many U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The case will be argued in the fall.
The case is Snyder v. Phelps, 09-751.WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is getting involved in the legal fight over the... more
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Introduction/Capitalism
Adam Smith was a creeper.
He used to finger women in line at the bank.
He used to finger women in line at the store.
One time he fingered a man at the poker table.
None of them ever knew it was him.
It’s easy to fuck people with an invisible hand.
Jingoism/Patriotism
Last week the Michigan Militia plotted to blow up a government building.
Last week a pro-lifer murdered an abortionist.
Last week Lil W cried during the national anthem.
Last week Glenn Greenwald blogged about CEO bonuses.
Sex/Religion
Jimmy Swaggart walks into a brothel.
Swaggart: “I’ll take one ginger, please.”
Cashier: “Sir, this is a Popeye’s Chicken.”
Swaggart: “But the author just said it’s a brothel?”
Cashier: “You’d be a fool to...
http://above-thefold.com/blog/2010/02/28/dually-noted-2/Introduction/Capitalism
Adam Smith was a creeper.
He used to finger women in line at... more
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A Danish newspaper apologises for reprinting a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban in 2008.A Danish newspaper apologises for reprinting a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad... more
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Iceland’s proposal to become a free speech haven has just passed its first discussion in parliament, unopposed. The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative instructs the government to draft and enact a collection of laws relating to press freedom, source protection, immunity for carriers such as ISPs, and provisions against libel tourism.
While local legislation cannot provide complete protection for journalistic organizations even if their servers are located in Iceland, local assets and records could be immune to foreign judegments. In any case, the initiative is intended to create the strongest combination of journalism and whistleblower protection laws in the world. The proposal now moves to committee, after which there will be a second discussion and a final binding vote, according to Smári McCarthy of the Icelandic Digital Freedom Society, who was involved in drafting the initiative. That could happen as soon as a week from now, but more likely several weeks.
Member of Parliament and proposal sponsor Birgitta Jónsdóttir has promised that “all of my effort will be to get it out of committee.” The full text of the proposal is available here, and the machine translation into English is fairly readable.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/iceland-update-media-freedom-bill-advances/
Photo of Iceland by Trey Ratcliff used under a Creative Commons license.Iceland’s proposal to become a free speech haven has just passed its first... more
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myhead
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added this
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22 days ago
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Miami, Florida (CNN) -- A former Florida high school student who was suspended by her principal after she set up a Facebook page to criticize her teacher is protected constitutionally under the First Amendment, a federal magistrate ruled.
U.S. Magistrate Barry Garber's ruling, in a case viewed as important by Internet watchers, denied the principal's motion to dismiss the case and allows a lawsuit by the student to move forward.
"We have constitutional values that will always need to be redefined due to changes in technology and society," said Ryan Calo, an attorney with Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.
"The fact that students communicate on a semi-public platform creates new constitutional issues and the courts are sorting them out," Calo said.
Katherine Evans, now 19 and attending college, was suspended in 2007 from Pembroke Pines Charter High School after she used her home computer to create a Facebook page titled, "Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met."
In his order, Garber found that the student had a constitutional right to express her views on the social networking site.
"Evans' speech falls under the wide umbrella of protected speech," he wrote. "It was an opinion of a student about a teacher, that was published off-campus ... was not lewd, vulgar, threatening, or advocating illegal or dangerous behavior."
Matthew Bavaro, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is representing Evans, was pleased with the ruling.
"The First Amendment provides protection for free speech regardless of the forum, being the Internet, the living room or a restaurant," he told CNN.
On the Facebook page created by Evans, which included a picture of her teacher, Evans wrote: "To those select students who have had the displeasure of having Ms. Sarah Phelps, or simply knowing her and her insane antics: Here is the place to express your feelings of hatred."
According to court documents, Phelps never saw the posting, which was made from a home computer after school hours.
After receiving three comments from people who criticized her and supported the teacher, Evans removed the page from Facebook.
