26 Jul 21 | Events
[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”117103″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]The importance of the role of whistleblowers in exposing corruption and malpractice is well-established in law and rightly celebrated in a string of Hollywood movies from All the President’s Men to Erin Brockovich. But whistleblowers should also be celebrated as champions of free expression. Join us for the launch of the Summer 2021 edition of Index on Censorship, which highlights several prominent cases around the world.
Whistleblowers are extraordinary people, who take incredible risks to bring the rich and powerful to account. This often exacts a terrible personal price, with whistleblowers losing their livelihoods, their mental health and even their freedom.
Daniel Ellsberg was the whistleblower behind the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the secret history of American involvement in Vietnam .
Brittany Winner is the sister of Reality Winner, the former US intelligence specialist who leaked details of Russian interference in the 2016 American election.
Martin Bright, editor of Index on Censorship, will chair the discussion.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
When: Tuesday 3 August 2021, 17:00 to 18:00 (BST)
Where: ONLINE
Tickets: Free, advance booking essential
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22 Jul 21 | Academic Freedom, News and features, United States
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”117096″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]A high school cheerleader has won an important victory for the right of students to express their opinions freely while off campus.
At the end of June, the US Supreme Court ruled eight to one that the rights of high school student Brandi Levy had been violated in a case dating back to 2017.
After failing to make the varsity cheerleading team, Levy had posted profanity-laced criticisms of the team roster on Snapchat while off campus at a local convenience store. The team captain kicked her off the junior varsity cheerleading team for a year as punishment.
The Supreme Court was asked to consider whether schools had the right to regulate off-campus speech; it ruled that her posts did not disrupt school operations so Levy’s rights had been violated. The court maintained that schools have a right to regulate speech in some “school-related, off-campus activities” without defining what that would look like.
David Cole, the legal director of the ACLU, called the ruling a victory for students, saying “the message from this ruling is clear – free speech is for everyone, and that includes public school students”. The director of the Pennsylvania ACLU, which represented Levy, characterised the precedent established by the ruling, saying they successfully argued that “students have greater free speech rights out of school and on their own time.”
Despite the nature of her comments, Levy was motivated to fight for her rights. She commented publicly that she was proud to have advocated for the rights of students saying, “young people need to have the ability to express themselves without worrying about being punished when they get to school”.
Recent graduates from Blake High School in Maryland broadly agree with the principle the court ruled on – that her speech did not disrupt the safety of the school.
Cole Shankel, class of 2023, said, “She’s overreacting… cheerleading is lame,” but added, “I don’t think public schools should be allowed to punish students for off-campus speech.”
Jeniffer Ventura, class of 2021, pointed out, “Being held accountable for your actions online is important,” expressing concern about online hate speech and racism affecting the safety and security of the community. Julian Kabik, also the class of 2021, stated simply, “If you are not making a deliberate threat online, then I don’t think you should be punished.”
This is the first student free speech case to favour students since the landmark 1969 case Tinker v Demois. The case considered students who had been suspended for wearing black armbands in protest at the war in Vietnam; the court ruled schools must show a substantial disruption to school operations, besides the speech being unpleasant, to restrict a student’s right to free speech.
The right of students to exercise free speech established in the case has been eroded by others since then. In 1986, Bethel v Fraser ruled that schools could regulate certain styles of expression if they were sexually vulgar. In 1989, in Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier, the court ruled schools had the right to regulate the content of school publications. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Morse v Frederick that schools may restrict speech at or in view of a school-supervised event if it promoted illegal drug use. The US Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit Court in 2013 and Ninth Circuit Court in 2014 ruled a student’s dress could be restricted in two separate cases related to wearing the confederate flag or American flag, respectively. The courts ruled student dress had incited disruption, and the Supreme Court declined to hear both cases.
The Levy ruling has broken the trend in student speech law, affirming students’ off-campus rights and considering the role of extracurricular activities for the first time. A ruling against Levy would have further crippled the original 1969 ruling, allowing schools to restrict students based on their speech being unpalatable and extending a school’s authority to restrict student speech to include online and off-campus speech.
Despite this, the Levy ruling is not a decisive victory for American students’ right to free speech.
