08 Oct 13 | News and features, Politics and Society, The climate crisis, United Kingdom, United States
(Photo Illustration: Shutterstock)
The continuing advance of climate science, as reflected in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recently released Fifth Assessment Report, points ever more strongly to the need for an expedited phase-out of carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Only a fundamental transformation of the current energy system during the coming decades may make it possible to avert disastrous impacts of global climatic disruption.
Carrying out such a transformation would be a political, economic, and technological challenge under the best of circumstances. But it is made especially difficult by corporate and ideologically driven opposition — most notably, by pressure from fossil fuel production interests to protect their strategic position and set the terms for government policymaking.
The United States and Canada exemplify the power of the dominant energy interests. The governments of both countries strongly support the expansion of domestic fossil energy extraction, production, and export. But the collision between climate science and energy politics, and threats to freedom of communication, are playing out differently in the two countries.
With the Harper government in Canada, for years we have witnessed an ongoing repression of climate and environmental science communication by government scientists, along with systematic cutbacks of environmental research and data collection. “Harper’s attack on science: No science, no evidence, no truth, no democracy“, an excellent review and discussion in the May 2013 issue of the Canadian journal Academic Matters, itemized a series of moves by the Harper government to control or prevent the free flow of scientific information across Canada, particularly when that information highlights the undesirable consequences of industrial development. The free flow of information is controlled in two ways: through the muzzling of scientists who might communicate scientific information, and through the elimination of research programs that might participate in the creation of scientific information or evidence.
It appears that the issues on which government scientists are subjected to the tightest political control of communications include climate change, the Alberta tar sands, the oil and gas industry, and Arctic wildlife. In other words, issues on which free communication of scientific evidence could pose problems for corporate energy development interests.
The situation in Canada has driven government scientists to hold public protest rallies twice in the last year. In September, rallies in major city centers and on university campuses were held across the country.
“It isn’t the way science is supposed to be. It’s not the way science used to be, the way I remember it in the federal government,” IPCC vice-chair and retired Environment Canada scientist John Stone told The Guardian.
So the Harper government can be said to be following in the footsteps — even surpassing — the record of the former Bush-Cheney administration in the U.S., whose alignment with energy industry interests led them to misrepresent climate science intelligence and impede forthright communication by federal climate scientists.
In the U.S., the Obama administration presents a complex picture that differs from Canada in significant ways, but also suggests the problematic nature of government support for expanded fossil energy extraction and production. The administration appears susceptible to industry pressure aimed at playing down the environmental and societal consequences of fossil energy resource extraction and use.
After several years of near-silence on climate change at the highest levels of U.S. political leadership, in June President Obama finally gave a major public address on climate change (the first by an American president) and laid out a multifaceted Climate Action Plan. The plan focuses on actions that can be taken by the White House and Executive Branch in the absence of action by a Congress that is tied in knots, largely subservient to corporate energy interests, and with much of the Republican Party aligned with the global warming denial machine.
Under Obama, we see a more straightforward acknowledgement of climate science and assessments by the most credible experts, and more straightforward communication on climate by federal research agencies. The forthcoming National Climate Assessment, scheduled for release next spring, will address the implications of climatic disruption for the U.S., across geographical regions and socioeconomic and resource sectors (public health, water resources, food production, coastal zones, and so forth). The importance of national assessments for public discourse was underscored when the Bush administration, in collusion with nongovernmental global warming denialists, suppressed official use of and references to the first National Climate Assessment, which had been completed in 2000.
Yet, despite the numerous constructive action items in Obama’s Climate Action Plan, there appears to be a contradiction at the heart of Obama’s policy, as indicated by the administration’s adoption of what they call an ‘all of the above’ approach to energy development. Obama points to increased U.S. fossil energy extraction as a major accomplishment. U.S. energy development includes ‘mountaintop removal’ coal mining in Appalachia, large-scale coal strip-mining on public lands in the West, and increased coal exports; deepwater drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, even in the wake of the BP oil blowout disaster in 2010, and quite possibly drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska; and a dramatic increase during the past five years in natural gas production using directional drilling technology and hydraulic fracturing of shale deposits that cover a number of large areas across the country.
Natural gas from ‘fracking’ appears to be an essential component of the administration’s climate policy, i.e., relying on the ongoing trend of substitution of natural gas for coal in power plants in order to meet a 2020 goal for reducing U.S. carbon emissions. The Department of the Interior has proposed to open 600 million acres of public land to fracking. But fracking is controversial, raising concerns about contamination of drinking water in affected areas by chemicals used in fracking, large-scale use of water in drilling, air pollution, leaking methane greenhouse gas emissions, and industrial degradation of rural landscapes. Environmental groups have protested at the White House, calling for a moratorium on fracking on public lands.
