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Jimmy Song discusses Bitcoin, blockchain, and the crypto space

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Sometimes I feel I know a lot about Bitcoin, blockchain, how the crypto space properly functions, and how it will most likely evolve.

From time to time, I even consider myself an expert. But then reality strikes when you happen to have a chance to speak to a Bitcoin community superstar like Jimmy Song.

Jimmy has been a programmer for most of his life and joined the Bitcoin space in 2013. Hes a lecturer at the University of Texas and the author of the awesome book Programming Bitcoin: Learn How to Program Bitcoin from Scratch (which you should definitely read if youre into Bitcoin technicalities).

The conversation was really amusing and Jimmy was quite transparent and straight to the point, as he usually is. Check out a clip from our talk below.

Due to the fact Im constantly being bombarded with private blockchain-related questions, I made sure to start by asking Jimmy his views on the subject. Can there be private blockchains? His logic cut straight through the fog of doubt. As he put it:

There can certainly be private blockchains [] but theres no real point to it if theres a central point of failure or somebody who controls the whole thing, whether you call it an ordering service or some sort of central coordinator.

Plus, what is the purpose of having decentralised technology being run by a strict group of people? As I usually say, if one thinks of Bitcoin as the internet of money, one can think of private blockchains as the ethernet of money. Does it still sound amazing? I have my doubts. Try doing an exercise I like to do to make sure I understand the definitions of words. For instance, we could say a blockchain is a public distributed ledger. Does it make sense to have a private-public distributed ledger?

Maybe it does for some unknown reason. I see a case where companies might want to integrate a distributed ledger-type solution to promote transparency among themselves, but when you make such data public to a blockchain, it cannot be removed, so you better hope whatever youre putting there isnt sensitive or might fall under GDPR compliance, for example.

When we started discussing Bitcoin, one of the things I wanted to understand is why Jimmy is considered a Bitcoin maximalist. A Bitcoin maximalist is someone who believes Bitcoin to be the ultimate form of cryptocurrency, given its properties and community.

Jimmy started by explaining why he fell in love with Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is the only [cryptocurrency] that is decentralised everything else has a central point of failure. Bitcoin, to me, is the only one that is decentralised and digital, and we didnt know we could have that until Satoshi Nakamoto did it. People buy these other cryptocurrencies because they do not understand the value preposition [of Bitcoin] and what money is.

Although I consider myself an altcoin investor, as I do own altcoins, I completely understand (and agree) with Jimmys assertion of Bitcoin and the crypto space. It is true that theres no other cryptocurrency as decentralised as Bitcoin. Even though in some metrics some other cryptos like Ethereum for example might appear decentralised, I dont think it would be fair to say they can match Bitcoin, simply because the network effects of Bitcoin have played a huge part in connecting people financially worldwide.

And no, Im not forgetting the hundreds of tokens that exist thanks to Ethereum, nor the brilliance of gaming dApps and DeFi, which gave rise to CryptoKitties and MakerDAO respectively.

Still, I consider Bitcoin to be above all else in terms of real utility. What it does, it does so well there is no way to stop it.

No regulation, law, government, or company can stop Bitcoin, and that is its value preposition.

On a similar topic, I did ask what Jimmy thought of adding privacy features to Bitcoin, as it could probably increase confidentiality for users:

Theres already a bunch of stuff like bulletproofs and zk-SNARKS that give you full privacy [] but people usually dont care. The problem is that privacy is kind of hard. You cant have perfect hiding and a fixed supply at the same time.

The fact your math may break and you may never notice it means you cannot have a fully-private currency where you guarantee the supply is fixed, for the simple fact that transactions are private meaning if someone manages to break the algorithm and effectively change the supply, you may never notice it.

Story continues

I asked Jimmy about how Bitcoin could scale, and he touched on the subject of micropayments and the Lightning Network (LN) and how it could improve Bitcoins usability.

Lightning allows you to do payments really fast, and it also allows for micropayments things we never had in the economy until now. Its hard to say. We know BTC is a really great store of value. Micropayments? You can sort of do it in other platforms, so I guess that will increase competition, which is a good thing in the end. But the real value purpose of Bitcoin is store of value.

I personally believe the LN could be a great tool for people to see Bitcoin as a currency as well as money, as up until now the major issue with Bitcoin was transaction times. Because the LN allows for micropayments, e-commerce platforms could properly use Bitcoin with minimal hassle.

Dont forget to follow Jimmy on Twitter and to subscribe to his YouTube channel and weekly newsletterfor the best technical content on Bitcoin.

The post Jimmy Song discusses Bitcoin, blockchain, and the crypto space appeared first on Coin Rivet.

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Jimmy Song discusses Bitcoin, blockchain, and the crypto space

BitcoinSVs blockchain is struggling with its enormous 128MB …

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

The Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BitcoinSV) blockchain has suffered a series of block re-oganizations, putting the integrity of its network in question.

On 18th April 2019, our Bitcoin Cash SV [sic] node experienced twoblock re-organizations. First, a three block re-organization, followed by a six block re-organization,tweetedBitMEX Research, the analysis arm of digital asset exchange BitMEX.

Block re-organizations occur when cryptocurrency miners are forced to orphan blocks after theyve been mined.This can happen when the network is too slow to propagate blocks effectively, and bigger blocks (like the ones featured by BitcoinSV) are especially susceptible to orphaning.

The last time this occurred was in November 2018, when two blocks one 16MB and another 13MB in size were orphaned for being too large. At the time, BitMEX researchers also blamed bad network connectivity.

This makes for three BitcoinSV block re-organizations in six months.

BitcoinSV is a fork of Bitcoin Cash (which is a fork of Bitcoin).It raised Bitcoin Cashs block size limit from 32MB to 128MB. Bitcoins block size limit is still 1MB.

Whiteblock CEO Zak Cole told Hard Fork that when blocks become too large, they take much longer to be processed by the network than smaller ones.

The longer it takes to propagate throughout the network, the higher the likelihood of it becoming an orphan, Cole said. The larger the object, the more likely it will be that it isnt transported in its entirety and will likely have to be rebroadcast.

BitcoinSV uses Proof-of-Work to come to consensus over which transactions (and blocks) to trust. Miners essentially present their own versions of the BitcoinSV blockchain for validation.

The network accepts the longest chain of blocks as the most legitimate record of transactions, but imagine a miner mines a relatively large block and presents it to the network for validation.

Now, at the same time, another miner shares a smaller block, buttheir transactions are written to the blockchain first. In this scenario, the second miner has effectively stolen the first miners intended spot in the trustworthy longest chain.

The miner with the bigger block is stuck with no place to put it. Theyre forced to orphan the block, and the transactions inside of it are effectively cancelled. This means the block was mined, but not included in the blockchain.

While this might seem like a system working as intended, regular block orphaning could have major consequences. Cole explained to Hard Fork that devastating fork events can occur when different versions of blockchains meet with conflicting block histories.

When a significant portion of nodes receive Version A of the chain and then a similarly significant portion of nodes receive Version B, everything will go to hell, Cole told Hard Fork. If blocks are too large to propagate throughout BitcoinSVs mining pools effectively, theyre all going to be deadlocked for a period of time.

These scenarios present conditions which significantly increase the likelihood of double-spends. These attacks involve spendingcryptocurrency with intent toreverse the transactions by assuming 51 percent (or more) of the networks total computing power with a 51-percent attack.

The thing is, orphaned blocks distract network participants from working with the correct chain.Having multiple active versions of a blockchain makes for lesscomputing power dedicated to the longest version of the blockchain.

This means an attacker might not even need to control 51 percent of a networks hash power to double-spend, they could actually find success with much less.

Large portions of the available network hashing rate is going to waste, which lowers the total overall security of the network. warned Cole. As theorphan count rises, it lowers the total amount of hashing power needed to engage in a 51-percent attack.'

A number of cryptocurrency services have recently removed support for BitcoinSV, after Craig Wright and his proponents launched legal action against prominent community members one of which is a pseudonymous Twitter space-cat.

Its still unclear whether BitcoinSVs recently orphaned blocks were malicious. Cole says re-organizations arent necessarily indicative of an attack, but given the current climate, he doesnt rule out this scenario.

BitcoinSV indeed boasts a tiny fraction of Bitcoins hash power, but Cole warns fixing high orphan rates isnt simply a matter of recruiting more miners to the network.

[BitcoinSVs] block sizes are massive. Id say its not an attack, but its definitely a possibility if someone were clever enough to know how to exploit the suboptimal performance, said Cole.

Its not so much to do with hashing power as it large block times, large block sizes, and a suboptimal P2P [peer-to-peer] networking stack, he added.

Hard Fork reached out to nChain, the firm behind BitcoinSVs software, to ask about this unusual activity. Unfortunately, no BitcoinSV reps were immediately available for comment. Well update this piece accordingly should we hear back.

Did you know? Hard Fork has its own stage atTNW2019, our tech conference in Amsterdam.Check it out.

Published April 19, 2019 13:49 UTC

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BitcoinSVs blockchain is struggling with its enormous 128MB ...

Yosemite X uses blockchain tech to shorten payments trip …

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Thanks to blockchain technology, Yosemite X has Visa and MasterCard in its crosshairs, business operations manager Bryan Jin said.

The Palo Alto-based fintech companys newest release, the Yosemite Card, looks to take a large bite out of the credit card companies estimated $55.4 billion annual take in processing fees. Merchants will be charged .1 percent of every $10,000 in transaction volume, with a cap of .3 percent.

We wanted to utilize blockchain technology to create a seamless transaction between parties and eliminate the middleman, Mr. Jin said.

But there was a catch. Existing blockchain technologies didnt meet Yosemite Xs scalability needs so they created their own semi-public blockchain with a potential capability of millions of transactions per second (TPS). Existing card companies TPS top out at a much lower total.

The Yosemite Card eliminates the intermediaries such as payment company, credit card company and card network and settles payment between retailer and customer via a blockchain transaction ledger. Payment is collected in digital fiat tokens equal to the charge amount and converted back at the other end.

Facilitators charge fees of two to five percent, Mr. Jin said. Yosemite Card is able to bypass that requirement so we can offer a significantly lower transaction fee.

When blockchain technology debuted it was basic in its capability but as it developed, so did its potential to change the industry landscape, Mr. Jin said.

It connects users so they can interact directly with each other and not have to go through a centralized entity such as Visa or MasterCard. The possibilities of what it could create are endless.

Yosemite X will take their time with rolling out Yosemite Card, Mr.Jin said. They will concentrate around UC Berkeley and other college towns where there is a concentration of merchants employing it. Those merchants will attract students who will in turn attract more merchants.

Security is strong because, unlike most credit card companies, Yosemite X does not employ a centralized server. They also utilize a combination of an AI-assisted one-time password and static QR code.

We offer it as secure way of presenting an account number instead of a 16-digit number, Mr. Jin said. On mobile payments the QR code changes every time and is combined with a one-time password which is a six-digit number. If someone then steals that QR code it wont mean anything.

Were utilizing a new technology to improve an old way of doing things, Mr. Jin said.

Image byJan VaekfromPixabay

This article contains new, firsthand information uncovered by its reporter(s). This includes directly interviewing sources and research / analysis of primary source documents.

As a news piece, this article cites verifiable, third-party sources which have all been thoroughly fact-checked and deemed credible by the Newsroom in accordance with the Civil Constitution.

This Newsmaker has been deemed by this Newsroom as having a specialized knowledge of the subject covered in this article.

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The politically correct attack on Ilhan Omar – news.yahoo.com

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Theres a phrase for the attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar thats on the tip of my tongue, and if you give me a minute Ill think of it.

Omar, the freshman Democrat from Minnesota, was guilty, in the eyes of President Trump, various Republicans in Congress and those guardians of civil discourse, the editors of the New York Post, of failing to show proper deference in discussing the attacks of 9/11. What she said, in a speech last month to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil-rights organization, was that CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties. (She was mistaken about the year CAIR was established it was 1994 but her intended point, that 9/11 was a seminal moment for the organization, was correct.)

Her critics focused on her use of the phrase some people did something, rather than the Republican-approved description of 9/11 as a horrible attack by radical Islamist terrorists on the United States, leading to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians and heroic first responders. Which is accurate, and it would probably help Omar get past the episode if she said as much. But in the context of her remarks, some people did something was clearly meant to signal her own distance from the attacks she was 19 years old and living in Minnesota, a refugee from Somalia and a naturalized U.S. citizen and the unfairness of being stigmatized, along with all other American Muslims, for what some people did.

Im trying to think of the term for that kind of enforcement of rigid norms of discourse. Factional decorum? No, thats not it. Ideological propriety? Dont think so.

Obviously, almost from the moment they occurred, the attacks of 9/11 have been used to score political points, not always in what one might consider good faith. The party now attacking Omar nominated and renominated an administration that used those attacks as a pretext to launch a war against Iraq, which even the current Republican president has described as a disaster. New Yorks mayor at the time, Rudy Giuliani, cited his leadership in the aftermath as his prime credential in his 2008 presidential campaign. (It was Joe Biden, a candidate for the Democratic nomination, who memorably described Giulianis speeches as consisting of a noun, a verb and 9/11.)

During his own campaign, Trump claimed to have seen on television thousands and thousands of people in Muslim neighborhoods in New Jersey cheering as those buildings came down, something that by all evidence never happened.

And while Omars reference to some people may have come across as unacceptably vague, evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were outspoken in pinning the blame for 9/11 on those they considered the real perpetrators, the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way. These people, Falwell said on Robertsons television broadcast, just days after 9/11, brought about the calamity by making God mad at the United States.

All of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, You helped this happen, Falwell continued, to which Robertson responded, I totally concur.

Let me be clear: Falwell and Robertson are entitled to their beliefs, preposterous though they might be, and even if they quickly (and unconvincingly) disavowed them once they circulated beyond the friendly confines of the Christian Broadcasting Network. But Omars failure to focus-group test her description of 9/11 left her open to the kind of attack that is becoming all too common in America, from both ends of the ideological spectrum. Language is increasingly deployed in the service of advancing an argument rather than conveying meaning.

On the activist left it is impermissible to speak of the Palestinians except in the context of their oppression by Israel; the fact that some Palestinians are terrorists goes unmentioned. The crisis of incarceration in some communities is discussed as if it were a unitary, impersonal phenomenon, unrelated to the reasons some people are incarcerated. These are not simple issues. The Palestinians are indeed oppressed, and some jurisdictions jail people for stupid or venal reasons, such as minor drug possession or not paying a traffic fine. But when we insist they can only be discussed through an ideological lens the reverse, in this case, of the lens conservatives have turned on Omar we make reasoned discourse more difficult.

In fact, I think I have figured out how to refer to the attacks on Omar.

Its coming back to me now: its political correctness.

