Soviet-Style Courtroom Censorship: "It's Just Protocol"

William Norman Grigg

During the Soviet era, foreign journalists and tourists would frequently have their cameras confiscated by the KGB, a practice that remains quite common in contemporary police states -- including the one being consolidated here in the United States.

"I was at the local courthouse just now for the court appearance of Hope Solo, the U.S. soccer player charged with domestic violence," a Seattle-area reporter and LRC reader informed me. In the courtroom one of the officers there told everyone there no photography was allowed, nor video or audio recording, and he would confiscate cell phones if he felt they were recording or photographing Solo. A coworker of mine came to take photos and was outside the courtroom when the officer explained the rules, as she was trying to get a photo of Hope Solo as she arrived. After my coworker came into the courtroom when Solo appeared I told her she couldn?t take photos in there and needed to go to an area in the back with a wall and glass window, where other media persons were photographing and recording. My coworker walked over there with her camera and the officer immediately followed her there."

The reporter's colleague, it should be emphasized, had not taken a photograph, and was in compliance with the court's instructions. But this didn't deter the officer from pursuing her, assaulting her, and stealing her camera.

Without a word, the officer seized the camera "and walked back into the courtroom," the reporter relates. "When [his colleague] said she hadn?t taken any photos he said `I know' and walked away. The Seattle Times photographer next to her told both of us it was the first time in his career he had seen a law enforcement officer confiscate a reporter?s camera in a courtroom."

As was the case in Soviet Russia, only State-authorized purveyors of officially approved content (somehow the word "journalist" seems inapposite) are permitted to make records of judicial proceedings in Seattle, and elsewhere in the American soyuz.

"Apparently there is a `pool' in which only State-approved media persons are allowed to take photos, one videographer and one photographer and the photos get sent out through the wire," the reporter points out.

"Putting the legality of any of this rule aside, the young officer behaved like a mindless drone," continues the correspondent. "Unless he had no observational skills he might have noticed she was not in the courtroom at the time, as there were only a handful of news people, or he could have simply told her when he spoke to her about the rule and asked her not to take photos rather than stealing her camera. When my coworker said it was unnecessary for him to be so rude he said `it?s just protocol.'"

"Apparently being an uncivil thug is now protocol for someone whose average pay in Kirkland is $74,000," concludes the justifiably disgusted and admirably candid reporter. "You think with all that money they could afford to hire someone to teach them manners."

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Google Adds Pirate Bay Domains to Censorship List

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by Ernesto

Google has quietly expanded its list of censored search phrases with the addition of The Pirate Bay?s domain names. The blacklist prevents popular keywords from appearing in Google?s Instant and Autocomplete search services, while the pages themselves remain indexed. Although Google understands that there is no silver bullet to stop online copyright infringement, the search giant is convinced that the steps they've taken could help to decrease piracy.

There are certain words Google doesn?t want you to see without explicitly searching for them.

Type in ?peni?? or ?vagin?? and the search giant leaves out the most obvious suggestions. This, despite the fact that these dictionary words are popular searches among the public.

Since January last year Google has been applying the same moral compass to filter "piracy-related? terms from its Autocomplete and Instant services.

Google users who search for terms like "utorrent", "BitTorrent" or "RapidShare" will notice that no suggestions or search results will be shown before they finish typing the full word.

By censoring parts of their search services, Google is sending out a strong signal that they are committed to combating online copyright infringement, and to a certain degree their efforts are effective.

When terms such as BitTorrent, Mediafire and Megaupload were banned we saw that the number of searches dropped drastically. The same happened when ?The Pirate Bay? got censored last year, although many people simply switched to then uncensored domain thepiratebay.org as a shortcut to access their favorite torrent site.

However, since last month thepiratebay.org was also added to the blacklist, as well as thepiratebay.se. When people type in ?thepirate? the two domains are no longer offered as a suggestion. As a direct result, the search volume for these terms dropped instantly.

No Pirate Bay (c.f. Bing!)

The Pirate Bay is used to being censored by now and shrugs off the censorship attempts.

A Pirate Bay spokesperson told TorrentFreak that they are not in the least bit hurt by Google's ?half-baked? attempts to keep people away from their site. They haven't noticed a decrease in referrers from Google, and even if that was the case it wouldn't be a problem as only a tiny percentage of The Pirate Bay's traffic comes from search engines.