There are sIgns that the administration may be allowing political pressure from the natural gas industry to compromise investigations by the Environmental Protection Agency into fracking contamination incidents. The EPA has pulled back from several high-profile investigations in a manner that raises questions about whether this indicates a pattern of failure to act on scientific evidence. When the EPA’s scientists found evidence that fracking was contaminating water supplies, the EPA stopped or slowed down their work in in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming.
“Not only does this pattern of behavior leave impacted residents in the lurch, but it raises important questions as to whether the agency is caving to pressure from industry, antagonistic members of Congress and/or other outside sources,” Kate Sinding at the Natural Resources Defense Council notes. “This trend also calls into serious question the agency’s commitment to conducting an impartial, comprehensive assessment of the risks fracking presents to drinking water—a first-of-its-kind study that is now in its fourth year, with initial results now promised in 2014.” The EPA recently announced that it has delayed the expected final date of this study until 2016 — Obama’s eighth and final year in office. Meanwhile, industry continues to create a fait accompli of radically expanded fracking operations.
Obama has adopted a forward-looking position on climate change. But his ‘all of the above’ energy policy, and particularly his full-speed-ahead support for shale gas fracking, raises the question of whether politics is impeding freedom of communication by government experts — and whether the EPA is thereby being impeded in doing its job of protecting the public against the environmental dangers of fossil fuel development.
This article was originally published on 8 Oct 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
19 Sep 13 | Digital Freedom, News and features, Politics and Society, United States
David Carr recently reported in the New York Times that journalist Barrett Brown could face a 100-year prison term if he’s found guilty for linking to stolen information. He didn’t steal this information himself, nor did he post it online. He simply linked to it.
Brown is a dogged journalist who has done important and revealing reporting on the business of surveillance. His work has appeared in BusinessWeek, the Guardian, the Huffington Post and Vanity Fair. He has also served at times as a self-appointed spokesman for Anonymous, the leaderless Web collective of hackers and activists.
As a victim, he’s imperfect, Carr writes. Brown has struggled with substance abuse and by all accounts hasn’t always been easy to get along with. For example, he threatened an FBI agent and his family by name in a video he posted to YouTube.
Brown came to the government’s attention when he linked in a chat room to material Anonymous had posted online.
In recent years, Anonymous has hacked into the computer systems of a number of intelligence and surveillance firms who contract with the government and the biggest corporations. These firms helped craft elaborate campaigns to attack and discredit activists and journalists on behalf of corporate clients and have received huge government contracts for other projects.
By all accounts, Brown doesn’t have the technical ability or knowhow to have participated in the hacking that exposed these documents. But once they were released, Brown set up a research organization, Project PM, to sort through the documents and report on what they contained.
“The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors,” Carr writes. But they also contained credit-card information and private emails.
When Brown linked to these files in a chat room, he “provided access” to stolen information, the government says. Prosecutors charged him with 12 counts related to identity theft.
The notion that linking to stolen material makes the linker a party to the original crime is absurd. And the severity of the charges is clearly meant to send a message to journalists and whistleblowers everywhere. Viewed in light of the Chelsea Manning case and the Edward Snowden leaks, the Brown case appears part and parcel of the government’s crackdown on activists who leak information and the journalists who report on them.
Carr reminds us that journalists frequently link to stolen documents. The Times’ most recent articleon the Snowden documents did so. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also points to a leak of congressional staffer passwords that many news organizations linked to. And this practice is only likely to expand.
“News organizations in receipt of leaked documents are increasingly confronting tough decisions about what to publish,” Carr writes, “and are defending their practices in court and in the court of public opinion, not to mention before an administration determined to aggressively prosecute leakers.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists responded in more forceful terms, arguing that the government’s handling of this case “threatens the nature of the Web, as well as the ethical duty of journalists to verify and report the truth.”
Indeed, in the U.S. and the U.K. we’ve seen shocking efforts to harass and intimidate journalistsworking on national security and surveillance issues. The Barrett Brown case follows a similar narrative.
When Brown posted the link to the Anonymous documents in a chat room, the government tracked him down at his mother’s home and tried to seize his laptop. When he and his mother refused to hand over the computer, the FBI threatened to throw Brown’s mother in jail. Here’s how the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald describes the harassment:
Over the next several months, FBI agents continued to harass not only Brown but also his mother, repeatedly threatening to arrest her and indict her for obstruction of justice for harboring Brown and helping him conceal documents by letting him into her home.”
Brown’s mother eventually pled guilty but has yet to be sentenced. Brown lashed out at the FBI, threatening one agent by name, in the video he posted to YouTube. Those threats gave the FBI cause to arrest Brown and he has been in custody ever since.