_____

Political correctness – Simple English Wikipedia, the free …

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Political correctness (or PC for short) means using words or behavior which will not offend any group of people. Most people think it is important for everyone to be treated equally, fairly and with dignity. Some words that are unkind to some people have been used for a long time. Some of these words have now been replaced by other words that are not offensive. These new words are described as politically correct.The term is often used in a mocking sense when attempts at avoiding offense are seen to go too far.

This term has been used since the early 1970s. It started being used in the modern negative sense in the late 80s in America.

Politically correct words or terms are used to show differences between people or groups in a non-offensive way. This difference may be because of race, gender, beliefs, religion, sexual orientation, or because they have a mental or physical disability, or any difference from what is considered the norm.

Throughout the 20th century women fought to have the same rights as men. In PC language this is seen in changes to job titles such as "policeman", "postman", and "chairman" which now commonly go by the gender-neutral titles "police officer", "letter carrier" and "chairperson" or "chair" as well as with terms having broader application, such as "humankind" replacing "mankind".

People who are attracted to the same gender are usually referred to as 'homosexual'. Likewise, people who are attracted to people of both genders are usually referred to as "bisexual". However, both of these terms are seen as being perfectly fine by the more politically liberal oriented people.

People who are mentally disabled are now rarely described as "mentally retarded" (sometimes called "M.R.") but may be said to have "special needs". M.R. has been changed to I.D.; Intellectual Disabilities.

People who are blind or deaf may be referred to as "vision impaired" and "hearing impaired". People who cannot speak are never "dumb" but "mute" or "without speech".

The overall terms 'handicapped' and 'disabled' are no longer considered appropriate (there is no distinction between physical or mental, acquired or inborn.) The people first/PC term is 'challenged'. This term better reflects the fact they are different, rather than less.

Some of the new politically correct words are often criticized for being rather ridiculous. Some examples of these are the terms ending in challenged. For example, someone who is very short might be described as "vertically challenged". People also say that things that are obviously bad are called by something else which hides the fact that they are bad. For example, young people who are in trouble with the law, instead of being called "juvenile delinquents" became "children at risk". Some PC terms may be ambiguous i.e. have two possible meanings. "hearing impaired" can also refer to someone who has partial hearing (hard of hearing) and "vision impaired" can also refer to someone who has partial vision.

Continued here:

Political correctness - Simple English Wikipedia, the free ...

Jitsi – Should I Remove It?

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

What is Jitsi? (from the publisher)

Jitsi is Open Source / Free Software, and is available under the terms of the LGPL. Jitsi (formerly SIP Communicator) is an audio/video and chat communicator that supports protocols such as SIP, XMPP/Jabber, AIM/ICQ, Windows Live, Yahoo! and many other useful features.

The most common release is 2.4.4997, with over 98% of all installations currently using this version. During setup, the program creates a startup registration point in Windows in order to automatically start when any user boots the PC. Upon being installed, the software adds a Windows Service which is designed to run continuously in the background. Manually stopping the service has been seen to cause the program to stop functing properly. It adds a background controller service that is set to automatically run. Delaying the start of this service is possible through the service manager. It adds a Browser Helper Object (BHO) to Internet Explorer. A scheduled task is added to Windows Task Scheduler in order to launch the program at various scheduled times (the schedule varies depending on the version). The software is designed to connect to the Internet and adds a Windows Firewall exception in order to do so without being interfered with. The setup package generally installs about 126 files. Relative to the overall usage of users who have this installed on their PCs, most are running Windows 7 (SP1) and Windows 10. While about 39% of users of Jitsi come from the United States, it is also popular in France and Germany.

Help link: jitsi.org

Installation folder: C:Program Filesjitsijrelibziamerica

Uninstaller: MsiExec.exe /I{45A78051-9B86-40D4-9D4E-77436F9EC5F8}

(The Windows Installer is used for the installation, maintenance, and removal.)

Language: French (France)

2 Internet Explorer BHOs

Internet Explorer Extension

Scheduled Task

Service

2 Startup Files (User Run)

Startup File (All Users Run)

3 Windows Firewall Allowed Programs

Network connections

Show technical details

Quickly and completely remove Jitsi from your computer by downloading "Should I Remove It?", its 100% FREE and installs in seconds (click the button below).

Or, you can uninstall Jitsi from your computer by using the Add/Remove Program feature in the Window's Control Panel.

If your web browser homepage and search settings have been modfied by Jitsi you can restore them to their previous default settings.

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Mozilla Firefox

Google Chrome

OS VERSIONS

Win 7 (SP1)53%

Win 7 0%

HOW IT STARTS

Automatically starts?Yes

(Found in the run registry)

USER ACTIONS

Uninstall it4%

Keep it96%

Which Windows OS versions does it run on?

Which OS releases does it run on?

38.63% of installs come from the United States

Which countries install it?

What PC manufacturers (OEMs) have it installed?

Common models

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Jitsi - Should I Remove It?

Space Station – Unique Properties, Loft Apartments, Penthouses

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Unique Properties, Loft Apartments, Penthouses | Space Station

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If you are looking to sell or let a unique property space, it pays to work with an agency that knows how to find the right buyer or tenant who will fully appreciate its value regardless of the 'market rates'. This requires a much more strategic approach than traditional agents typically employ. Your property is a work of art not a commodity and needs to be marketed as such.

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Space Station - Unique Properties, Loft Apartments, Penthouses

Tor Browser 8.0.8 Download – TechSpot

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor's hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.

Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use Tor to allow their workers to connect to their home website while they're in a foreign country, without notifying everybody nearby that they're working with that organization.

Groups such as Indymedia recommend Tor for safeguarding their members' online privacy and security. Activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recommend Tor as a mechanism for maintaining civil liberties online. Corporations use Tor as a safe way to conduct competitive analysis, and to protect sensitive procurement patterns from eavesdroppers. They also use it to replace traditional VPNs, which reveal the exact amount and timing of communication. Which locations have employees working late? Which locations have employees consulting job-hunting websites? Which research divisions are communicating with the company's patent lawyers?

A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently. Law enforcement uses Tor for visiting or surveilling web sites without leaving government IP addresses in their web logs, and for security during sting operations.

Welcome Screen

Our old screen had way too much information for the users, leading many of them to spend great time confused about what to do. Some users at the paper experiment spent up to 40min confused about what they needed to be doing here. Besides simplifying the screen and the message, to make it easier for the user to know if they need to configure anything or not, we also did a 'brand refresh' bringing our logo to the launcher.

Censorship circumvention configuration

This is one of the most important steps for a user who is trying to connect to Tor while their network is censoring Tor. We also worked really hard to make sure the UI text would make it easy for the user to understand what a bridge is for and how to configure to use one. Another update was a little tip we added at the drop-down menu (as you can see below) for which bridge to use in countries that have very sophisticated censorship methods.

Proxy help information

The proxy settings at our Tor Launcher configuration wizard is an important feature for users who are under a network that demands such configuration. But it can also lead to a lot of confusion if the user has no idea what a proxy is. Since it is a very important feature for users, we decided to keep it in the main configuration screen and introduced a help prompt with an explanation of when someone would need such configuration.

As part of our work with the UX team, we will also be coordinating user testing of this new UI to continue iterating and make sure we are always improving our users' experience. We are also planning a series of improvements not only for the Tor Launcher flow but for the whole browser experience (once you are connected to Tor) including a new user onboarding flow. And last but not least we are streamlining both our mobile and desktop experience: Tor Browser 7.5 adapted the security slider design we did for mobile bringing the improved user experience to the desktop as well.

Other

What's New:

All platforms

Linux

Other versions:

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Tor Browser 8.0.8 Download - TechSpot

Tor Browser – Free Download for Windows 10 [64 bit / 32 bit]

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Tor BrowserLatest Freeware

Download Tor Browser latest version 2019 free for windows 10, 8, 8.1 and 7 | Setup installer [64 bit, 32 bit]. Free software and an open network that helps you defend against traffic analysis, prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked. Safe download with no ads and virus free, developed by Tor Project (2182).

*: Portable and Offline setup files are provided when available.

Tor Browser

Developer Tor Project

Tor Browser is a free web browser based on the Tor Network. A free software and an open network that helps you defend against traffic analysis, prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.

Tor Browser lets you use Tor on Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS, or GNU/Linux without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser to protect your anonymity, and is self-contained (portable).

Download the file above, and save it somewhere, then double click on it. (1) Click Run then choose the installers language and clickOK(2). Make sure you have at least 80MB of free disk space in the location you select. If you want to leave the bundle on the computer, saving it to the Desktop is a good choice. If you want to move it to a different computer or limit the traces you leave behind, save it to a USB disk.

ClickInstall(3) Wait until the installer finishes. This may take a few minutes to complete.

Once the installation is complete, clickFinishto launch Tor Browsers wizard.

Once you see Tor Browsers wizard clickConnect

Alternatively, you can launch Tor Browser by going to the folderTor Browserwhich can be found at the location you saved the bundle at (Default: Desktop) and double click on theStart Tor Browserapplication.

Once Tor is ready, Tor Browser will automatically be opened. Only web pages visited through Tor Browser will be sent via Tor. Other web browsers such as Internet Explorer are not affected.

Once you are finished browsing, close any open Tor Browser windows by clicking on the X(6). For privacy reasons, the list of web pages you visited and any cookies will be deleted.

To use Tor Browser again, double click on the Start Tor Browser application.

Remember that Tor anonymizes the origin of your traffic, and it encrypts everything inside the Tor network, butit cant encrypt your traffic between the Tor network and its final destination.If you are communicating sensitive information, you should use as much care as you would on the normal scary Internet use HTTPS or other end-to-end encryption and authentication.

Download the most recent version of Tor Browser for your Windows powered PC, Laptop, Notebook, Tablet. * Offline setup file is provided when ever available in download section.

Supported Devices: Microsoft Surface, Samsung, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Toshiba, Nokia Tablet and many others running windows 10, 8/8.1 or 7.No 3rd party installers, no adware, no toolbars, no viruses or any other harmful apps.

Disclaimer Windows10Top does not provide any keygen activation, key generator, license key, registration codes, serial numbers, Keygen, patch or crack for Tor Browser.

Tor Browser is developed and maintained by Tor Project. Our site is not affiliated with the developer by any means. All trademarks, product and company logos are the property of their respective owners.

To uninstall (remove) it from your device, follow these instructions:

To make it as the default application among other VPN, Proxy & IP Protection, follow these simple steps:

N.B. Some times microsoft tells you that it is recommended to use certain application for windows 10, just ignore & click switch anyway.

You can also choose default app for specific file type or specific protocol from other options.

It is completely free to download any App/Game from Windows10Top. Tor Browser 64 bit free download for windows 10.

Where to buy Tor Browser professional version with discount?

Windows 10 Top - like every one of you- likes freewares, however sometimes the good value is not for free.You will always find a cheap buying link with discount just above the download links when available.

Always download the most recent version. Downloading the newer version ensures more stability, more bug fixes, more features & less security threats.

Updated version makes app/game works better on new Windows 10 builds.

Generally, 64 bit versions provide more stability, improved performance & better usage of high hardware capabilities (CPU & RAM).

On the other side, Tor Browser 64 bit version requires 64 bit supported hardware (64 bit CPU which most modern devices has)

Tor Browser 32 bit can work without problems on both Windows 32 bit & Windows 64 bit, but 64 bit version will work only on Windows 64 bit.

Originally posted here:

Tor Browser - Free Download for Windows 10 [64 bit / 32 bit]

Tor Browser Review & Rating | PCMag.com

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Need to hire an assassin, buy some contraband, view illegal porn, or just bypass government, corporate, or identity thief snooping? Tor is your answer. Tor, which stands for "The Onion Router" is not a product, but a protocol that lets you hide your Web browsing as though it were obscured by the many layers of an onion. The most common way to view the so-called Dark Web that comprises Tor sites is by using the Tor Browser, a modded version of Mozilla Firefox. Using this Web browser also hides your location, IP address, and other identifying data from regular websites. Accessing Tor has long been beyond the ability of the average user. Tor Browser manages to simplify the process of protecting your identity onlinebut at the price of performance.

What Is Tor?If you're thinking that Tor comes from a sketchy group of hackers, know that its core technology was developed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab and D.A.R.P.A.. The Tor Project non-profit receives sizeable donations from various federal entities such as The National Science Foundation. The Tor Project has a page listing many examples of legitimate types of Tor users, such as political dissidents in countries with tight control over the Internet and individuals concerned about personal privacy.

Tor won't encrypt your datafor that, you'll need a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Instead, Tor routes your Internet traffic through a series of intermediary nodes. This makes it very difficult for government snoops or aggressive advertisers to track you online. Using Tor affords far more privacy than other browsers' private (or Incognito) modes, since it obscures your IP address so that you can't be tracked with it. Standard browsers' private browsing modes discard your cached pages and browsing history after your browsing session. Even Firefox's new, enhanced private browsing mode doesn't hide your identifiable IP address from the sites you visit, though it does prevent them tracking you based on cookies.

Starting UpConnecting to the Tor network entails more than just installing a browser and firing up websites. You need to install support code, but luckily, the free Tor Browser bundle streamlines the process. Installers are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Tor Project recommends installing the browser on a USB drive for more anonymity and portability; the drive needs to have 80MB free space.

We tested a standard Windows installer, with choices to create desktop icons and run the browser immediately. The browser itself is a heavily modified version of Firefox 38.5 (as of this writing), and includes several security plug-ins as well as security tweaks such as not caching any website data. For a full rundown of the PCMag Editors' Choice browser's many features, read our full review of Firefox.

Before merrily browsing along anonymously, you need to inform Tor about your Web connection. If your Internet connection is censored, you configure one way, if not, you can connect directly to the network. Since we live in a free society and work for benevolent corporate overlords, we connected directly for testing. After connecting to the Tor relay system (a dialog with a progress bar appears at this stage), the browser launches, and you see the Tor project's page.

InterfaceThe browser's home page includes a plea for financial support to the project, a search box using the anonymized Disconnect.me search, and a Test Tor Network Settings link. Hitting the latter loads a page that indicates whether you're successfully anonymized. We recommend taking this step. The page even shows your apparent IP addressapparent because it's by no means your actual IP address. We verified this by opening Microsoft Edge and checking our actual IP address on Web search sites. The two addresses couldn't have been more different, because the Tor Browser reports the IP address of a Tor node.

The browser interface is identical with Firefox, except with some necessary add-ons installed. NoScript, a commonly used Firefox add-on, is preinstalled and can be used to block most non-HTML content on the Web. The green onion button to the left of the address bar is the Torbutton add-on. It lets you see your Tor network settings, but also the circuit you're using: Our circuit started in Germany and passed through two different addresses in the Netherlands before reaching the good old Internet. If that doesn't suit you, you can request a new circuit, either for the current session or for the current site. This was one of our favorite features.