Google disagrees, and firmly believes that the measures are effective in decreasing piracy. The company is not trying to prevent Pirate Bay users from accessing the site, but they don?t want to suggest it to people who only type in ?the? into the search bar either.

"While there is no silver bullet for infringement online, this measure is one of several that we have implemented to curb copyright infringement online," a Google?s spokesman told TorrentFreak previously.

Besides censoring piracy related terms, last month Google began downranking ?pirate? websites in its search results. Although we?ve seen some changes in the search results, the effects of this update don?t appear to have had a dramatic impact.

The big question is, where will Google draw the line?

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The Past, Present and Future of Internet Censorship

by James Corbett

When legislators in the US abandoned their support of SOPA and PIPA in the wake of mass popular protest earlier this month, many of those who had been mobilized by the legislation?which would have granted the US government almost total power to block access to foreign websites accused of so much as linking to copyrighted material?did not have long to enjoy their ?victory.? The very next day the New Zealand police swooped in to the million-dollar estate of MegaUpload.com founder Kim Dotcom, arresting him and three others at the US government?s request for alleged racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering. The Department of Justice is now seeking the MegaUpload CEO?s extradition to the US.

Some amongst those who had been campaigning against SOPA and PIPA did not know that the US government already had the authority to shut down entire websites and in fact has exercised that authority on numerous occasions. What many are now learning is that, far from some potential future threat, internet censorship already exists in a variety of legislation that is already on the books in the United States and in nations around the world.

Although most commonly associated with China, which has implemented strict internet filters that prevent its citizens from finding politically sensitive material, various internet censorship programs have already been implemented by countries around the globe.

In 2010, Japan passed amendments to its copyright law making it illegal to download copyrighted material. The move has yet to curtail file-sharing in the country, so the Japanese government recently announced that they are going to begin putting fake copies of popular tv dramas on file-sharing websites that, when opened, remind users that it is illegal to download such material.

In July of 2010, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized the domains of 8 websites that it accused of hosting illegal copies of copyrighted material as part of an investigation dubbed Operation In Our Sites. The seizures came before any trial took place, and six of the websites did not actually host any of the copyrighted material in question, only linking to it. That November, ICE acted once again, this time seizing 82 domains. In December of 2011, over one year later, the agency returned one of the domains, Dajaz1.com, to its owner, after admitting that it had not in fact breached any laws.

In May of last year, the US Justice Department began seeking the extradition of one of the website?s operators, Richard O?Dwyer, from the UK. O?Dwyer is a British citizen who established TVShack.net in December of 2007. The DOJ is hoping to bring O?Dwyer to the US under the Extradition Act of 2003 to face charges of copyright infringement in the Southern District of New York.

Late last year, a number of nations signed a new global copyright agreement known as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement or ACTA. Signatories include the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, South Korea, and, as of this past week, 22 member states of the European Union.

Purported to be a treaty against counterfeit goods, generic drugs and copyright, it threatens to fundamentally alter the internet as it has so far existed.

When the Polish government announced its intention to sign earlier this month, protests sprang up around the country.

While the public is only beginning to understand the implications of ACTA, which has already been signed by a number of countries, others are pointing to these types of agreements as only the thin edge of the wedge for the implementation of outright totalitarian control over the internet as a whole. Indeed, perhaps even more worrying than the existing legislation and agreements for internet censorship are the numerous proposals for even more restrictive measures that have been made time and again by political leaders in a variety of contexts.

In October of 2008, the Labor government in Australia proposed a mandatory filter for the entire Australian internet. The proposal, dubbed ?Clean Feed? would ostensibly block any content deemed to break Australia?s media regulations. When a list of the websites supposed to be banned under the scheme was released in early 2009, it included the websites of numerous innocuous Australian businesses, as well as overtly political websites that had no illegal or offending material. The current government has said they would not vote for any such legislation, and the proposal would be unlikely to reach parliament until 2013.

In 2010 the UK passed the Digital Economy Act, which theoretically allows for the UK government to ban copyright violators from the Internet. In August of 2011, parts of the legislation proposing the blocking of sites believed to be linking to copyrighted material was declared to be unenforceable and were dropped from the legislation.

In March of 2009, Senator Jay Rockefeller opined during a subcommittee hearing that the internet is proving to be such a threat to America?s national security that it would have been better if it had never existed.

