August 18th 2008
The Wall Street Journal‘s law blog covers the remarkable online obscenity case of 56-year-old Karen Fletcher. A reclusive abuse survivor, she is a sympathetic publisher of stories involving the rape, murder, and torture of children. The comments generated by this blog post voice our societies desire both for freedom and for various imperfect schemes for […]
August 14th 2008
Kevin Gosper, chairman of the IOC’s press commission, disclosed that Olympic officials negotiated with their Chinese hosts and agreed that certain sensitive Web sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games-related. This would include Chinese language versions of the BBC, Voice of America and Amnesty International. Chinese officials noted that this […]
August 13th 2008
An update on yesterday’s post, MBTA Makes MIT Subway Hack Guide Famous. The MBTA issued a statement to CNET which tells their view of how MIT students approached shared information with the organization about flaws in its fare card system. Now Dan Grabauskas, the general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, has told the […]
August 12th 2008
My local transit agency, the MBTA, gained a restraining order to keep a group of MIT students from presenting their discovery of just how easy it is to forge credits on the subway’s fare cards. But since the MBTA filed the students’ paper as part of their complaint, the full text of what they sought […]
July 16th 2008
The Iranian parliament is moving toward enforcing the death penalty as a punishment for blogging that encourages “corruption, prostitution or apostasy.” As I wrote last month, there are about 40 bloggers imprisoned worldwide. Blogs are filtered, and bloggers are deterred, but this is the first law that would try to eliminate bloggers altogether. Iranian President […]
June 21st 2008
The Christian Science Monitor reports that as blogging has become more popular, so has the oppression of bloggers by governments. Bloggers seem particularly susceptible to political imprisonment: The vigilante tone of many citizen journalists sends them down a prickly path with government censors; and they are often one-man operations, meaning there’s no editors or company […]
June 15th 2008
Jonathan Zittrain had been serving as Oxford University’s Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, until this week, when he agreed to return to Harvard Law as its newest tenured Professor. A ’95 grad of Harvard Law, Zittrain co-founded Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which makes him a key thinker about the kinds of topics I […]
June 4th 2008
Inspired by the hideous and tacky mascots of the Beijing Olympics, the Internet Surveillance Division of the Public Security Bureau in Shenzhen and the Beijing Police have adopted animated, noseless “censor-mascots” of their own, Jingjing and Chacha. Note the play on words: jing cha means “police” in Chinese. Even as Chinese citizens use the Internet […]
June 3rd 2008
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is considering blocking Facebook, the popular social networking site used in April to mobilize 80,000 supporters to protest rising food prices. As described in earlier postings, Facebook has been used around the world to coordinated even larger protests. Blogger Kareem el-Beheiri, who covered and promoted the protest was imprisioned for 73 . See […]
May 20th 2008
Floyd Abrams published an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal describing how plaintiffs seeking to suppress protected speech in the US are gaining libel judgements in England. Rachel Ehrenfeld’s book Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Funded and How to Stop It, had sold only 23 copies in England. But that was enough for a UK […]
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