While threats of this sort should be taken seriously, so too should the ongoing harassment of journalists and their families.
The New York Times story on Barrett Brown is important because it comes on the heels of a gag order that prohibits people involved in his case from speaking to the press. The legal fees for the case are expected to exceed $200,000 and an activist has established a defense fund.
Links are the connective tissue of the Internet. They enable us to share news, discover new information, dig deeper into issues and give credit to sources. The government’s effort to criminalize linking is akin to rewiring how the Internet works. It will have a chilling effect on how journalists report on sensitive government matters.
This case also has a bearing on all of us who post links to Facebook, tweet articles or blog about the news of the day.
This article was originally posted on 13 Sept 2013 at freepress.net and is reproduced here by permission.
18 Sep 13 | Guest Post, News and features, Politics and Society, United States
Josh Stearns argues that the US shield law sets a dangerous precedent by allowing the government to decide who is a journalist. (Photo: Wikipedia)
The Free Flow of Information Act – also known as the “Shield Law” – is meant to protect journalists from having to reveal their sources during investigations by the U.S. government. The bill comes amidst news organizations’ growing concern about the impact of surveillance of the press by the Justice Department and the National Security Agency.
Last week a Senate committee approved the bill. The next step would be a vote by the full Senate. However, as currently written, the bill creates two classes of journalists and sets a dangerous precedent for press freedom.
The first class is protected by default. It includes people who have been employed by newsrooms for at least one year in the last 20 years, or for three months in the last five years. This is actually an improvement over an earlier version, but still excludes many freelancers, bloggers and citizen journalists.
For those not in that class, the bill allows a judge to decide if “such protections would be in the interest of justice and necessary to protect lawful and legitimate newsgathering.” This “judicial discretion” catchall means a broad range of acts of journalism could be protected, but raises questions about the necessity of the first definition of journalist.
The judicial discretion inclusion is significant because the case law in this area strongly asserts protection for all acts of journalism, not just some pre-defined set of “legitimate” journalists. For example, in a 2006 decision a California state appellate court wrote:
We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes “legitimate journalis[m].” The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here. We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish “legitimate” from “illegitimate” news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment.
This point is echoed in decisions by the Second, Third and Ninth Circuit federal courts of appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. And there is a growing consensus amongst leaders inside traditional journalism institutions that we should protect all people engaged in the journalism process regardless of their occupation or affiliation. The Society for Professional Journalists recently passed a resolution that “rejects any attempts to define a journalist in any way other than as someone who commits acts of journalism” and even considered changing its name to reflect this.
Which raises the question, why did some Senators work so hard to create two tiers of journalists and spill so much ink trying to limit those who can be covered?
One answer might be to send a message about who they see as “real” journalists and to further chill sources who might talk to independent reporters. This bill has to be seen in the context of Washington’s ongoing war on leaks and some elected officials’ efforts to criminalize journalism.
The debate over this bill exposed a deep and troubling thread of concern about the shifting media landscape and the nature of a truly participatory fourth estate. During the Senate committee meeting, Sen. Feinstein made it clear that she wanted to limit the bill so it wouldn’t protect people like “the 17 year old who drops out of high school, buys a website for five dollars, and starts a blog.” Other Senators made even more troubling statements, speculating and wringing their hands about spies hiding in newsrooms, foreign journalists at Al Jazeera, and protections for Edward Snowden and Wikileaks.
Most such concerns are baseless because the bill includes a huge “national security” loophole that would let prosecutors force journalists to testify about their sources, or face jail time. This exception makes the bill useless for a huge number of journalists who are most often in possession of leaked material. Yet it’s widely believed that this provision was critical to getting White House support of the bill.
What’s at stake here is not just the narrow purview of this bill, but the precedent of allowing government to define who is and is not a journalist. It is a sad irony that a bill meant to expand press freedom could in fact erode First Amendment rights of non-traditional media makers.
This could all be avoided, and the bill could be greatly strengthened and simplified by defining journalism as an act, a process that anyone can participate in, instead of a profession limited to a few practitioners. As the bill moves forward, making that change should be our top priority.
This article was originally posted on 18 Sept 2013 at indexcensorship.org
22 Aug 13 | Digital Freedom, Index Reports, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture, United States
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(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
Freedom of expression is generally protected in the US, but political, legal, economic and cultural factors continue to constrain this fundamental right. The First Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits laws that abridge free speech, academic freedoms and the right to assemble are generally protected, and violence against journalists is rare.
National security is used excessively to justify free speech and privacy restrictions.
Revelations over the National Security Agency’s “Prism” programme, which it is claimed gives the US government powers of mass surveillance over web communications, have caused huge concern over the authorities’ attitudes to free speech and privacy.