When students are on campus, schools act in loco parentis – they function in place of parents. This gives schools legal authority over minors’ rights while they are at school and formally gives all other authority over minors to their legal guardians. This doctrine and the fact that Levy was off campus when she made the posts was at the centre of the majority opinion’s arguments. Since the Levy ruling reaffirms the school’s on-campus authority over student’s rights, this aspect can be interpreted as an opening to further restrict student speech when on campus.
In questioning, some justices raised concerns about a school’s ability to punish off-campus speech that was threatening to other students. Other justices raised concerns of what schools would do with authority over off-campus speech that was politically controversial.
The justices’ questions indicate that they feel the issue of off-campus speech needs to be further unpacked. All but two of the justices are under the age of 70, and all three of former President Donald Trump’s appointments are under the age of 60. With the composition of the court being unlikely to change any time soon, the right of students to express themselves freely may yet be further eroded.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You may also want to read” category_id=”581″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
11 Jun 21 | News and features, United States
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116892″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Fifty years ago this weekend, the New York Times ran a story under the headline “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing US Involvement”.
The headline is understated and far from the sensationalist language that would be used for a similarly explosive exclusive today.
The article, published on 13 June 1971, was the first of a series that outlined the revelations of what became known as the Pentagon Papers, disclosures from on a 7,000-page report leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a government contractor who worked for the Rand Corporation.
The newspaper revealed how four consecutive Presidents “progressively developed a sense of commitment to a non‐Communist Vietnam, a readiness to fight the North to protect the South, and an ultimate frustration with this effort, with much of it hidden from the public gaze”.
In an interview with Index on Censorship this week, Ellsberg said the huge volume of material did not at first appear to be anything special.
“They didn’t look that effective as they ended in 1968. I assumed that then President [Nixon] would say this is old history and doesn’t have anything to do with me. It was just a fifth president following in the footsteps of four previous presidents,” he said.
Ellsberg faced more than 100 years in prison for leaking the documents but illegal Government evidence-gathering saw the judge in his case declare a mistrial.
In the end, Nixon’s fury over the leaking of documents like the Pentagon Papers led to his downfall in the Watergate Scandal.
Yet little has changed in the past 50 years, says Ellsberg.
“US foreign policy is largely conducted as a covert, plausibly denied, imperial policy,” said Ellsberg. “We deny we are an empire and we deny the means we use, the means which every empire uses to maintain its hegemony – torture, paramilitary invasion, assassination. This is the standard for everybody that seeks a global influence over countries and get involved in regime change the way we do.”
Ellsberg has called on the young to take a stand against government wrongdoing.
“When young people sign agreements [with their employers] under which they will be asked to not reveal any secrets they become privy to in their job, they should take into account that they don’t really have a right to keep that promise in all circumstances,” he said. “Circumstances may well arise where it is wrong to keep silent about information that has come to your attention because other lives are at stake or perhaps the Constitution is being violated and that it is wrongful to keep that promise.”
“It doesn’t occur to you that you could be asked to take part in very wrongful or criminal activities. In your eyes, you are not joining the Mafia yet you make a promise of secrecy like the Mafia without knowing what you are going to be asked to do. This is why you should have your fingers crossed when you make that promise.”
He says, “Young people should remain open to the idea that you may be called on to challenge, to risk your job, your career, your relationships with other people by telling the truth even if you have promised not to do that. It is very unusual advice for young people to hear; it will not improve their career prospects but it will possibly save a lot of lives.”
Ellsberg is in regular contact with other whistleblowers, a club with a very exclusive membership.
“There is something unfortunately quite rare about whistleblowing, and that is not good for the future of our species. It means that when terribly dangerous processes are at work, like wrongful wars or the climate crisis, we can’t count on people to step forward and tell us what we need to know.“
“Very few people get beyond the point of saying this should be known to the point of saying no-one else is going to do it, so I have to do it. That turns out to be an almost unpredictable reaction. It is a matter of personal responsibility and moral courage.”