School principal Peter Bayer suspended Evans, an honor student, for three days for disruptive behavior and cyberbullying of a staff member. Bayer also removed her from Advanced Placement classes and assigned her to regular classes.
Bavaro, Evans' attorney, is seeking to have the court find the school's suspension invalid and to have documents related to the suspension removed from her school file.
"It will eliminate any official public record and validate her rights, since her First Amendment rights were violated," he said.
Internet experts say the court got it right, and that the ruling shows the law evolving with society.
"It reassures Internet users and students that they can still speak their mind," Calo said. "Its not a security issue. Its personal opinion and gossip."
Calo believes high-profile campus shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech have made schools more security conscious. But in this case, the principal went too far, he said.
"I think this is just an example of an overreaction on the part of an administrator to speech outside the classroom," he said.
"It used to be that principals wouldn't hear you talking about teachers outside the class. Social networks give principals the ability to see what students are saying about teachers and each other.
"It's one thing to use that information to identify illegal or dangerous conduct. It's quite another to punish opinion and speech outside the classroom that doesn't disrupt the activities of the classroom," he told CNN.
Bavaro said Evans is not granting media interviews at this time. He said she is not seeking to get rich from her lawsuit.
"We are only seeking nominal, token damages. Maybe $100. Some token amount to show that her rights were violated," he said. This case is not about money."
An attorney representing Bayer, the school principal, did not return CNN's calls for comment.
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Question:
Do you think that speech should be protected under the 1st amendment on social networking sites such as Facebook? Do you think this applies to pictures as well?Miami, Florida (CNN) -- A former Florida high school student who was suspended by her... more
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A teenage student living in South Florida is taking action against her principal, Peter Bayer, after she was suspended for creating a Facebook page that was criticizing one of her teachers, Sarah Phelps. A federal judge has ruled that she can proceed with the lawsuit and it looks like Katherine Evans, 19, will be taking the case to court.A teenage student living in South Florida is taking action against her principal,... more
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Imagine getting arrested for just striking up a conversation about religion in public.
...constitutional attorney John Eastman says that "to require a permit to even speak about your religious faith to anybody in the mall starts looking like it's unreasonable and might well be unconstitutional."
Eastman, a professor at California's Chapman University School of Law, says because Snatchko was seemingly engaged in a private conversation and not a public address, his speech would not have violated mall rules were it not for its content.
"There’s a decent argument that if the mall is not consistently applying this to all kinds of speech but is targeting religious speech or political speech then it is a content-based restriction ... and a content-based restriction like that would be unconstitutional," he told FoxNews.com.
McReynolds calls the incident a "national issue," especially because Westfield owns malls all over the country, but he says California is the best place to tackle it.
"Out here in California, because of the way our state constitution words its own free-speech clause, it’s been extended beyond the realm of just government property to large public venues like shopping malls."
Eastman warns that even if Snatchko wins his case, people outside of the state of California could find themselves in the same predicament.
"In other states, unless they’ve take the step in interpreting their own constitution that California took ... those malls are going to be treated as private property where they’ll have more control over the people who enter onto their property and a greater ability to set rules like these."
McReynolds said the ban is a "don’t talk to strangers" rule for adults. "We think that’s beyond the pale of what the constitution allows and what free speech allows in this country and certainly in the state of California."