One thing we really like about the Tor Browser is how it makes existing security and privacy tools easier to use. NoScript, for example, can be a harsh mistress, who can be difficult to configure, and can break websites. But a security panel in the Torbutton presents you with a simple security slide. At the lowest, default setting, all browser features are enabled. At the highest setting, all JavaScript and even some image types are blocked, among other settings. This makes it easy to raise or lower the level of protection you need, without having to muck around in multiple settings windows.

Everything you do in the browser is tested for anonymity: When we tried full-screening the browser window, a message told us that that could provide sites a way to track us, and recommended leaving the window at the default size. And the project's site specifically states that using Tor alone doesn't guarantee anonymity, but rather that you have to abide by safe browsing guidelines: don't use BitTorrent, don't install additional browser add-ons, don't open documents or media while online. The recommendation to only visit secure HTTPS sites is optionally enforced by a plug-in called HTTPS Everywhere.

Even if you follow these recommendations, though, someone could detect the simple fact that you're using Tor, unless you set it up to use a Tor bridge relay. Those are not listed in the Tor directory, so hackers (and governments) would have more trouble finding them.

One thing we noticed while browsing the standard Web through Tor was the need to enter a CAPTCHA to access many sites. This is because your cloaked URL looks suspicious to website security services such as CloudFlare, used by millions of sites to protect themselves. It's just one more price you pay for anonymity.

We also had trouble finding the correct version of websites we wished to visit. Directing the Tor Browser to PCMag.com, for example, took us to the Netherlands localization of our website. We could not find any way to direct us back to the main URL, which lets you access the U.S. site.

The Dark WebYou can use Tor to anonymize browsing to standard websites, of course, but there's a whole hidden network of sites that don't appear on the standard Web at all, and are only visible if you're using a Tor connection. You can read all about it in our feature, Inside the Dark Web. If you use a standard search engine, even one anonymized by Disconnect.me, you just see standard websites. By the way, you may improve your privacy by switching to an anonymous search provider such as DuckDuckGo or Startpage.com. DuckDuckGo even offers a hidden search version, and Sinbad Search is only available through Tor. Ahmia is another search engine, on the open Web, for finding hidden Tor sites, with the twist of only showing sites that are on the up-and-up.

Tor hidden sites have URLs that end in .onion, preceded by 16 alphanumeric characters. You can find directories of these hidden sites with categories resembling the good old days of Yahoo. There's even a Tor Links Directory page (on the regular Web) that's a directory of these directories. There are many chat and message boards, but you even find directories of things like lossless audio files, video game hacks, and financial services such as anonymous bitcoin, and even a Tor version of Facebook. Many onion sites are very slow or completely downkeep in mind that they're not run by deep-pocketed Web companies. Very often we clicked an onion link only to be greeted with an "Unable to Connect" error. Sinbad helpfully displays a red "Offline on last crawl" bullet to let you know that a site is probably nonfunctional.

Speed and CompatibilityWebpage loading time under Tor is typically far slower than browsing with a standard Internet connection. It's really not possible to state definitively by how much your browsing will be slowed down if you use Tor, because it depends on the particular relay servers your traffic is being routed through. And this can change every time for every browsing session. As a very rough rule of thumb, however, PCMag.com took 11.3 seconds to load in Firefox and 28.7 seconds in the Tor Browser, at the same time, over the same FiOS connection on the open Web. Your mileage, of course, will vary.

As for browser benchmarks, the results hew to Firefox's own performance, with near-leading performance on all the major JavaScript tests, JetStream and Octane, for example. On our test laptop, the Tor Browser scored 20,195 on Octane, compared with 22,297 for standard Firefoxnot a huge difference. The Tor network routing is a far more significant factor in browsing performance than browser JavaScript speed. That is, unless you've blocked all JavaScript.

Keep in mind, though, that the Tor Browser is based on the Firefox Extended Support Release versions, which updates less frequently so that large organizations have time to maintain their custom code. That means you don't get quite the latest in Firefox performance and features, but security updates are delivered at the same time as new main versions.

There's a similar story when it comes to standards compatibility: On the HTML5Test.com site, which quantifies the number of new Web standards supported by a browser, the Tor Browser gets a score of 412, compared with 468 for the latest Firefox version. You may run into incompatible sites, though. For example, none of the Internet speed connection test sites performed correctly in the Tor Browser.

Tor, Browser of ThunderWith the near complete lack of privacy on today's Web, Tor is becoming more and more necessary. It lets you browse the Web knowing that all those tracking services aren't watching your every move. Most of us have experienced how an ad follows you from site to site, just because you clicked on, or searched for a product or service once. All that goes away.

Of course, you pay a price of extra setup and slower performance with the Tor Browser, but it's less onerous than you may think. And the included support for fine-grain privacy and security protection is excellent. If you take your online privacy seriously, you owe it to yourself to check out the Tor Browser. For standard, full-speed Web browsing, however, check out PCMag Editors' Choice Web browser, Firefox.

See the article here:

Tor Browser Review & Rating | PCMag.com

Versions of the Golden Rule in dozens of religions and …

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Amplified Bible:So then, in everything treat others the same way you want them to treat you,for this is [the essence of] the Law and the [writings of the] Prophets.King James Version: "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you,do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets."

New International Version:So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you,for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

Living Bible:Do for others what you want them to do for you.This is the teaching of the laws of Moses in a nutshell. 1

(Words in bold are not in the original Bible translations.)

A photoshopped "Golden Rule Bus"

This bus image was altered to display "The Golden Rule" on its front.The side of the bus was photoshopped to contain the upper part of Scarboro Missions' Golden Rule poster, which is shown below

Linking the Golden Rule to the "Sheep and Goats" passage, Matthew 25:32-46

A statement by Gautama Buddha:He was the founder of Buddhism, which is the fifth largest religion after Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Chinese traditional religion:

"Resolve to be tender with the young,compassionate with the aged,sympatheitic with the striving.and tolerant with the weak and wrong.Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these." 3

Statement by the Dalai Lama:

The core beliefs of every religion

9 Best Cryptocurrency Exchanges to Buy/Sell Any …

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Slowly and steadily, Bitcoin and altcoins are getting attention from more investors all around the world.

And why not? These cryptocurrencies are time and again proving themselves to be a safe haven against governments inflationary policies.

Thats why some people are even securing cryptocurrencies astheir retirementfunds, while some are doing pure speculation with short-term trading (i.e. buy low, sell high).

And lets not forget about those who are just starting off by looking around to find the answer to questions like:

But before we talk about the best exchanges out there, I need to tell you that its not too late to get invested in cryptocurrencies. At the time of this writing, the Bitcoin and altcoin market is at anall-time high, with a market cap of $166 billion. I believe we will cross the $250 billion mark later this year.

So now that you know youshouldinvest, heres where you need to go to do that.

Here is a consolidated list of best cryptocurrency exchanges with my comments:

For Acquiring Cryptocurrencies:

If you live in a country where its not easy to get Bitcoin, you can use any of these three websites. All three of them offersto buy Bitcoin using a credit/debit card.

Note: This list is starting from easy to use exchanges and moving towards some of the advanced exchanges.

Binance is a rapidly growing exchange that concluded its ICO a few months back.

Though it is based out of China, it doesnt serve its native country but is open to almost all countries around the world.

Since its ICO to till date, it has grown tremendously and is now placed in top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.It now has more than 140 altcoins listed on it which are only increasing as the days are passing.

Binance being a centralized exchange has taken a unique take to expand its business and also provides a decent discount for day traders if they use BNB coins.BNB is Binance Coin which is the native currency of this platform.

Read:Binance Cryptocurrency: A Unique And Rapidly Growing Crypto Exchange

Binances fee structure is also unique. To start with they have 0.1% standard trading fee which is already quite less than other peers. You can even reduce your fee furtherif you pay your trading fee in BNB according to the below-shown structure.

To get started with Binance you need to register using your email ID and the process is quite simple & fast. Moreover, you get 1 QTUM coin as a kind gesture for registration which is limited to 10,000 QTUM coins on first come first basis.

Binance is one of the few exchanges that offers mobile app for iOS and Android. Being using it for a while, I find it too easy to trade cryptocurrency while on the move. You can watch this video to learn how to use their mobile app.

They also have aggressive plans like multi-lingual support, mobile apps for both iOS and Android users,Binance Angel Program, and theCommunity Coin Per Month etc for more adoption of their platform.

BitMex is high volume crypto exchange created by a talented team of economists, high-frequency traders and web developers for the crypto community.

Here you will never find any issues regarding the liquidity of your cryptocurrencies.

The primary currency traded on this exchange is Bitcoin and its future contracts.

Apart from Bitcoin contracts, one can also play around with future contracts for altcoins such as Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Cardano, Litecoin, Ripple.

The registration process on BitMex is quite simple where you just need to register through your email ID and their fee structure is also quite straightforward as shown below:

Trade On BitMex

KuCoin is another easy and hassle-free cryptocurrency exchange. KuCoin offers many popular and unique coin such as DragonChain, $KCS, and many others. Just like Binance, they offer a fully functional mobile app for Android and iOS.

To get started with KuCoin, you can deposit any crypto of your choice ex: BTC and start trading. Personally, I have been using KuCoin since last quarter of 2017 and they are getting popular day by day.

Get started with KuCoin

Changelly is one of the easiest ways to get ahold of various cryptocurrencies.

Changelly has a proven track record of consistently good products being put out into the crypto-space.

One of the best things about Changelly is that you dont need to go through any lengthy verification or registration process. You just log in with your email ID (or any email ID) and start exchanging!

Currently, it supports more than 35 cryptocurrencies along with fiat pairs such as USD/EUR. It is one of the best and easiest to use exchanges out there.If you want to know more, check out Harshsreview on Changelly.

When you use Changelly to exchange cryptocurrency, Changelly bots connect in real time to some of the best and busiest cryptocurrency exchanges in the market to get you the best price.

Usually, when using Changelly, a crypto-to-crypto exchange takes 5 to 30 minutes.

They charge a commission fee of 0.5% on each trade, which I think is minimal in exchange for the volatility and risk that they bear on behalf of their users. In addition to the commission, a miners fee is also paid by the user and is deducted directly from their crypto balance.

But all you need in order to buy from Changelly is aVISA/MasterCard (credit/debit card) or any Changelly-supported cryptocurrency and a wallet where you want to receive your new coins.

The procedure is very simple.

Head towardCoinSutras Cryptocurrency Exchange Changelly, and follow the steps given in thisguide.

Note:Though this guide shows how to buy Ripple in exchange for BTC, the process is exactly the same to buy any other Changelly-supported cryptocurrency.

And if you want to buy cryptos using a VISA/MasterCard, then here is their officialstep-by-step guide on doing that.(Even though this guide is for buying BTC using a VISA/MasterCard, the process is the same as buying any other Changelly-supported cryptocurrency.)

Check out Changelly

Huobi Pro is an internationalcryptocurrency exchangethat originated in China but now has moved across the world to serve a maximum number of investors. It is based out of Singapore and has been operating in this space successfully for the last five years.

As we speak, it occupies the #3 spot on CoinMarketCaps list of exchanges by volume and has 244 cryptocurrency pairs. Hence, needless to say, of this, you will never face liquidity problems on this exchange.

They also have mobile apps for bothAndroidandiOSfor users who want to trade cryptos on the go.

Theirregistration processis also pretty simple and straightforward, so go ahead and do the needful. Oh, and just so you know, the exchange fee is also pretty low. Have fun.

Do read,Huobi Exchange Review & Benefits of HT token: Can It Pull Off Another Binance?

Bittrex is aUS-based cryptocurrency exchange that provides you the option to trade more than 190 cryptocurrencies at a time. They are well-regulated and compliant with all of the current US rules, so crypto users need not worry about the safety of their funds.

Bittrex handles one of the largest BTC trading volumes out of all the exchanges in the world.

Here, the users (buyers/sellers) decide the rates in which they want to trade, and Bittrex charges them a small service fee for providing this platform (0.25%).

To get started with Bittrex, you need to register and log in through your email ID, but to withdraw funds, you need to do a KYC by submitting your ID documents and phone number, as well as enabling two-factor authentication for higher limits.

But one good thing about Bittrex is the account verification happens quite fast.

Bittrex supports two types of accounts:

Bittrex is a crypto-only exchange, meaning it doesnt allow you to deposit fiat currencies such as USD, EUR, GBP, etc.

They provide access to advanced trading tools like candlestick charts and crosshairs, but the user interface is quite clean and intuitive, so newbies should have no problems.

You can visit Bittrex and open a Bittrex accountby following this official step by step guide here.

Check out Bittrex

Founded by Tristan DAgosta, Poloniex has been operational since January 2014 and is undoubtedly one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.

It is based out of the United States and offers +100 cryptocurrencies to its users to trade.

When you talk about trade volumes, nothing beats Poloniex. In 2017, Poloniex had the highest volume for ETH because it supports an independent Ethereum market as well as a BTC market.

It is a crypto-only exchange, but you can start trading easily by depositing USDT (Tether dollars).

Poloniex also has zoomable candlestick charts for 5-minutes, 15-minutes, 30-minutes, 2-hours, 4-hours, and 1-day, along with a stop-limit feature for advanced cryptocurrency traders.

Poloniex charges a fee of0.15% to 0.25% on all trades depending upon whether you are a maker or a taker.

So if you are looking to trade a variety of altcoins, then you should give Poloniex a shot.

To get started with Poloniex, follow this official guide.

Remember: As soon as you sign up for Poloniex using your email,do make sure to enable two-factor authentication!

Check out Poloniex

Bitfinex is another one of the largest and most popular cryptocurrency exchanges out there.

Based out of Hong Kong and operational since 2014, it gives its users the option to trade the following 13 cryptocurrencies in exchange for USD or BTC:

Update: They have added a lot more cryptos recently.

Unlike Bittrex and Poloniex, you can trade using USD (with a wire fee of at least $20). Also, users will need to pay a trade fee which varies from 0.1% to 0.8% (details here).

Also, whenever you withdrawal or deposit anything, you are charged a certain fee:

On Bitfinex, if you are a pro-trader, you will find advanced trading tools such as limit orders, stop orders, trailing stop, fill or kill, TWAP, and others, along with different market charts.

To get started on Bitfinex, you need toregister,verify your ID, andauthenticateyourself. It typically takes 15-20 business days aftersubmitting valid ID proof before youre accepted into the platform.

And whenever you get bored with the web version or want to trade on-the-go, you can use Bitfinexs Android and iOS mobile apps.

Check out Bitfinex

Using the above cryptocurrency exchanges will allow you to buy almost all of the cryptos you could ever want to buy.

However, there are a few more cryptocurrency exchanges that you should have an account with, as there are a few coins that are only available there. Its a good idea to have an account on most of these, which will save time when you discover a winning coin.