In June of 2010, Senator Joe Lieberman stated that he believed the US needed the same ability to shut down the internet as China currently has.

While these proposals are sometimes couched in business-friendly rhetoric about protecting intellectual property, sometimes as a national security question about defending cyber infrastructure from foreign enemies and sometimes as attempts to protect children or stop the spread of child pornography, the proponents of internet censorship are becoming increasingly honest about their real worry: the free spread of ideas amongst a public that is allowed to choose for themselves what information to believe and what to discard.

Last year, Bill Clinton advocated the idea that the US government create an agency for ?fact-checking? websites on the internet.

Earlier this month, Evgeny Morozov of Stanford, who previously served as a Fellow of George Soros? Open Society Institute, wrote an article calling on Google and other search engines to use banners to warn users about websites that are deemed to be pseudoscientific or conspiratorial. Perhaps realizing that the proposal sounds drastic, Morozov concludes:

?such a move might trigger conspiracy theories of its own?e.g. is Google shilling for Big Pharma or for Al Gore??but this is a risk worth taking as long as it can help thwart the growth of fringe movements.?

Here we see the real danger of the internet for those who seek to control the spread of information. The internet, like every other medium that has come before it, changes not just the way in which people create, distribute and receive information, but the information itself. Just as the printing press led to the widespread publication of the Bible in the vernacular and ultimately to the Reformation which forever transformed the power structure in European society, so too has the internet allowed the public to receive, correlate and distribute information that challenges official government narratives in a way that threatens to transform the power structure of our society. And as the traditional media has begun to bleed away the remains of its increasingly dissatisfied customer base, self-immolated on the fantastic failure to challenge the status quo on issues like Saddam?s WMD or the growing apparatus of the police state or the never-ending bailouts of the too-big-to-fails, a new, independent media has arisen to take its place, empowered by technologies that allow for the instantaneous and nearly costless transmission of ideas to the farthest corners of the globe.

When situated in this context, the recent struggle over the SOPA and PIPA bills are seen for what they are: one battle in a much larger war for internet freedom, and ultimately, the cognitive liberty of the American public. But it is possible to win the battle and yet lose the war, as the millions of MegaUpload users who just had all of their files seized by the FBI found out the hard way. The only hope is that the movement that has arisen to face this, the greatest threat to the rise of this new era of mental independence, does not wane in the wake of the SOPA and PIPA ?victory,? but instead rises to meet the even greater internet clampdown that awaits. After all, all the authorities are waiting for is for the public to fall back asleep.

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Senator Leahy Praises US Gov't Censorship Of Websites As ICE Takes Another Victory Lap

from the they-live-in-an-alternate-reality dept
by Mike Masnick, Techdirt

It really would be kind of funny to watch the US government congratulate itself for censorship of websites if it wasn't just kind of sad. At a Senate Judiciary committee hearing on intellectual property issues, Senator Patrick Leahy (top 3 campaign contribution sources: lawyers, entertainment industry, lobbyists -- you can't make this stuff up) praised administration officials for censoring websites based on questionable accusations from an entertainment industry who seems to think that their own content creators are running "pirate" websites.

Of course, Leahy apparently doesn't recognize the irony of condemning internet censorship in other countries while praising it at home when it benefits his biggest campaign contributors.

The same hearing gave ICE assistant director Erik Barnett one more chance to declare victory, though I note with some amusement that the text of Barnett's speech this time leaves out the bogus claim that no sites are challenging the seizures. Apparently he's realized that some people might call him on it when he blatantly misrepresents reality.

Either way, none of this dog and pony show is much of a surprise. You certainly wouldn't expect Senator Leahy to call one of the people who had their sites illegally seized to hear their side of the story. I mean, that might be embarrassing to actually hear that there's more than one side to this. He might have to hear about how the content creators themselves sent the content in question to these sites, and how the ICE affidavit to seize them misstated the facts of whether or not the content was infringing. He might have to hear how ICE didn't even ask the actual copyright holders, in most cases. He might have to hear how ICE doesn't seem to understand the technology, and doesn't seem to understand the difference between linking and distribution. He doesn't have to hear about how hardworking people who helped promote new artists and build their careers now live in fear of their own government. He doesn't have to hear about how these people are afraid to speak out, because the Justice Department has told them that if they do, they may face criminal charges.

No, it's easier to put on a show and pat yourself on the back for censoring those people and pretend that you've done something productive.

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