i certainly agree.Imagine getting arrested for just striking up a conversation about religion in public.... more
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echoz
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added this
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1 month ago
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Shocker! Only few weeks ago Obama and his administration issued a note for Chinese counterpart saying that China should stop censorships as its against the democracy rules just after Googles claims that Google will walk out from China market if Chinese government don’t stop the censorships, So what happen now? Well as far as I can see Under Obama America The capital of Democracy is slowly but steadily becoming The Capital of Censorships.Shocker! Only few weeks ago Obama and his administration issued a note for Chinese... more
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George Carlin on the freedom of speech: the famous "seven words" that cannot be uttered on the public airwaves in America.George Carlin on the freedom of speech: the famous "seven words" that cannot... more
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~y2010m1d23-Beijing-wants-Washington-to-stop-its-criticism-of-its-internet-policies
Ma Zhaoxu, Spokesman of Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, urged the U.S. to stop accusing China without reason by invoking a so-called freedom of the Internet. Zhaoxu was referring to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comments yesterday, who advised China to lift the 'embargo' on internet use by its citizens. He added:
"The U.S. has criticized China's internet management by implying that it restricted the freedom of Internet use. We strongly object to the remarks which go against the reality, and that infringe Sino-US relations'~y2010m1d23-Beijing-wants-Washington-to-stop-its-criticism-of-its-internet-policies... more
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BusinessWeek Editorial Overview
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on January 22
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on the universality of Internet Freedom is a wonderful speech that I personally applaud but it is seriously flawed when applied to China and to Google in China. Absolute internet freedom is a value widely shared among hundreds of millions of North Americans, Latin Americans and Europeans but not among the vast, vast, vast majority of Chinese.
I recently spent two weeks in Shanghai and Beijing talking with designers and academics. Here is my sense of how internet censorship and “freedom” work in China. The stereotype of of a distant, old, militaristic censor shutting down blogs and web sites on whim is incorrect. Both the young. high-tech entrepreneurs developing new online businesses and the government censors come from the same good universities, are extremely well-educated and know each other personally. The two sides are in constant contact every day, pushing and pulling, reshaping the zone and focus of censorship. In general, both sides, mostly men in their 20s and early 30s, I am told, are trying to increase the space of what is allowed. I am also told that one problem with Google in China was that it was not tied into this network of censor and censored as well as Baidu and other Chinese web companies. And Google didn’t share the accepted culture of dynamic censorship, further antagonizing the censors.
Two weeks is not a long time in any country, but I did take away the conclusion that for nearly all Chinese, Tibet and Taiwan are as much a part of China as Hawaii and New Mexico are of the US. Government censorship of individuals and groups calling for Tibetan independence is widely applauded, not criticized. It is not an internet space that the younger generation in China wants expanded. However, there is an enormous amount of expressed anger at the rich and powerful all over the net. And throughout contemporary Chinese painting.
I remember going to the 798 art district of Beijing and looking at one installation that listed words. The first word was “propaganda.” The second was “advertising.” The flow of other words expressed the artists conclusion that two were basically the same—messages from powerful institutions designed to persuade you to think one way and behave in a particular way.
more--
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2010/01/internet_freedo.html
http://img.labnol.org/di/periodictableoftheinterum5.jpgBusinessWeek Editorial Overview
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on January 22
Secretary... more
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BEIJING – Beijing issued a stinging response Friday to Hillary Rodham Clinton's criticism that it is jamming the free flow of words and ideas on the Internet, accusing the United States of damaging relations between the two countries by imposing its "information imperialism" on China.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu defended China's policies regarding the Web, saying the nation's Internet regulations were in line with Chinese law and did not hamper the cyber activities of the world's largest online population. His remarks follow those made by the U.S. secretary of state, who in a speech Thursday criticized countries engaging in cyberspace censorship, and urged China to investigate computer attacks against Google.
"Regarding comments that contradict facts and harm China-U.S. relations, we are firmly opposed," Ma said in a statement posted Friday on the ministry's Web site. "We urge the U.S. side to respect facts and stop using the so-called freedom of the Internet to make unjustified accusations against China."
In her speech in Washington, Clinton cited China as among a number of countries where there has been "a spike in threats to the free flow of information" over the past year. She also named Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam.
A state-run newspaper labeled the appeal from Washington as "information imperialism," and Ma insisted that China had "the most active development of the Internet" of any country.
Washington, meanwhile, carried its message on Internet freedom directly to Chinese bloggers. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing and consulates in Shanghai and Guangzhou hosted Internet-streamed discussions with members of the blogging community on Friday afternoon — the latest example of Washington's outreach to Chinese bloggers as a way of spreading its message.
more---
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100122/ap_on_hi_te/as_china_google
another source-
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/01/china-to-us-stop-accusations-on-so-called-internet-freedom.arsBEIJING – Beijing issued a stinging response Friday to Hillary Rodham... more
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The Wilders trial is a showdown for free people, and for the free West. If he is convicted, the freedom of speech will not long endure in Europe, and America will be next. And the darkness of Islamic supremacism will continue to spread, and to subjugate women and non-Muslims, without it being possible to raise a voice against it.