Some of those exchanges are:

I will update this post as I find other trustable and feature-rich cryptocurrency exchanges. For now, you can consider joining our Telegram channel to stay updated with all thelatest info.

I hope these insights help you in choosing the best cryptocurrency exchange for you to use.

But one word of caution:

If you are storing cryptocurrencies on these exchanges for a few hours or even a few days for the sake of trading, then its probably OK. Otherwise, this is a bad practice.

Large-scale hacks like Mt. Gox can happen at any time. I would strongly recommend you to use the Ledger Nano S or a wallet like Exodus, where you can store a lot of different cryptos and control your private keys.

Continue reading here:

9 Best Cryptocurrency Exchanges to Buy/Sell Any ...

Cryptocurrency Trading | TD Ameritrade

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

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Certain aspects of this offering are subject to regulatory approval. ErisX, Eris Exchange, and the ErisX and Eris Exchange logos are trademarks of the Eris Exchange group of companies.

Futures trading services provided by TD Ameritrade Futures & Forex LLC. Trading privileges subject to review and approval. Not all clients will quality.

Futures and futures options trading is speculative, and is not suitable for all investors. Please read theRisk Disclosure for Futures and Options prior to trading futures products.

Futures accounts are not protected by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC).

Third-party firms mentioned above are separate from and not affiliated with TD Ameritrade, which is not responsible for their services or policies.

This is not an offer or solicitation in any jurisdiction where we are not authorized to do business or where such offer or solicitation would be contrary to the local laws and regulations of that jurisdiction, including, but not limited to persons residing in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, UK, and the countries of the European Union.

Brokerage services provided by TDAmeritrade, Inc., memberFINRA/ SIPC. TDAmeritrade is a trademark jointly owned by TDAmeritrade IP Company, Inc. and The Toronto-Dominion Bank. 2019 TDAmeritrade.

Free Speech Movement – Wikipedia

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during the 196465 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.[1] The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Berkeley graduate student Mario Savio.[2] Other student leaders include Jack Weinberg, Michael Rossman, George Barton, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Michael Teal, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and others.[3]

With the participation of thousands of students, the Free Speech Movement was the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus in the 1960s.[4] Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom. The Free Speech Movement was influenced by the New Left,[5] and was also related to the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement.[6] To this day, the Movement's legacy continues to shape American political dialogue both on college campuses and in broader society, impacting on the political views and values of college students and the general public.[7]

In 1958, activist students organized SLATE, a campus political party meaning a "slate" of candidates running on the same level a same "slate." The students created SLATE to promote the right of student groups to support off-campus issues.[8] In the fall of 1964, student activists, some of whom had traveled with the Freedom Riders and worked to register African American voters in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer project, set up information tables on campus and were soliciting donations for causes connected to the Civil Rights Movement. According to existing rules at the time, fundraising for political parties was limited exclusively to the Democratic and Republican school clubs. There was also a mandatory "loyalty oath" required of faculty, which had led to dismissals and ongoing controversy over academic freedom. Sol Stern, a former radical who took part in the Free Speech Movement,[9] stated in a 2014 City Journal article that the group viewed the United States to be both racist and imperialistic and that the main intent after lifting Berkeley's loyalty oath was to build on the legacy of C Wright Mills and weaken the Cold War consensus by promoting the ideas of the Cuban Revolution.[5]

On September 14, 1964, Dean Katherine Towle announced that existing University regulations prohibiting advocacy of political causes or candidates, outside political speakers, recruitment of members, and fundraising by student organizations at the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues would be "strictly enforced."[10]

On October 1, 1964, former graduate student Jack Weinberg was sitting at the CORE table. He refused to show his identification to the campus police and was arrested. There was a spontaneous movement of students to surround the police car in which he was to be transported. The police car remained there for 32 hours, all while Weinberg was inside it. At one point, there may have been 3,000 students around the car.The car was used as a speaker's podium and a continuous public discussion was held which continued until the charges against Weinberg were dropped.[10]

On December 2, between 1,500 and 4,000 students went into Sproul Hall as a last resort in order to re-open negotiations with the administration on the subject of restrictions on political speech and action on campus.[10] Among other grievances was the fact that four of their leaders were being singled out for punishment. The demonstration was orderly; students studied, watched movies, and sang folk songs. Joan Baez was there to lead in the singing, as well as lend moral support. "Freedom classes" were held by teaching assistants on one floor, and a special Channukah service took place in the main lobby. On the steps of Sproul Hall, Mario Savio[11] gave a famous speech:

...But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings! ... There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.[12]

At midnight, Alameda County deputy district attorney Edwin Meese III telephoned Governor Edmund Brown Sr., asking for authority to proceed with a mass arrest. Shortly after 2 a.m. on December 4, 1964, police cordoned off the building, and at 3:30a.m. began the arrest. Close to 800 students were arrested,[10] most of which were transported by bus to Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, about 25 miles away. They were released on their own recognizance after a few hours behind bars. About a month later, the university brought charges against the students who organized the sit-in, resulting in an even larger student protest that all but shut down the university.

After much disturbance, the University officials slowly backed down. By January 3, 1965, the new acting chancellor, Martin Meyerson (who had replaced the previous resigned Edward Strong), established provisional rules for political activity on the Berkeley campus. He designated the Sproul Hall steps an open discussion area during certain hours of the day and permitting tables. This applied to the entire student political spectrum, not just the liberal elements that drove the Free Speech Movement.[13]

Most outsiders, however, identified the Free Speech Movement as a movement of the Left. Students and others opposed to U.S. foreign policy did indeed increase their visibility on campus following the FSM's initial victory. In the spring of 1965, the FSM was followed by the Vietnam Day Committee,[10] a major starting point for the anti-Vietnam war movement.

For the first time, disobedience tactics of the Civil Rights Movement were brought by the Free Speech Movement to a college campus in the 1960s. Those approaches gave the students exceptional leverage to make demands of the university administrators, and build the foundation for future protests, such as the against the Vietnam War.[14]

The Free Speech Movement had long-lasting effects at the Berkeley campus and was a pivotal moment for the civil liberties movement in the 1960s. It was seen as the beginning of the famous student activism that existed on the campus in the 1960s, and continues to a lesser degree today. There was a substantial voter backlash against the individuals involved in the Free Speech Movement. Ronald Reagan won an unexpected victory in the fall of 1966 and was elected Governor.[15] He then directed the UC Board of Regents to dismiss UC President Clark Kerr because of the perception that he had been too soft on the protesters. The FBI kept secret files on Kerr and Savio, and subjected their lives and careers to interference under COINTELPRO.

Reagan had gained political traction by campaigning on a platform to "clean up the mess in Berkeley".[15] In the minds of those involved in the backlash, a wide variety of protests, concerned citizens, and activists were lumped together. Furthermore, television news and documentary filmmaking had made it possible to photograph and broadcast moving images of protest activity. Much of this media is available today as part of the permanent collection of the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, including iconic photographs of the protest activity by student Ron Enfield (then chief photographer for the Berkeley campus newspaper, the Daily Cal).[16] A reproduction of what may be considered the most recognizable and iconic photograph of the movement, a shot of suit-clad students carrying the Free Speech banner through the University's Sather Gate in Fall of 1964, now stands at the entrance to the college's Free Speech Movement Cafe.[16]

Earlier protests against the House Committee on Un-American Activities meeting in San Francisco in 1960 had included an iconic scene as protesters were literally washed down the steps inside the Rotunda of San Francisco City Hall with fire hoses. The anti-Communist film Operation Abolition[17][18][19][20] depicted this scene and became an organizing tool for the protesters.

The 20th anniversary reunion of the FSM was held during the first week of October, 1984, to considerable media attention. A rally in Sproul Plaza featured FSM veterans Mario Savio, who ended a long self-imposed silence, Jack Weinberg, and Jackie Goldberg. The week continued with a series of panels open to the public on the movement and its impact.[21] The 30th anniversary reunion, held during the first weekend of December 1994, was also a public event, with another Sproul Plaza rally featuring Savio, Weinberg, Goldberg, panels on the FSM, and current free speech issues.[22] In April 2001, UC's Bancroft Library held a symposium celebrating the opening of the Free Speech Movement Digital Archive. Although not a formal FSM reunion, many FSM leaders were on the panels and other participants were in the audience.[23] The 40th anniversary reunion, the first after Savio's death in 1996, was held in October 2004. It featured columnist Molly Ivins giving the annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, followed later in the week by the customary rally in Sproul Plaza and panels on civil liberties issues.[24] A Sunday meeting was a more private event, primarily a gathering for the veterans of the movement, in remembrance of Savio and of a close FSM ally, professor Reginald Zelnik, who had died in an accident in May.[25]

Today, Sproul Hall and the surrounding Sproul Plaza are active locations for protests and marches, as well as the ordinary daily tables with free literature from anyone of any political orientation who wishes to appear. A wide variety of groups of all political, religious and social persuasions set up tables at Sproul Plaza. The Sproul steps, now officially known as the "Mario Savio Steps", may be reserved by anyone for a speech or rally.[10] An on-campus restaurant commemorating the event, the Mario Savio Free Speech Movement Cafe, resides in a portion of the Moffitt Undergraduate Library.

The Free Speech Monument, commemorating the movement, was created in 1991 by artist Mark Brest van Kempen. It is located, appropriately, in Sproul Plaza. The monument consists of a six-inch hole in the ground filled with soil and a granite ring surrounding it. The granite ring bears the inscription, "This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction." The monument makes no explicit reference to the movement, but it evokes notions of free speech and its implications through its rhetoric.[26]

See more here:

Free Speech Movement - Wikipedia

Free Speech | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

EFF defends your ability to use the Internet as a platform for free expression through law, technology, and activism. The Internet has radically enhanced our access to information in countless ways, and empowered anyone to share ideas and connect with the entire world. Yet while speech is invited and empowered on the electronic frontier, it is also sometimes threatened.

Freed of the limitations inherent in traditional print or broadcast media createdand constrainedby corporate gatekeepers, speech thrives online. Social networking websites allow groups of a dozen friends to grow into massive communities that transcend national borders. Meanwhile, community journalists have used microblogging and video live-streaming to expose the world to stories that long went unheard. Websites like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive have pioneered an open-source model of sharing and preserving information.

On the other hand, speech is also threatened online. Coders and developers risk criminal penalties for practicing the kind of digital tinkering, repair, and exploration that enable innovation. Similarly, dissidents and activists, especially those whose opinions may be unpopular where they live, confront chilling effects imposed by government surveillance programs that constrain their freedom of expression. Journalists and researchers can also be stymied by government agencies that limit public access to certain information.

The technological capacity enabling even great wonders can mean little when users are denied legal protections for their creativity. Without sufficient legal protections for users and innovators, it's all too easy for governments and companies to undermine your rights. Learn more below and consider supporting our efforts.

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Free Speech | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Free speech zone – Wikipedia

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Free speech zones (also known as First Amendment zones, free speech cages, and protest zones) are areas set aside in public places for the purpose of political protesting. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The existence of free speech zones is based on U.S. court decisions stipulating that the government may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner but not content of expression.[citation needed]

The Supreme Court has developed a four-part analysis to evaluate the constitutionality of time, place and manner (TPM) restrictions. To pass muster under the First Amendment, TPM restrictions must be neutral with respect to content, be narrowly drawn, serve a significant government interest, and leave open alternative channels of communication. Application of this four-part analysis varies with the circumstances of each case, and typically requires lower standards for the restriction of obscenity and fighting words.[citation needed]

Free speech zones have been used at a variety of political gatherings. The stated purpose of free speech zones is to protect the safety of those attending the political gathering, or for the safety of the protesters themselves. Critics, however, suggest that such zones are "Orwellian",[2][3] and that authorities use them in a heavy-handed manner to censor protesters by putting them literally out of sight of the mass media, hence the public, as well as visiting dignitaries. Though authorities generally deny specifically targeting protesters, on a number of occasions, these denials have been contradicted by subsequent court testimony. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed, with various degrees of success and failure, a number of lawsuits on the issue.

Though free speech zones existed prior to the Presidency of George W. Bush, it was during Bush's presidency that their scope was greatly expanded.[4] These zones have continued through the presidency of Barack Obama; he signed a bill in 2012 that expanded the power of the Secret Service to restrict speech and make arrests.[5]

Many colleges and universities earlier instituted free speech zone rules during the Vietnam-era protests of the 1960s and 1970s. In recent years, a number of them have revised or removed these restrictions following student protests and lawsuits.[citation needed]

During the 1988 Democratic National Convention, the city of Atlanta set up a "designated protest zone"[6] so the convention would not be disrupted. A pro-choice demonstrator opposing an Operation Rescue group said Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young "put us in a free-speech cage."[7] "Protest zones" were used during the 1992 and 1996 United States presidential nominating conventions.[8]

Free speech zones have been used for non-political purposes. Through 1990s, the San Francisco International Airport played host to a steady stream of religious groups (Hare Krishnas in particular), preachers, and beggars. The city considered whether this public transportation hub was required to host free speech, and to what extent. As a compromise, two "free speech booths" were installed in the South Terminal, and groups wishing to speak but not having direct business at the airport were directed there. These booths still exist, although permits are required to access the booths.[9]

WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999 protest activity saw a number of changes to how law enforcement deals with protest activities. "The [National Lawyers] Guild, which has a 35-year history of monitoring First Amendment activity, has witnessed a notable change in police treatment of political protesters since the November 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. At subsequent gatherings in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and Portland a pattern of behavior that stifles First Amendment rights has emerged".[10] In a subsequent lawsuit, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that "It was lawful for the city of Seattle to deem part of downtown off-limits ... But the court also said that police enforcing the rule may have gone too far by targeting only those opposed to the WTO, in violation of their First Amendment rights."[11]

Free speech zones were used in Boston at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The free speech zones organized by the authorities in Boston were boxed in by concrete walls, invisible to the FleetCenter where the convention was held and criticized harshly as a "protest pen" or "Boston's Camp X-Ray".[1] "Some protesters for a short time Monday [July 26, 2004] converted the zone into a mock prison camp by donning hoods and marching in the cage with their hands behind their backs."[12] A coalition of groups protesting the Iraq War challenged the planned protest zones. U.S. District Court Judge Douglas Woodlock was sympathetic to their request: "One cannot conceive of what other design elements could be put into a space to create a more symbolic affront to the role of free expression.".[13] However, he ultimately rejected the petition to move the protest zones closer to the FleetCenter.[14]

Free speech zones were also used in New York City at the 2004 Republican National Convention. According to Mike McGuire, a columnist for the online anti-war magazine Nonviolent Activist, "The policing of the protests during the 2004 Republican National Convention represent[ed] another interesting model of repression. The NYPD tracked every planned action and set up traps. As marches began, police would emerge from their hiding places building vestibules, parking garages, or vans and corral the dissenters with orange netting that read 'POLICE LINE DO not CROSS,' establishing areas they ironically called 'ad-hoc free speech zones.' One by one, protesters were arrested and detained some for nearly two days."[15] Both the Democratic and Republican National parties were jointly awarded a 2005 Jefferson Muzzle from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, "For their mutual failure to make the preservation of First Amendment freedoms a priority during the last Presidential election".[13]