In a wide-ranging interview published in full in the summer edition of Index on Censorship magazine Ellsberg talks about his views on Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and NSA whistleblower Reality Winner.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
24 Mar 21 | 50 years of Index
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116457″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Of the “gang of four” who signed the documents establishing the Writers and Scholars Education Trust fifty years ago on 25 March 1971, Peter Calvocoressi perhaps embodied the spirit of that trust more than the other three. He was both writer and scholar. And many things besides.
In 1968, Calvocoressi published what became the definitive work on post-war global history, World Politics Since 1945. The book, which the Sunday Times called “masterly”, has remained in print ever since and stretches to almost 900 pages.
It is one of more than 20 books he wrote during his lifetime, which stretched from a Who’s Who in The Bible to Suez: Ten Years After.
His academic credentials were equally impressive: he was Reader in International Relations at the University of Sussex, a post created especially for him.
The Calvocoressi name hints at his most international of upbringings. He was born in Karachi, in what is now Pakistan, but then was British India, making him a British subject. However, in one of his autobiographical works he considered himself “entirely Greek”, being part of the Ralli family who left the Aegean island of Chios in the 19th century diaspora.
Peter’s parents moved to London in 1910 and he was born two years later. Peter was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford where he got a first in modern history.
He was called to the Bar in 1935 and shortly thereafter was recruited into the Ministry of Economic Warfare, based at the London School of Economics.
Soon after the start of the Second World War, Calvocoressi resolved to volunteer to become more active in the war effort. After a day of tests at the War Office he was told he was “no good, not even for intelligence”.
That conclusion proved to be very wrong. Soon after, through a contact, he was interviewed by the Air Ministry and shortly after became an RAF intelligence officer. In 1942, his gift for languages saw him plucked out for duty to Bletchley Park, the wartime home of the Allied codebreakers.
There he worked in the famous Hut 3, which decrypted messages from Germany’s Enigma machines and passed intelligence, known as Ultra, to the Allies’ military commanders. His time at Bletchley, where he went on to lead Hut 3, is described in his revelatory book Top Secret Ultra, published in 1980, shortly after the activities of the Allied codebreakers were first made public.
After the war, Calvocoressi was asked to participate in the Nuremberg Trials, helping obtain evidence for the Allied prosecution team and in which he cross-examined former German Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt.
Calvocoressi spent much of the Fifties researching and writing his Survey of International Affairs series, revealing his firm grasp of global politics and international relations.
He was asked to join the council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in 1961 and later was instrumental in the early years of Amnesty International.
In 1967, he was called on as an independent expert to find out whether Amnesty had been infiltrated by British intelligence agents – his investigation proved that it had not. He steadied the ship at the organisation and served on its board from 1969 to 1971.
Throughout the decade, Calvocoressi was a member of the UN’s Commission on discrimination and the protection of minorities and became a member and chairman of the Africa Bureau, which lobbied against apartheid, at the request of his friend David Astor, owner and editor of The Observer.
Calvocoressi’s international experience and erudition made him an obvious choice to be asked to help found the Writers and Scholars Educational Trust, the organisation that is today better known by its working name of Index on Censorship.
Calvocoressi contributed to Index’s work in the early years but the world of publishing came calling.
He became a partner in publishers Chatto & Windus and Hogarth Press and was later asked to be chief executive of Penguin Books, a position he held until 1976. He continued his prodigious writing output throughout the Eighties and Nineties.
He had strong freedom of expression values too. He believed in the freedom to publish – writing a book of the same name which Index published in 1980.
He also believed in the freedom of the press but not at any cost.
In the case of the Pentagon Papers, the revelations around US involvement in the Vietnam War, he wrote to the Sunday Times about the decision of US newspaper editors to publish them.
He wrote: “The newspapers maintained that they were entitled to print the Pentagon Papers because the documents had come into their possession and they themselves judged that publication could not harm national security.
“But is an editor in a position to judge this? Surely not, for he cannot know enough of the background to tell whether he is giving something away.”
“Governments must have secrets whether we like it or not, and the power to preserve them. I am not denying that our own government overdoes the secrecy, sometimes absurdly so.”
What readers of that letter did not know, of course, was Calvocoressi’s personal involvement in the biggest secret of the war: the codebreaking at Bletchley Park.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