"Filmmaker Geert Wilders faces hatred charges," from CNN, January 20:
(CNN) -- Controversial Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders appeared in court Wednesday on charges of inciting discrimination and hatred that relate in part to his much-criticized film about Islam.
Wednesday's session at the Court of Amsterdam was a pre-trial hearing and a full trial was due to begin later this year. A court spokesman said the hearing was expected to last one day but could stretch into Thursday.
Wilders, who heads the Dutch Party for Freedom, said he has done nothing wrong. "I will fight," he promised in a statement Tuesday on the party's Web site....
In addition to inciting discrimination and hatred, Wilders is also charged with offending a group of people, which relates to his comparison of Islam to Nazism.
"According to Wilders, the truth about Islam must be made known, even if it is painful and unpleasant for certain people," his statement on his party's site said....The Wilders trial is a showdown for free people, and for the free West. If he is... more
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Washington, USA - the nut job Cass Sunstein is officially a enemy of the internet. The man that wants to ban free speech online should be made war against according to the New York Post
"Sunstein is an enemy to every news organization and blogger. We should return the favor and declare war on him."
And as you can imagine we at FTO agree with the New York post. If this does not set alarms off everywhere in the world where free speech is still cherished then we have some serious stressing to do.
We can not agree more, freedom of speech is the biggest hallmark of a free country and a free world. If Obama and his IT dictator wants to declare war on bloggers and news organizations then we should do the same by exposing them, this guy clearly is a criminal and needs to be treated as such.Washington, USA - the nut job Cass Sunstein is officially a enemy of the internet. The... more
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Army Specialist and Iraq war veteran Marc Hall was incarcerated by the US Army on December 11, 2009, in Liberty County Jail, Georgia, for recording a song that expresses his anger over the Army's stop-loss policy.
Stop-loss is a policy that allows the Army to keep soldiers active beyond the end of their signed contracts. According to the Pentagon, more than 120,000 soldiers have been affected by stop-loss since 2001, and currently 13,000 soldiers are serving under stop-loss orders.
Hall, (aka hip hop artist Marc Watercus), who is in the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, was placed in Liberty County Jail for the song (click here to listen to "Stop-Loss," by Marc Watercus), in which he angrily denounces the continuing policy that has barred him from exiting the military.
Military service members do not completely give up their rights to free speech, particularly not when they are doing so artistically while off duty, as was the case with Hall. He is charged under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which covers "all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline" and "all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces." The military is claiming that he "communicated a threat" with his song. Hall mailed a copy of the song to the Pentagon after the Army unilaterally extended his contract for a second Iraq deployment.
Hall planned to leave the military at the end of his contract on February 27, before his commander, Captain Cross at Fort Stewart, moved to have him incarcerated for the song. The military currently intends to keep Hall in pre-trial confinement until he is court-martialed, which is expected to be several months from now.
Jim Klimanski, a civilian military lawyer, member of the National Lawyers Guild and the Military Law Task Force, who is closely following Hall's case, told Truthout that he feels the military is overreacting to the case, and that it is simply a matter of free speech and that the Army's actions violate his First Amendment right to free speech.Army Specialist and Iraq war veteran Marc Hall was incarcerated by the US Army on... more
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In blaming universities for radicalized students, we risk serious damage to freedom of speech and civil libertiesIn blaming universities for radicalized students, we risk serious damage to freedom of... more
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For all of you people who got caught up in frustrating arguments with J_Jammer, it seems as if your troubles are over. Another one bites the dust.
What were the reasons?
Was it justified?
Do you even care?For all of you people who got caught up in frustrating arguments with J_Jammer, it... more
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