Free speech zones were commonly used by President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks and through the 2004 election. Free speech zones were set up by the Secret Service, who scouted locations where the U.S. president was scheduled to speak, or pass through. Officials targeted those who carried anti-Bush signs and escorted them to the free speech zones prior to and during the event. Reporters were often barred by local officials from displaying these protesters on camera or speaking to them within the zone.[16][4] Protesters who refused to go to the free speech zone were often arrested and charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct and/or resisting arrest.[17][18] A seldom-used federal law making it unlawful to "willfully and knowingly to enter or remain in ... any posted, cordoned off, or otherwise restricted area of a building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting" has also been invoked.[19][20]

Civil liberties advocates argue that Free Speech Zones are used as a form of censorship and public relations management to conceal the existence of popular opposition from the mass public and elected officials.[21] There is much controversy surrounding the creation of these areas the mere existence of such zones is offensive to some people, who maintain that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution makes the entire country an unrestricted free speech zone.[21] The Department of Homeland Security "has even gone so far as to tell local police departments to regard critics of the War on Terrorism as potential terrorists themselves."[17][22]

The Bush administration has been criticized by columnist James Bovard of The American Conservative for requiring protesters to stay within a designated area, while allowing supporters access to more areas.[18] According to the Chicago Tribune, the American Civil Liberties Union has asked a federal court in Washington, D.C. to prevent the Secret Service from keeping anti-Bush protesters distant from presidential appearances while allowing supporters to display their messages up close, where they are likely to be seen by the news media.[18]

The preliminary plan for the 2004 Democratic National Convention was criticized by the National Lawyers Guild and the ACLU of Massachusetts as being insufficient to handle the size of the expected protest. "The zone would hold as few as 400 of the several thousand protesters who are expected in Boston in late July."[23]

In 1939, the United States Supreme Court found in Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization that public streets and parks "have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions." In the later Thornhill v. Alabama case, the court found that picketing and marching in public areas is protected by the United States Constitution as free speech. However, subsequent rulings Edwards v. South Carolina, Brown v. Louisiana, Cox v. Louisiana, and Adderley v. Florida found that picketing is afforded less protection than pure speech due to the physical externalities it creates. Regulations on demonstrations may affect the time, place, and manner of those demonstrations, but may not discriminate based on the content of the demonstration.

The Secret Service denies targeting the President's political opponents. "Decisions made in the formulation of a security plan are based on security considerations, not political considerations", said one Secret Service spokesman.[24]

"These [Free Speech] zones routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential sight and outside the view of media covering the event. When Bush came to the Pittsburgh area on Labor Day 2002, 65-year-old retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign proclaiming, 'The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us.' The local police, at the Secret Service's behest, set up a 'designated free-speech zone' on a baseball field surrounded by a chain-link fence a third of a mile from the location of Bush's speech. The police cleared the path of the motorcade of all critical signs, though folks with pro-Bush signs were permitted to line the president's path. Neel refused to go to the designated area and was arrested for disorderly conduct. Police detective John Ianachione testified that the Secret Service told local police to confine 'people that were there making a statement pretty much against the president and his views.'"[18][25] District justice Shirley Trkula threw out the charges, stating that "I believe this is America. Whatever happened to 'I don't agree with you, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it'?"[16]

At another incident during a presidential visit to South Carolina, protester Brett Bursey refused an order by Secret Service agents to go to a free speech zone half-a-mile away. He was arrested and charged with trespassing by the South Carolina police. "Bursey said that he asked the policeman if 'it was the content of my sign,' and he said, 'Yes, sir, it's the content of your sign that's the problem.'"[18] However, the prosecution, led by James Strom Thurmond Jr., disputes Bursey's version of events.[26] Trespassing charges against Bursey were dropped, and Bursey was instead indicted by the federal government for violation of a federal law that allows the Secret Service to restrict access to areas visited by the president.[18] Bursey faced up to six months in prison and a US$5,000 fine.[18] After a bench trial, Bursey was convicted of the offense of trespassing, but judge Bristow Marchant deemed the offense to be relatively minor and ordered a fine of $500 be assessed, which Bursey appealed, and lost.[27] In his ruling, Marchant found that "this is not to say that the Secret Service's power to restrict the area around the President is absolute, nor does the Court find that protesters are required to go to a designated demonstration area which was an issue in this case as long as they do not otherwise remain in a properly restricted area."[27]

Marchant's ruling however, was criticized for three reasons:

In 2003, the ACLU brought a lawsuit against the Secret Service, ACORN v. Secret Service, representing the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). "The federal court in Philadelphia dismissed that case in March [2004] after the Secret Service acknowledged that it could not discriminate against protesters through the use of out-of-sight, out-of-earshot protest zones."[29] Another 2003 lawsuit against the city of Philadelphia, ACORN v. Philadelphia, charged that the Philadelphia Police Department, on orders from the Secret Service, had kept protesters "further away from the site of presidential visits than Administration supporters. A high-ranking official of the Philadelphia police told ACLU of Pennsylvania Legal Director Stefan Presser that he was only following Secret Service orders."[21][30] However, the court found the ACLU lacked standing to bring the case and dismissed it.[31]

The Secret Service says it does establish 'public viewing areas' to protect dignitaries but does not discriminate against individuals based on the content of their signs or speech. 'Absolutely not,' said Tom Mazur, a spokesman for the agency created to protect the president. 'The Secret Service makes no distinction on the purpose, message or intent of any individual or group.' Civil libertarians dispute that. They cite a Corpus Christi, Texas, couple, Jeff and Nicole Rank, as an example. The two were arrested at a Bush campaign event in Charleston, West Virginia, on July 4, 2004, when they refused to take off anti-Bush shirts. Their shirts read, 'Love America, Hate Bush' ... The ACLU found 17 cases since March 2001 in which protesters were removed during events where the president or vice president appeared. And lawyers say it's an increasing trend.[32]

The article is slightly mistaken about the contents of the shirts. While Nicole Rank's shirt did say "Love America, Hate Bush", Jeff Rank's shirt said "Regime change starts at home."[33]

The incident occurred several months after the Secret Service's pledge in ACORN v. Secret Service not to discriminate against protesters. "The charges against the Ranks were ultimately dismissed in court and the mayor and city council publicly apologized for the arrest. City officials also said that local law enforcement was acting at the request of Secret Service."[34] ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Chris Hansen pointed out that "The Secret Service has promised to not curtail the right to dissent at presidential appearances, and yet we are still hearing stories of people being blocked from engaging in lawful protest", said Hansen. "It is time for the Secret Service to stop making empty promises."[34] The Ranks subsequently filed a lawsuit, Rank v. Jenkins, against Deputy Assistant to the President Gregory Jenkins and the Secret Service. "The lawsuit, Rank v. Jenkins, is seeking unspecified damages as well as a declaration that the actions leading to the removal of the Ranks from the Capitol grounds were unconstitutional."[34] In August 2007, the Ranks settled their lawsuit against the Federal Government. The government paid them $80,000, but made no admission of wrongdoing.[35] The Ranks' case against Gregory Jenkins is still pending in the District of Columbia.[36]

As a result of ACLU subpoenas during the discovery in the Rank lawsuit, the ACLU obtained the White House's previously-classified presidential advance manual.[37] The manual gives people organizing presidential visits specific advice for preventing or obstructing protests. "There are several ways the advance person" the person organizing the presidential visit "can prepare a site to minimize demonstrators. First, as always, work with the Secret Service to and have them ask the local police department to designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferably not in view of the event site or motorcade route. The formation of 'rally squads' is a common way to prepare for demonstrators ... The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform ... As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site."[37]

The use of free speech zones on university campuses is controversial. Many universities created on-campus free speech zones during the 1960s and 1970s, during which protests on-campus (especially against the Vietnam War) were common. Generally, the requirements are that the university is given advance notice and that they are held in locations that do not disrupt classes.

In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that non-disruptive speech is permitted in public schools. However, this does not apply to private universities. In September 2004, U.S. District Court Judge Sam Cummings struck down the free speech zone policy at Texas Tech University.

According to the opinion of the court, campus areas such as parks, sidewalks, streets and other areas are designated as public forums, regardless of whether the university has chosen to officially designate the areas as such. The university may open more of the campus as public forums for its students, but it cannot designate fewer areas ... Not all places within the boundaries of the campus are public forums, according to Cummings' opinion. The court declared the university's policy unconstitutional to the extent that it regulates the content of student speech in areas of the campus that are public forums.[38]

In 2007, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education released a survey of 346 colleges and Universities in the United States.[39] Of those institutions, 259 (75%) maintain policies that "both clearly andsubstantially restrict freedom of speech."

In December 2005, the College Libertarians at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro staged a protest outside the University's designated protest zones. The specific intent of the protest was to provoke just such a charge, in order to "provoke the system into action into a critical review of what's going on."[40] Two students, Allison Jaynes and Robert Sinnott, were brought up on charges under the student code of conduct of "violation of respect",[41] for refusing to move when told to do so by a university official.[40] The university subsequently dropped honor code charges against the students.[40] "University officials said the history of the free-speech zones is not known. 'It predated just about everybody here", said Lucien 'Skip' Capone III, the university attorney. The policy may be a holdover from the Vietnam War and civil rights era, he said.'"[40]

A number of colleges and universities have revised or revoked free speech zone policies in the last decade, including: Tufts University,[42] Appalachian State University,[42] and West Virginia University.[42][43] In August, 2006, Penn State University revised its seven-year-old rules restricting the rights of students to protest. "In effect, the whole campus is now a 'free-speech zone.'"[44]

Controversies have also occurred at the University of Southern California,[45] Indiana University,[46] the University of Nevada, Las Vegas,[47] and Brigham Young University.[48][49]

At Marquette University, philosophy department chairman James South ordered graduate student Stuart Ditsler to remove an unattributed Dave Barry quote from the door to the office that Ditsler shared with three other teaching assistants, calling the quote patently offensive. (The quote was: "As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.") South claimed that the University's free-speech zone rules required Ditsler to take it down. University spokeswoman Brigid O'Brien Miller stated that it was "a workplace issue, not one of academic freedom."[50][51] Ultimately, the quote was allowed to remain, albeit with attribution.[52]

For example, the Louisiana State University Free Speech Alley (or Free Speech Plaza) was utilized in November 2015 when Louisiana gubernatorial candidate John Bel Edwards was publicly endorsed by former opponent and republican Lt. Governor Jay Dardenne.[53] The Consuming Fire Fellowship, a church located in rural Woodville, Mississippi, often sends members to convene at the universities free speech alley to preach their views of Christianity. The members have often been met with strong resistance and resentment by the student body.[54][55] Ivan Imes, a retired engineer who holds "Jesus Talks" for students at the university, said in an interview, "Give the church a break. The don't understand love. They don't understand forgiveness."[56]

As of March2017[update], four states had passed legislation outlawing public colleges and universities from establishing free speech zones. The first state to do so was Virginia in 2014,[57] followed by Missouri in 2015,[58] Arizona in 2016,[59] and Kentucky in 2017.[60]

Designated protest areas were established during the August 2007 Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America Summit in Ottawa, Canada. Although use of the areas was voluntary and not surrounded by fences, some protesters decried the use of designated protest areas, calling them "protest pens."[61]

During the 2005 WTO Hong Kong Ministerial Conference, over 10,000 protesters were present. Wan Chai Sports Ground and Wan Chai Cargo Handling Basin were designated as protest zones. Police wielded sticks, used gas grenades and shot rubber bullets at some of the protesters. They arrested 910 people, 14 were charged, but none were convicted.

Three protest parks were designated in Beijing during the 2008 Summer Olympics, at the suggestion of the IOC. All 77 applications to protest there had been withdrawn or denied, and no protests took place. Four persons who applied to protest were arrested or sentenced to reeducation.[62][63]

In the Philippines, designated free speech zones are called freedom parks.

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Free speech zone - Wikipedia

Free Speech | NC State University – ncsu.edu

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

How does the First Amendment right to free speech apply to speakers who have been invited by student groups to speak on campus?

As a public institution of higher education, NC State is committed to fostering free speech and the open debate of ideas. NC State is prohibited from banning or punishing an invited speaker based on the content or viewpoint of his or her speech. University policy permits student groups to invite speakers to campus, and the university provides access to certain campus venues for that purpose. NC State cannot take away that right or withdraw those resources based on the views of the invited speaker. Only under extraordinary circumstances, as described on this page, can an event featuring an invited speaker be canceled.

Once a student group has invited a speaker to campus, NC State will act reasonably to ensure that the speaker is able to safely and effectively address his or her audience, free from violence or disruption.

Although NC State cannot restrict or cancel the speech based on the content or viewpoint of the speech, the university is allowed to place certain content- and viewpoint-neutral limits on how the speech can take place. These limits can be based on the time, place and manner of the speech.

What are time, place and manner restrictions?

Courts have long recognized that public educational institutions have the right to impose certain restrictions on the use of their campuses for free-speech purposes. Content- and viewpoint-neutral restrictions on the times and modes of communication, often referred to as time-place-manner restrictions, are common features universities implement to ensure that they can continue to fulfill their mission while allowing free expression to occur. Simply put, this means that the when, where and how of free-speech activity may be reasonably regulated if such regulation (1) is scrupulously neutral (in other words, it must apply to all speech, no matter how favored or disfavored) and (2) leaves ample opportunity for speech in alternative areas or forums. The right to speak on campus is not a right to speak at any time, at any place and in any manner that a person wishes. The university can regulate where, when and how speech occurs to ensure the functioning of the campus and to achieve important goals, such as protecting public safety.

Examples of acceptable time-place-manner restrictions include permit requirements for outside speakers, notice periods, sponsorship requirements for outside speakers, limiting the duration and frequency of the speech and restricting speech during final-exam periods.

The need to consider time, place and manner regulations is the reason the university requires students to work with the administration when setting up certain events, as opposed to students scheduling and creating the events on their own without university input.

Can NC State cancel a student-sponsored event if the administration or the campus community disagrees with the speakers views?

No, NC State is prohibited from canceling an event based on the viewpoint of the speaker.

If it is known that an event with a speaker may lead to physical violence, is that legal grounds for the university to cancel the event?

In general, NC State cannot prevent speech on the grounds that it is likely to provoke a hostile response. Stopping speech before it occurs due to the potential reaction to the speech is often referred to by courts as the hecklers veto and is a form of prior restraint. Prior restraints of speech are almost never allowed.