Government transparency and accountability are also key concerns. The 1966 Freedom of Information Act and various state laws are meant to shine light on classified government documents, but many agencies do not comply with these laws or do so significantly later than mandated and with heavily redacted information. The aggressive prosecution and sentencing of WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning and the pursuit of Edward Snowden highlights the Obama administration’s attitude to whistleblowers.
Beyond security and secrecy, some of the greatest challenges to freedom of expression are linked to rapid shifts in technology and online behaviour so that is for digital section. Money is also key. The Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court case in 2010 extended first amendment rights to corporations and unions, threatening the free speech rights of individuals by diminishing the power of their voices to compete with billion-dollar industries. Although US libel laws generally protect the public interest — public figures must prove actual malice rather than mere negligence to win a suit — “Strategic lawsuits against public participation” (SLAPPs) sometimes silence criticism, as libel actions in the US remain expensive.
Despite these concerns, the state of free expression in the US is generally healthy.
Media Freedom
The US enjoys a free and diverse press, although aggressive political partisanship, the consolidation of media ownership and other financial troubles have threatened this freedom as traditional institutions struggle to stay afloat and adapt to an increasingly digital media landscape. Local and national newsrooms have shrunk, and reporters are overstretched , diminishing the quality of American journalism.
Laws against obscenity, indecency and profanity set out and enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restrict what content can appear on free-to-air broadcasting.
Most states have shield laws that protect journalists from revealing their sources, and the Obama administration is proposing a federal shield law, But the government’s prosecution of whistleblowers has raised real concern. The accessing of Associated Press reporters’ phone records in pursuit of leaks has also been a source of alarm.
The Obama administration has been criticised for its aggressive pursuit of whistleblowers and journalists and demands for source information in cases of government secrecy. While the president did sign a Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act into law in late 2012, the behaviour of the authorities when confronted with leaks has been heavy handed.
Meanwhile, physical attacks by police against journalists and bloggers covering the Occupy movements hurt the US’ ranking in several press freedom indices in 2012.
Digital Freedom
About 75 percent of the population is online, but affordable high-speed broadband remains elusive. Copyright legislation and surveillance currently represent some of the greatest threats to digital freedom of expression.
The latest Google Transparency report shows that the US requests more user data than any other country and issues the second most court orders for content removal behind Brazil. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalises the circumvention of copyright controls online without regard for how users intend to use the tools. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) were shelved in 2012 following highly publicised website blackout campaigns by internet activists and web companies, but intellectual property rights remain a concern with secret negotiations around the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement on-going. Efforts are also underway to reform the 1986 Electronic Communications and Privacy Act (ECPA), which allows the government to access private emails older than 180 days without warrant.
PATRIOT Act provisions and the fact that US telecommunications companies comply with millions of government requests for user data have given Americans cause to self censor their electronic communications. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA)[1], which passed through the House of Representatives twice but stalled in the Senate, would have compounded the threat of self censorship by granting companies greater immunity to share private user data with secretive government agencies. In June, it was revealed that the government has been secretly collecting the call records of Verizon customers under the PATRIOT Act and that the National Security Agency can access the servers of Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft and others to monitor users’ video calls, search histories, live chats, and emails. Concern is also growing over how domestic drones used for surveillance will affect individuals’ privacy] and how American web companies are in a sense privatising censorship through terms of service that restrict freedom of expression.
Artistic Freedom
The First Amendment protects artistic freedom in the US, but fear of offence still motivates censorship and self-censorship. Nudity, pornography, obscenity and religious sensitivity are among the most common reasons visual art is censored from public space in the US. Censorship typically occurs at the gallery level where art is removed in response to controversy rather than through legal mandate. Donor funding can also dictate the type and content of art displayed. A US university removed a controversial climate change sculpture without warning in May 2012 when it upset a major donor from the energy industry. High sensitivity to political correctness and concerns about marketability sometimes lead artists to self-censor what they produce, and donor funding often dictates the type and content of art that is displayed. A growing trend of online crowdsourced funding for the arts is helping to overcome this barrier for specific projects.
Controversial books are still removed from or kept out of local public libraries across the country — in March 2013, for example, the Chicago public schools authority demanded the graphic novel Persepolis be removed from its classrooms — and music is regularly stripped of violent references and profanity at stores and on radio due to private decisions or Federal Communications Commission mandates.
Increasingly strict copyright laws keep much art out of the public domain despite relatively liberal fair use provisions. Due to copyright extensions, which now extend to 70 years after the creator’s death, many creative works originally due to enter the public domain this year will not do so until 2052.
This article was originally published on 22 Aug, 2013 at indexoncensorship.org[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Join the Index mailing list and get an exclusive gift” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:28|text_align:left” use_theme_fonts=”yes”][vc_separator color=”black”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]
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