The university is required to do what it can to protect speakers and prevent disruption or violence. Although the university is committed to fulfilling these obligations, if despite all efforts by the university there is a serious threat to public safety and no other alternative, an event can be canceled. NC States primary concern is to protect the safety of its students, faculty and staff. NC States Police Department makes security assessments with input from federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

How does NC State respond to hate speech?

NC State is dedicated to fostering free speech in an environment where members of our community can learn from one another and where all are treated with dignity and respect. The university vigorously opposes and denounces all forms of hateful speech. The university encourages faculty, staff and students to use their free-speech rights, consistent with federal and state laws, to condemn hateful speech and to help create opportunities for the campus community to understand and learn from these actions. Students who encounter hurtful or offensive speech are encouraged to reach out to university administrators, including the Office for Institutional Equity and Diversity (OIED), or to make a report to the universitys Bias Incident Response Team (BIRT). More information about responding to acts of intolerance may be found at the OIED and BIRT websites.

How does NC State ensure the safety of the campus community in light of freedom of speech?

NC State balances its commitment to free speech with a commitment to safety. Individuals who threaten or commit acts of violence or other violations of law may be subject to arrest and prosecution by law enforcement, as well as disciplinary sanctions imposed by the university.

Free Speech | NC State University - ncsu.edu

The Value of Free Speech | National Affairs

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Harvey C. Mansfield Fall 2018

Our usual debate over the extent of free speech takes for granted the value of free speech. We argue over the boundaries or limits of what can be said but pass over the importance of what is said within those bounds. This leaves us with a peculiar sense of why speech matters: We imply that it's valuable because its restraint would undermine our freedom, which is a way of avoiding the question more than of answering it.

This disinterest in the value of free speech, sometimes amounting to a refusal to define it, appears to be rooted in the principles of our liberalism, which enshrines free speech as one right, perhaps the principal right, among the rights that deserve protection in a liberal society. To guard such a right, it seems, one must not specify the value of how it will normally be used lest by such definition society destroy what it wants to protect. For by discussing the value of free speech one would expose less-valued or valueless speech to disdain, or worse, prohibition.

A society that understands itself in terms of rights must above all protect its boundaries in the definition of rights rather than concern itself too much, or at all, with what is within the protected territory. Thus, the protection of unlimited, or nearly unlimited, speech eclipses our view of worthy speech. To recover some idea of worthy speech, and therefore also of why free speech matters, we will need to challenge our liberalism for its own good, and to expose its more-than-simply-liberal aims and character. And to see these is ultimately also to grasp what speech is for, and why it is important.

FROM NORMAL SPEECH TO FREE EXPRESSION

Everybody admits the exception to unlimited speech in the dangerous but exemplary circumstance of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater, but no one wants to pursue the distinction implied in that exception. Yet to condemn or punish the act of falsely shouting "fire!" in that situation is indeed to distinguish between helpful and harmful speech. At times we will find value in apparently harmful speech, as in the "redeeming social value" awarded by the United States Supreme Court to speech that might appear obscene and thus dangerous to our morals. From this example one could infer that there is no such thing as a "content-free" attitude toward free speech. Our need to define permissible speech tempts or compels us to find value in any speech that is permitted. We pass from permitting speech because it is valuable to valuing speech because we permit it. However much our liberalism demands that we withhold judgment upon what is said, by the same token it impels us to find value in what we permit. Hence, one may ask, not from without but from within liberalism, what is this valuethe value of normal, non-obscene speech?

The right of free speech makes presuppositions. To prize it is to hold that free speech has some value, which in turn requires that speech have value. Speech consists in giving reasons. It is not just the communication that other animals can engage in, often very effectively, without supplying reasons; only humans give reasons. Speaking is an appeal to fellow human beings who share the power of reason; so, speech presupposes that man is a rational animal. The power of reason is to appeal to others persuasively at some level of generality to gain the assent of someone besides yourself. It is more than a cry of pain or a grunt of pleasure, and it must issue in a complaint or a statement of gratitude that lifts the communication above your private feeling. It is the "rational" that rises above the "animal." Speech is a claim upon the attention of another, a prayer or a demand to be heard; it is an argument, if nothing else, against indifference.

So far, one might nod in agreement. But this seems too simple. Is it so clear that speech lifts one above personal motives? Perhaps speech is not reason but rationalization, the reasons giving effect to one's motives by concealing them rather than transcending them. And what of the joke: "Shut up," he explained. Do not many arguments end in the attempt to silence the other side's reasons? Isn't this maneuver characteristic of political speech above all?

One might allege, therefore, that the point of arguing is to win, not merely to appeal to reason, and that the power of reason is to serve as a cloak for the desire to win. But to say this admits that reason has a certain power and the desire to win a certain limit. Reason makes domination respectable while it requires the winner to make himself acceptable. Language too is not merely arbitrary; it has a structure, a grammar enabling it to make sense. Even a lie must make sense. The "shut up" joke makes sense by pointing to the fact that it is sometimes courageous and not always wise to speak.

Reason makes its way often with only apparent rationality, but the appearance of reason indicates the presence of reason. Even silencing requires an argument, as in George Orwell's rationalization from Napoleon the pig that "all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." The power of reason, one may conclude, is shown in its very abuse. But this is an objection to which one must return. Somehow the power of reason must be shown to be compatible with, rather than merely subordinated to, the power of rulers. Somehow one must understand reason as not merely poetry and rhetoric, or, in today's ugly word, "ideology"in sum, not merely partisan.

Preoccupation with the limits rather than the content of free speech can be seen in John Stuart Mill's iconic pamphlet On Liberty. Mill wishes to expand the limits of free speech as against the "tyranny of the majority" that menaces his country in his time, and to do this he magnifies the benefits of free speech and minimizes the harms. The benefits culminate in more "originality" and "genius"; the harms are no worse than the need for intellectuals like himself sometimes to "keep...their convictions within their own breasts." But discussion of the consequences of free speech detracts from Mill's principle that all concern for them constitutes "interference" with individual freedom. Within the permissible limits of free speech, all speech is substantially equal, for "permissible" means deserving of an audience.

Mill divides speech into true and false, not good and bad, for true speech brings progress "[a]s mankind improve[s]," and false speech merely tests and corrects true speech. All speech is good, though it is not said to address other rational animals and does not have to be argumentative. The benefits of speech do exist, though Mill seems naively to exaggerate the power of reason in discussion. Yet in his view the right to free speech holds sway over its benefits, and the benefits do not arise from the nature of speech as giving reasons. Mill's society heads toward progress but has no sense of direction other than a vague goal of replacing "despotism" and "barbarism" with "civilization." Instead, Mill's undescribed civilization has itself been replaced in our time by value relativism that makes it a point of pride to renounce its ability to distinguish "civilization" from the "culture" of any society whatever.

The Supreme Court has charged ahead of Mill to extend speech to "expression." This is a step beyond the First Amendment, which speaks of free speech, to the assertion that it meant to say free expression or perhaps to express that word without saying it. The change has developed in a number of cases over the years, but it seems to have been introduced in the famous flag-salute case in 1943, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, when the Court decided that it was permissible for Jehovah's Witnesses not to salute the flag in schoolrooms. Their refusal to salute was taken as a symbolic exercise of free speech because the command to salute was declared to be an impermissible compulsion to speak. So refusing to speak was concluded to be speech and protected as such.

In oft-quoted words, Justice Robert Jackson said that "[i]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics..." and force citizens to do so "by word or act." Here "act" is added to "word," apparently as not the same, but the act is then taken as a kind of word. "Symbolic speech" and "expressive conduct" emerge in later cases dealing with flag burning, draft-card burning, wearing of armbands, and nude dancing. In 1941 Franklin Roosevelt had listed "freedom of speech and expression" among the Four Freedoms America would defend, and since the Court developed its meaning, "expression" has come to be accepted as an equivalent of speech or indeed as the generic term of which "speech" is one variety. Law-school courses in constitutional law now routinely use the title of "freedom of expression" for the subject of free speech.

Two questionable consequences can be seen to emerge from Justice Jackson's Barnette opinion. First, he denied that there is any constitutional fixed star of political orthodoxy in the very act of declaring the political orthodoxy of free speech. The "very purpose of a Bill of Rights," he said, "was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy." Are not those subjects declared to be beyond controversy thereby made orthodox? The implication is that free speech must be regarded as sacred and hence has no value that can or needs to be disputed. This is a proposition I am disputing here.

Second, Justice Jackson said that free speech cannot be compelled because the Bill of Rights "guards the individual's right to speak his own mind." But to speak one's own mind is to address other minds, not merely to squeak or bark or chirp. The flag salute and the other, later examples of "expressive conduct" that the Court found to be akin to free speech are symbols or gestures to which one can impute a meaning, but they are not rational arguments. When speech is taken as expression, and "expression" becomes the general category of which speech is one type, then the rational in speech is subordinated to the irrationality of symbolic expression. Yet a symbol is only a symbol by virtue of its imputed rational meaning in words. The irrational is rightly subordinate to the rational from which alone it gains its sense. Both of these consequences imply that free speech is fundamentally irrational: the first implying that free speech cannot be rationally disputed as good or bad by partisans in politics; and the second that a symbol is not inferior to an argument but rather an argument is a kind of symbol.

A refusal to consider the content of speech so as to recognize its value leads to a minimal definition of free speech, one which allows for including as much as one would not wish to prohibit. One would not wish to do away with theater and poetry just because they add symbol, style, and gesture to reasonable speech. But though the beauties of speech add to its power, they distract from its thought, or at least conceal it. And since a thought is almost always disputable, so a less-strict definition of speech is more exact; one can be more sure of the boundary between speech and act. So the Supreme Court has found that although flag burning is acceptable as legal speech, draft-card burning can be prohibited as an illegal act. That is how it happens that our speech over free speech tends to concentrate on the extremes of riot, rebellion, eccentricity, and obscenity where reason seems to be at its weakest.

We liberals are occupied with challenges to normal speech rather than with the normal speech we reject. We so far forget that "expression" is a dilution of speech that it comes to be held the essence of it. Shouting and screaming take precedence over persuasion or threaten to become the normal means of persuasion. The more intense the expression, the freer it ought to be; the test of free speech is to show how far it can tolerate departures from normal speech. In the latest instance, a baker's message on the icing of a cake is taken as protected speech (in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission). If I mush someone's face in it, do I send a message or commit an assault? That is the kind of discussion we are now left to have over free speech.

ENEMIES OF SPEECH

In presuming the capability of human reason, free speech has two present-day enemies seeking to pervert it or make it irrelevant. One we have already seen: the notion that speech is dictated by the urge to express oneself. The other is that speech is directed by self-interest. All speech comes from the self, but as speech, it rises above the self when one has to give a reason. The reason may be urged with an implicit demand for attention to one's selflisten to me!but the reason is a call to justice, not merely in the service of one's own advantage.

Socrates in Plato's Apology of Socratesdefends himself to be sure, but also "someone like himself," or a person in his position. The notion of self-expression, however, denies the power of reason and the existence of justice to say that all reason is rationalization, all generalization a fraud, a mask for the irrational id or urge, which is truly in charge. This view is the theme (the argument!) of Friedrich Nietzsche, very powerful today though often not advanced under his name. It suggests that the purpose of argument is to win and the result is not to learn, as when one's argument is refuted, but to triumph in a contest when no telling refutation can be readily produced. The ancient Sophists, without the help of Nietzsche, practiced their belief that rhetoric is clever maneuvering to get the best of your opponent. They were opposed by Socrates as enemies who did not understand the value of free speech and therefore felt free to abuse it.

Self-interest, the other enemy of free speech, also has an argument. Its proponents say that one's speech follows from one's interest, reflects it, and cannot change it. You can change your mind but not your interest; your mind is the prisoner and slave of your interest. While self-expression is heated and demanding, self-interest is cool and calculating. It has two forms: one very old and plain, the other modern (dating from the 18thcentury) and philosophically sophisticated.

Personal denunciation, or "character assassination," is the first form. One's opponent is said to have a bad character, a perverse sense of his self-interest that determines what he says. Hence his words are spoken in bad faith and his argument, whatever it is, can safely be ignored while focusing attention on his personal failings. The reason that this bad character deploys is the captive of his character and does not have the power to rise above it. Such a person can be defeated by reasoning that is ad hoc and ad hominem. Do not listen to him! It's better to insinuate and insult than argue with him, which would give his argument more dignity than it deserves.

This tactic, found in both mild and strong forms, is endemic to politics; it is sometimes true and always tempting, particularly in a democracy where the multitude enjoys the spectacle of bringing down the elitethe high, the mighty, and the presumptuous. The office of the demagogue has been denounced from Plato to the Federalist Papers, by friends and by opponents of popular government. Today the term is used frequently and demagogically by politicians, and never by political scientists, who refuse it the certificate of scientific credibility.

The political scientists (and their confrres in social science) have a second method of refusing to listen to speech. Their science says that speech cannot cause action; it can only be caused by action. It assumes that humans speak and act according to their interests, open or concealed. Humans speak in opinions, but they act according to their interests, which they give as opinions as if freely chosen but actually hold in consequence of their interests. These subjective opinions can be studied by social science in such magical fashion that they become objective "data"i.e., facts obtained and certified by science. Social-science surveys are baptized as "survey data" and then explained by the interest of the group that holds them.

The explanation is a study of cause and effect with a view to making predictions, which are either in the past (as "analysis") or in the future (truly as predictions). This procedure assumes that human beings cannot choose for themselves or guide themselves, meaning not as they describe themselves. They may say "I did it," but in scientific fact they were caused to do what they boastfully claim to have done. Thus, humans are essentially slaves to the causes that science imputes to them. "You vote by your interest" would often be taken by a voter as an insult (and rightly so), but science is not troubled by such subjective reactions. It says that speech cannot be a cause of human behaviorwhich means that free speech has no value. Free speech in whole and every part is nothing but a boast.

FREE SPEECH WELL SAID

At this point, it is worth recalling where we started: Present-day discussion of free speech is understandably but deplorably dominated by the question of what speech should be permitted, what forbidden. By this standard everything not forbidden is permitted andhere is the rubconsidered equal because equally permitted. But all free speech does not have equal value; speech that attacks free speech has less value than speech that explains it, endorses it, and practices it. Free speech needs to define itself in order to address its enemies.

Speech that explains and uses free speech has greater value and should have precedence over speech that denies the value of speech. This does not mean that free speech should be denied to its enemies (which are self-expression and self-interest). That would be censorship, and censorship has the simple but fatal flaw of being impractical in a free society. Alexis de Tocqueville supplies a beautiful demonstration of the point. But more than impracticability, the citizens of a free society have an interest (rooted in their faith in the reason of free speech) in listening to the enemies of free speech. Those enemies may not be entirely wrong, and they certainly provide food for thought. They point to the assumptions on which free speech rests and the weaknesses that exist in supposing so confidently that free speech is really speech and really free. These weaknesses must be addressed by free citizens. The direction of my argument can be discerned by this switch of addressee from humans to citizens.

Now to take a further step: What is free speech supposed to say? The question will seem strange, even inappropriate, to one who views free speech as a right. A right to free speech presupposes that what one says, or how one exercises the right, is left undefined. The government protects the right; the citizens in society say what they please. Yet clearly some free speech is more appropriate than the rest. Some free speech contributes to free speech by helping to define freedom and free speech in general and for that society. In so doing such speech defends and promotes the right of free speech. This would be the main task of free speech: to use reason to show why free speech is valuable and to make it active and lively. The task would include the investigation of the presuppositions of free speech in political philosophy, to see whether reason can guide our lives and how.

In saying this I do not mean to abridge or deny the right of free speech but only to specify what is valuable as opposed to what is tolerated. Tolerated but not valuable is the free speech understood as self-expression or self-interest, as stated above. You should have the right to speak (almost) as you please, and that right should be protected by law. But it is important to understand and to sustain the value of the free speech that contributes to free speech rather than that which abuses the right by denying or belittling the value of free speech. Not everything said is said well, and the right of free speech needs to be exercised well.

What is it in free speech that is said well? Let the definition be positive so that we do not proceed by excluding or proscribing any speech but rather by asking what good free speech supports. We have seen that free speech presupposes the freedom of human beings. Freedom means being in charge of yourself as opposed to being a slave. More specifically, freedom is the power of the self to cause its own action and reflection as opposed to the slavery of being under the power of necessity, when one is only being caused. Self-caused is both individual and social, and it amounts to the power to choose. The individual can choose by himself or with others. In choosing, one governs oneself as a whole individual or as one among a political whole that includes other free individuals. This choosing together is self-government or political liberty.

Political liberty might not seem to be the greatest good, greater than other uses of free speech, such as freedom of thought and freedom of artistic expression, that protect individual excellence. Yet human beings are not fully self-sufficient as individuals, however much they sometimes wish to be. Men are social because they must live together, depending on one another to supply their needs, above all those bodily needs that ambitious thinkers like philosophers and poets cannot be troubled to satisfy on their own. And more than merely social, men are political because they do not have the necessary instincts to cooperate but are compelled to invent the conventions by which they live and to use the rationality they have in their nature instead of their instincts.

These conventions are based on principles by which they rule in societies. Conventions are disputable, and humans argue in politics over what they should be and who should make them. Such argument is the content of free speech, and it makes use of the rationality that is the most distinctive feature of a human. At the same time that it is distinctive, this sort of argument addresses the needs of the body, needs that humans share with other animals. Politics thus features the rule of reason over unreason, the rule of what is distinctive about humans over the necessities of animals, including the mortality common to all living things. Man in the whole is the topic of politics as much as it is the arena of philosophy and poetry. Philosophers and poets might wish to learn from politics in order to better instruct politics, as they frequently like to do.

Liberalism, as shown above, wants to distinguish politics from what it calls "civil society" in order to prevent the full operation of political liberty. It distinguishes public from private to the advantage of the latter, reducing politics to providing the means of securing the private sphere, to the pursuit of (private) happiness. It has, therefore, a strong resistance to the idea of "rule," an animus displayed in attempts made to subvert or overthrow the sovereignty of political liberty.

One such attempt is at the heart of the discipline of "economics," a science distinct from politics that seeks to establish economic laws that are independent of political rule. Another is the "right of consent" to government, made central to all other rights, which depend on government, in such manner as to provide a lesser substitute for the comprehensiveness of "rule." The people do not rule but consent to the rule of those whom they elect, who also do not rule because they are creatures of the sovereign people. Consent is passive, as consent to be ruled; government is active but restrained from ruling. Political liberty in these constructions of liberalism is reduced to one liberty among others, such as economic liberty, or to the central but subordinate liberty of the liberty to consent.

Fortunately, there are wiser liberals, above all the two greatest authorities on American politics: the authors of the Federalist Papers and Tocqueville in his Democracy in America, who by observation and interpretation show that liberal consent in America amounts to political liberty in its fuller meaning. They show that the "Blessings of Liberty" promised in the preamble of the Constitution center on the free self-government over free men that is the same as "the rule of the free." Political liberty becomes responsible for economic liberty, ruling it with encouragement and restriction as partisan elections decide, and democratic consent becomes active in private life as well as sovereign in public decisions.

Free thought can of course exist without political liberty, as we know from the great philosophical works written in times of tyranny and of threatening religious censorship. The same is true for great works of poetry, art, and music, which seem to have become scarcer as a grave but almost unnoticed consequence of more democracy. Liberty for the few can be available if exercised with care so that it does not reach the attention of the public authority. One might conclude that this liberty is the most that can be achieved, indeed that all human achievement is reserved for the few who accomplish their thoughts and deeds by themselves beyond the notice of the many and the powerful. Yet a free society in which the many are the powerful has achieved greatness and nobility in its deeds, and in a crucial situation under the watchful attention of the world.

This is America in the 20th century, which with its allies saved civilization from the barbarism of Nazism and communism. This great deed (or series of deeds) was done not out of self-expression or self-interest by mere commitment or calculation but out of nobility, a democratic nobility shared by all though led by a few.

NOBILITY AND FREE SPEECH

Nobility means rising above necessity, or above the seeming necessity of living as you wish and calculating for present advantage, by finding it necessary to face a daunting task, thus using necessity against itself. One must refuse to accept the slavery of seeming necessity and instead insist on the human capacity for choice. Free men preserve their freedom only through acts of nobility that elevate them above ordinary necessities that seem to provide excuses for indifference and inaction. These acts are not constantly necessary as if human life were one long war, but they are occasionally necessary, and they reveal the extent of human freedom over circumstances.

On this point one can again criticize the official liberalism of our time, which, guided by the great thinkers at its inception, sought to make freedom easy by connecting it to motives of necessity. John Locke, for example, began from the "perfect freedom" of men in the state of nature, and then tried to maintain this freedom by resorting to the right of self-preservation rather than to moral virtue to protect one's freedom. America, however, fought to preserve itself as America, a free country, not to keep its population alive as separate individuals (which might have justified indifference or even surrender). This it did as a choice, neither blindly nor automatically.

Freedom is life by choice, in some serious degree conscious and voluntary and for both the individual and society. Choice requires rising above an urge or a whim or a passion. And rising above slavery to one's human body requires moral virtue. The human body rules us by pain and pleasure, and one can become a slave to fear if one is without courage, and to pleasure if without moderation. A human cannot deny the fact of pain and pleasure, but one can learn through good upbringing to control the extremes of bodily passions in a reasonable mean.

Courage is a mean between rashness and timidity, moderation a mean between greed and insensitivity, as we recall from Aristotle's report of what we naturally know. Free speechto return to the topichas a stake in moral virtue as the cause of free persons. Morality demands a free person because an action is not moral unless it is chosen, and morality makes free action possible by lifting an individual or a society above slavish necessities. It's a virtuous circle of cause and effect. It implies a natural capacity for virtue that has to be actuated by virtuea capacity for freedom that requires the exercise of freedom.

To repeat, I am not proposing to forbid immoral speech, assuming it has been identified as speech succumbing to human necessities. We humans need an occasional holiday from the seriousness of moral virtue, pleasant as it is to moral people. Aristotle puts the fun of wit on his list of virtues. Free speech can serve as a safety valve for letting off steam, a purging function often claimed for it that is featured by Niccol Machiavelli. We also need other, subordinate liberties to political libertyeconomic liberty to make us prosperous, artistic liberty to make our lives beautifulbut these are not as serious as political liberty.

With political liberty we speak to one another about our liberty; we argue over a course of action, a policy, and our ruling principles. Political liberty is the use of free speech to determine who and what principle should rule us.

FREE SPEECH AND FREE RULE

Societies stay together through rulers who rule by ruling principles, which are principles about the whole, about the common good. The debate over abortion today is about the kind of society we want. One could suppose that those who want abortion to be legal should have abortions, and those opposed should refrain from them, with the result that both sides are happy. But in fact, both sides would be unhappy. Those who favor legal abortion want a society in which a woman freely controls her own body, and those opposed want a society in which a woman does not have a right to kill a developing human being for the sake of her convenience. Politics is not about "preferences," as is often said by those using the analogy of consumer preferences. One can prefer vanilla to chocolate without wanting to abolish chocolate, but this is not the case in politics. Political liberty is distinctive because it consists in free speech over the choice of which principle, under which rulers, should rule the whole.

But what is the typical choice of free speech as to rule? One can approach this question through a consideration of the freest human being, the philosopher. The philosopher is freest because he questions and studies things that most people take for grantedon the ground that taking fundamental principles for granted is a form of slavery. Freedom in the strongest or the strictest sense is to break free of the principles that normal people do not question. To break free does not necessarily mean to abandon them and live as a hermit or madman or rogue. One can question the presuppositions behind free speech and find them reasonable (as in this attempt). But then one's embrace of or accommodation to the principle of freedom has been responsibly addressed and found more or less reasonable. This is the highest or best freedom, one might reluctantly agree, but is it the only freedom? There seems also to be freedom in a loose sense, attainable by many if not all of those who do not want or are not able to be a philosopher. This would be political liberty.

Then within political liberty is there a typical argument, one found in most every free society? Indeed there is, and it is an argument analogous to the distinction between strict philosophical liberty and loose political liberty. According to Aristotle, there are two parties in every regime, visible in a free regime. The party of the many, democracy, and the party of the few, oligarchy, can be found everywhere, and they engage in argument with each other, sometimes muted and implied, sometimes open. The many are more than the few in quantity. They are the larger part of all, that is, of all individuals in the whole. How is this possible? One needs a little metaphysics to see; one must carry the logic of politics into the whole universe to clarify the democratic argument. "All" can be a whole if all are equal parts, and they can be equal if seen as bodies that are parts of a whole body. Human beings are equal with reference to their bodies and their bodily necessities. When, however, one looks to their souls or minds, they are unequal, sometimes greatly unequal. Bodies are equal when considered for their matter, in which they are the same as all matter, as if human beings were nothing but matter like the rest of the universe. By the logic of the democratic argument, humans would have nothing special, nothing outstanding or distinctive, from the rest of nature.

Can the many make a whole, given this stringent extension of the argument on their behalf? Aristotle's answer is "No," and to make it he distinguishes demotic from democratic. Demotic individuals are simply equal, but as such they cannot form a government, having no distinctive capacities. Without a government there is no rule, no common good. A government needs officials and its society needs artisans, workers, experts; all of these are unequal. It seems that certain inequalities are needed to make a whole even of equal parts. Aristotle's distinction is like James Madison's in Federalist No. 10 between democracy (meaning pure democracy) and republic (representative democracy). A republic needs institutions that will (likely) select "fit characters," as Madison calls them, who are no longer simply among the many whom they are selected to serve. The "cracy" in democracy enables it to function at the cost of departure from strict equality.

Aristotle does not make this objection to demotic equality in his own name but puts it in the mouth of a spokesman for oligarchy. Oligarchy, government of the few, stands for "the better sort," or the best, altogether for excellence, and in sum for quality. The need for quality is a need for the few who have the most of it, whatever it may be. Even democratic qualities found quite generally, like courage, are distinctive of some democrats, not all of them as such. The whole of quantity fails because it is quite homogeneous; to succeed it needs those who are outstanding and needs to give them the rank they deserve as outstanding. Democracy speaks for mankind as one individual human to another; oligarchy speaks for humanity as a whole vis--vis the rest of the world or the universe.

Mankind is the part of the whole of nature that has an awareness of the whole; it can reflect on the whole (through theory) and can act on it (in practice). Thus, the oligarchical argument asserts the claim of humanity to be outstanding, for its awareness perhaps the best part of the whole. To assert something is more than merely to say it when nothing is at stake; it is to speak with passion and to demand to be honored and listened to in a situation where one's statements are contested. Assertiveness is the most outstanding, the freest quality of free speech. The Declaration of Independence begins from the "self-evident" truth Americans hold that all men are created equal. But this is not enough. At the end its signers go beyond what is self-evident; they mutually pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" to affirm it. In so doing they stand out from the equality they assert on behalf of those they excel by the very act of pledging their distinctive honor.

The two parties are those of quantity and of quality. But all nature has both quantity and quality. Humans are quantity insofar as each counts for one, but quality insofar as human beings have the special honor of claiming superiority over the rest of nature. Humans are a democracy among themselves as a species, and an aristocracy with respect to the rest of nature. Then both parties are correct or true: Quality counts for more because it is more important, and quantity counts for more because many are more than one or few. There are two meanings of "count" in regard to humans. "I count" means I am special; "we count" means "we count up." Every quantity is a quantity of a certain quality, and when counting one adds up the quality or qualities that have been identified as "counting." Yet conversely quality also depends on quantity; the quality when identified becomes something countable, as every "one" is potentially more than one, namely, few or many. In a rational claim every personal "I" becomes "someone" like me, with my qualities and deserts.

THE HIGHEST USES OF FREE SPEECH

Tocqueville applies Aristotle's analysis to our democratic era, saying that every free society has two great parties, one that wishes to extend and another that wishes to restrict the power of the people. We may now apply the distinction to American parties today, the Democrats and the Republicans, who seem as liberals vs. conservatives to fit this general description. Indeed, ours is distinctly a politics of two parties, in a way that sheds light on Aristotle's pointthough other free societies, with more parties, also tend to fall into broad coalitions of the left and the right in related and similar ways. These are not always perfectly the parties of quantity and quality, of course, but they are often roughly just that.

This may be particularly difficult to see given the current American president, elected by Republicans but not much of one himself, who has an adversarial relationship with virtue and particularly with its accompanying conventions. He does appeal to virtue by loudly emphasizing the application of vulgar versions of it that are attractive to his supporters, almost all of whom are more honest than he is. But even now, we can perceive that our two parties are locked in competition between a more quantitative ideal of inclusion and a more qualitative ideal of distinction.

Both parties are forgivably rather self-righteous about these ideals because, unlike the ordinary citizens who compose them, they are always arguing with each other and in doing so always compelled to make a point of themselves. They argue over the character of the whole, the whole of our country and also the whole of all things. Is it a homogeneous whole of equal or similar individuals, as the Democrats intend, or a heterogeneous whole of diverse parts of different rank and importance, as Republicans imply? The argument between these two wholes, we may now conclude, is free speech about the character of free human beings. Each is a partial truth, but each is tempted to make the partial truth a partisan whole. In doing so, each attempts to explain the other side and claim it for themselves: Democrats want virtue but in pursuit of equality; Republicans want popularity but from a virtuous people. Each reveals itself when trying to answer the other.

Democrats imply a whole that is inclusive of all, when each is understood as equal to everyone else; Republicans imply a whole with hierarchy and ranking of those who are better or best at the top. One can understand this political difference as a disagreement over our non-political thinking. When defining a thing it is necessary to speak of what it is when it is perfect or complete, in its best instance, and yet also to speak of the quality or qualities that cover all instances of that thing so as not to omit what must be included. Thus, a tree is defined by the complete tree and by all instances of objects that one would call a tree. The best instance is the standard that a tree should fit, and the class of tree holds together all its instances. Every definition needs to combine standard and class; it needs to have a standard to state a class. The difficulty is in defining a human being, where the best instance is far distant from the average or worst instancesso that a definition combining class and standard is very difficult to specify. The standard of the best human is too strict to include all humans, and the class of all humans is too loose to do justice to the best. Our two parties represent these two tendencies, and each tries to see the whole in terms of its partial or partisan view. They each call on us to exercise our freedom by choosing its way.

There is no freedom without choice, and no choice without choice-worthy choices, those that make sense and can be defended as reasonable. The politics of our free country is defined more by a dualism of our two parties than a pluralism of any number. There are many ways in which a people can be made more alike and more unlike, but Nietzsche is wrong to say that man has a thousand and one goals. Our politics is not indeterminate, chaotic, or arbitrary; it is connected to human nature, to the grand question raised by human nature, and to the choice we make in the exercise of our natural capacity for choice.

That capacity depends on the speech with which we form and state a choice. We can therefore conclude where we began: Our liberalismand here I include conservatives with those now called "liberals"should cease its feckless quest to overturn any rational basis for freedom and thereby deny any value to free speech beyond its being unfettered. What a surprise that in our very partisan differences, fickle and arbitrary as they often seem, we should turn out to be rational beings, worthy of a freedom to speak.

Harvey C. Mansfield is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University.

The Value of Free Speech | National Affairs

What is Cloning – Learn.Genetics

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

Many people first heard of cloning when Dolly the Sheep showed up on the scene in 1997. Artificial cloning technologies have been around for much longer than Dolly, though.

There are two ways to make an exact genetic copy of an organism in a lab: artificial embryo twinning and somatic cell nuclear transfer.

Artificial embryo twinning is a relatively low-tech way to make clones. As the name suggests, this technique mimics the natural process that creates identical twins.

In nature, twins form very early in development when the embryo splits in two. Twinning happens in the first days after egg and sperm join, while the embryo is made of just a small number of unspecialized cells. Each half of the embryo continues dividing on its own, ultimately developing into separate, complete individuals. Since they developed from the same fertilized egg, the resulting individuals are genetically identical.

Artificial embryo twinning uses the same approach, but it is carried out in a Petri dish instead of inside the mother. A very early embryo is separated into individual cells, which are allowed to divide and develop for a short time in the Petri dish. The embryos are then placed into a surrogate mother, where they finish developing. Again, since all the embryos came from the same fertilized egg, they are genetically identical.

Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), also called nuclear transfer, uses a different approach than artificial embryo twinning, but it produces the same result: an exact genetic copy, or clone, of an individual. This was the method used to create Dolly the Sheep.

What does SCNT mean? Let's take it apart:

Somatic cell: A somatic cell is any cell in the body other than sperm and egg, the two types of reproductive cells. Reproductive cells are also called germ cells. In mammals, every somatic cell has two complete sets of chromosomes, whereas the germ cells have only one complete set.

Nuclear: The nucleus is a compartment that holds the cell's DNA. The DNA is divided into packages called chromosomes, and it contains all the information needed to form an organism. It's small differences in our DNA that make each of us unique.

Transfer: Moving an object from one place to another. To make Dolly, researchers isolated a somatic cell from an adult female sheep. Next they removed the nucleus and all of its DNA from an egg cell. Then they transferred the nucleus from the somatic cell to the egg cell. After a couple of chemical tweaks, the egg cell, with its new nucleus, was behaving just like a freshly fertilized egg. It developed into an embryo, which was implanted into a surrogate mother and carried to term. (The transfer step is most often done using an electrical current to fuse the membranes of the egg and the somatic cell.)

The lamb, Dolly, was an exact genetic replica of the adult female sheep that donated the somatic cell. She was the first-ever mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell.

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What is Cloning - Learn.Genetics

Cloning Fact Sheet – National Human Genome Research …

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Danzig

CloningWhat is cloning?

The term cloning describes a number of different processes that can be used to produce genetically identical copies of a biological entity. The copied material, which has the same genetic makeup as the original, is referred to as a clone.

Researchers have cloned a wide range of biological materials, including genes, cells, tissues and even entire organisms, such as a sheep.

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Yes. In nature, some plants and single-celled organisms, such as bacteria, produce genetically identical offspring through a process called asexual reproduction. In asexual reproduction, a new individual is generated from a copy of a single cell from the parent organism.

Natural clones, also known as identical twins, occur in humans and other mammals. These twins are produced when a fertilized egg splits, creating two or more embryos that carry almost identical DNA. Identical twins have nearly the same genetic makeup as each other, but they are genetically different from either parent.

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There are three different types of artificial cloning: gene cloning, reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning.

Gene cloning produces copies of genes or segments of DNA. Reproductive cloning produces copies of whole animals. Therapeutic cloning produces embryonic stem cells for experiments aimed at creating tissues to replace injured or diseased tissues.

Gene cloning, also known as DNA cloning, is a very different process from reproductive and therapeutic cloning. Reproductive and therapeutic cloning share many of the same techniques, but are done for different purposes.

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Gene cloning is the most common type of cloning done by researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). NHGRI researchers have not cloned any mammals and NHGRI does not clone humans.

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Researchers routinely use cloning techniques to make copies of genes that they wish to study. The procedure consists of inserting a gene from one organism, often referred to as "foreign DNA," into the genetic material of a carrier called a vector. Examples of vectors include bacteria, yeast cells, viruses or plasmids, which are small DNA circles carried by bacteria. After the gene is inserted, the vector is placed in laboratory conditions that prompt it to multiply, resulting in the gene being copied many times over.

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In reproductive cloning, researchers remove a mature somatic cell, such as a skin cell, from an animal that they wish to copy. They then transfer the DNA of the donor animal's somatic cell into an egg cell, or oocyte, that has had its own DNA-containing nucleus removed.

Researchers can add the DNA from the somatic cell to the empty egg in two different ways. In the first method, they remove the DNA-containing nucleus of the somatic cell with a needle and inject it into the empty egg. In the second approach, they use an electrical current to fuse the entire somatic cell with the empty egg.

In both processes, the egg is allowed to develop into an early-stage embryo in the test-tube and then is implanted into the womb of an adult female animal.

Ultimately, the adult female gives birth to an animal that has the same genetic make up as the animal that donated the somatic cell. This young animal is referred to as a clone. Reproductive cloning may require the use of a surrogate mother to allow development of the cloned embryo, as was the case for the most famous cloned organism, Dolly the sheep.

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Over the last 50 years, scientists have conducted cloning experiments in a wide range of animals using a variety of techniques. In 1979, researchers produced the first genetically identical mice by splitting mouse embryos in the test tube and then implanting the resulting embryos into the wombs of adult female mice. Shortly after that, researchers produced the first genetically identical cows, sheep and chickens by transferring the nucleus of a cell taken from an early embryo into an egg that had been emptied of its nucleus.

It was not until 1996, however, that researchers succeeded in cloning the first mammal from a mature (somatic) cell taken from an adult animal. After 276 attempts, Scottish researchers finally produced Dolly, the lamb from the udder cell of a 6-year-old sheep. Two years later, researchers in Japan cloned eight calves from a single cow, but only four survived.

Besides cattle and sheep, other mammals that have been cloned from somatic cells include: cat, deer, dog, horse, mule, ox, rabbit and rat. In addition, a rhesus monkey has been cloned by embryo splitting.

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Despite several highly publicized claims, human cloning still appears to be fiction. There currently is no solid scientific evidence that anyone has cloned human embryos.

In 1998, scientists in South Korea claimed to have successfully cloned a human embryo, but said the experiment was interrupted very early when the clone was just a group of four cells. In 2002, Clonaid, part of a religious group that believes humans were created by extraterrestrials, held a news conference to announce the birth of what it claimed to be the first cloned human, a girl named Eve. However, despite repeated requests by the research community and the news media, Clonaid never provided any evidence to confirm the existence of this clone or the other 12 human clones it purportedly created.

In 2004, a group led by Woo-Suk Hwang of Seoul National University in South Korea published a paper in the journal Science in which it claimed to have created a cloned human embryo in a test tube. However, an independent scientific committee later found no proof to support the claim and, in January 2006, Science announced that Hwang's paper had been retracted.

From a technical perspective, cloning humans and other primates is more difficult than in other mammals. One reason is that two proteins essential to cell division, known as spindle proteins, are located very close to the chromosomes in primate eggs. Consequently, removal of the egg's nucleus to make room for the donor nucleus also removes the spindle proteins, interfering with cell division. In other mammals, such as cats, rabbits and mice, the two spindle proteins are spread throughout the egg. So, removal of the egg's nucleus does not result in loss of spindle proteins. In addition, some dyes and the ultraviolet light used to remove the egg's nucleus can damage the primate cell and prevent it from growing.

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No. Clones do not always look identical. Although clones share the same genetic material, the environment also plays a big role in how an organism turns out.

For example, the first cat to be cloned, named Cc, is a female calico cat that looks very different from her mother. The explanation for the difference is that the color and pattern of the coats of cats cannot be attributed exclusively to genes. A biological phenomenon involving inactivation of the X chromosome (See sex chromosome) in every cell of the female cat (which has two X chromosomes) determines which coat color genes are switched off and which are switched on. The distribution of X inactivation, which seems to occur randomly, determines the appearance of the cat's coat.

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Reproductive cloning may enable researchers to make copies of animals with the potential benefits for the fields of medicine and agriculture.

For instance, the same Scottish researchers who cloned Dolly have cloned other sheep that have been genetically modified to produce milk that contains a human protein essential for blood clotting. The hope is that someday this protein can be purified from the milk and given to humans whose blood does not clot properly. Another possible use of cloned animals is for testing new drugs and treatment strategies. The great advantage of using cloned animals for drug testing is that they are all genetically identical, which means their responses to the drugs should be uniform rather than variable as seen in animals with different genetic make-ups.

After consulting with many independent scientists and experts in cloning, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided in January 2008 that meat and milk from cloned animals, such as cattle, pigs and goats, are as safe as those from non-cloned animals. The FDA action means that researchers are now free to using cloning methods to make copies of animals with desirable agricultural traits, such as high milk production or lean meat. However, because cloning is still very expensive, it will likely take many years until food products from cloned animals actually appear in supermarkets.

Another application is to create clones to build populations of endangered, or possibly even extinct, species of animals. In 2001, researchers produced the first clone of an endangered species: a type of Asian ox known as a guar. Sadly, the baby guar, which had developed inside a surrogate cow mother, died just a few days after its birth. In 2003, another endangered type of ox, called the Banteg, was successfully cloned. Soon after, three African wildcats were cloned using frozen embryos as a source of DNA. Although some experts think cloning can save many species that would otherwise disappear, others argue that cloning produces a population of genetically identical individuals that lack the genetic variability necessary for species survival.

Some people also have expressed interest in having their deceased pets cloned in the hope of getting a similar animal to replace the dead one. But as shown by Cc the cloned cat, a clone may not turn out exactly like the original pet whose DNA was used to make the clone.

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Reproductive cloning is a very inefficient technique and most cloned animal embryos cannot develop into healthy individuals. For instance, Dolly was the only clone to be born live out of a total of 277 cloned embryos. This very low efficiency, combined with safety concerns, presents a serious obstacle to the application of reproductive cloning.

Researchers have observed some adverse health effects in sheep and other mammals that have been cloned. These include an increase in birth size and a variety of defects in vital organs, such as the liver, brain and heart. Other consequences include premature aging and problems with the immune system. Another potential problem centers on the relative age of the cloned cell's chromosomes. As cells go through their normal rounds of division, the tips of the chromosomes, called telomeres, shrink. Over time, the telomeres become so short that the cell can no longer divide and, consequently, the cell dies. This is part of the natural aging process that seems to happen in all cell types. As a consequence, clones created from a cell taken from an adult might have chromosomes that are already shorter than normal, which may condemn the clones' cells to a shorter life span. Indeed, Dolly, who was cloned from the cell of a 6-year-old sheep, had chromosomes that were shorter than those of other sheep her age. Dolly died when she was six years old, about half the average sheep's 12-year lifespan.

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Therapeutic cloning involves creating a cloned embryo for the sole purpose of producing embryonic stem cells with the same DNA as the donor cell. These stem cells can be used in experiments aimed at understanding disease and developing new treatments for disease. To date, there is no evidence that human embryos have been produced for therapeutic cloning.

The richest source of embryonic stem cells is tissue formed during the first five days after the egg has started to divide. At this stage of development, called the blastocyst, the embryo consists of a cluster of about 100 cells that can become any cell type. Stem cells are harvested from cloned embryos at this stage of development, resulting in destruction of the embryo while it is still in the test tube.

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Researchers hope to use embryonic stem cells, which have the unique ability to generate virtually all types of cells in an organism, to grow healthy tissues in the laboratory that can be used replace injured or diseased tissues. In addition, it may be possible to learn more about the molecular causes of disease by studying embryonic stem cell lines from cloned embryos derived from the cells of animals or humans with different diseases. Finally, differentiated tissues derived from ES cells are excellent tools to test new therapeutic drugs.

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Many researchers think it is worthwhile to explore the use of embryonic stem cells as a path for treating human diseases. However, some experts are concerned about the striking similarities between stem cells and cancer cells. Both cell types have the ability to proliferate indefinitely and some studies show that after 60 cycles of cell division, stem cells can accumulate mutations that could lead to cancer. Therefore, the relationship between stem cells and cancer cells needs to be more clearly understood if stem cells are to be used to treat human disease.

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Gene cloning is a carefully regulated technique that is largely accepted today and used routinely in many labs worldwide. However, both reproductive and therapeutic cloning raise important ethical issues, especially as related to the potential use of these techniques in humans.

Reproductive cloning would present the potential of creating a human that is genetically identical to another person who has previously existed or who still exists. This may conflict with long-standing religious and societal values about human dignity, possibly infringing upon principles of individual freedom, identity and autonomy. However, some argue that reproductive cloning could help sterile couples fulfill their dream of parenthood. Others see human cloning as a way to avoid passing on a deleterious gene that runs in the family without having to undergo embryo screening or embryo selection.

Therapeutic cloning, while offering the potential for treating humans suffering from disease or injury, would require the destruction of human embryos in the test tube. Consequently, opponents argue that using this technique to collect embryonic stem cells is wrong, regardless of whether such cells are used to benefit sick or injured people.

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Last Reviewed: March 21, 2017

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Cloning Fact Sheet - National Human Genome Research ...

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