Monthly Archives: June 2017

Andy Rain/EPA/NewscomYou'd think Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself was the driver of the van that plowed into pedestrians on London Bridge Saturday, the way U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May is talking about the attack. He isn't, but everybody across the world, not just in the United Kingdom, needs to pay close attention to how May wants to respond to the assault.

May believes the problem is you and your silly insistence that you be permitted to speak your mind and to look at whatever you want on the internet. And she means to stop you. And her attitude toward government control of internet speech is shared by President Donald Trump (and Hillary Clinton), so what she's trying to sell isn't isolated to her own citizenry.

In a speech in the wake of this weekend's attack, May called flat-out for government authority to censor and control what people can see and access on the internet:

We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breedyet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide. We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements to regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning.

Note that May appears to be trying to narrowly pitch a regulatory regime that focuses entirely on censoring speech by terrorists. One might argue that even America's First Amendment would not protect such speech, since such communications involve planning violence against others.

But May and the Tories really want to propose much broader censorship of the internet, and they know it. May is using fear of terrorism to sell government control over private online speech. The Tories' manifesto for the upcoming election makes it pretty clear they're looking to control communication on the internet in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with fighting terrorism. BuzzFeed took note:

The proposalsdotted around the manifesto documentare varied. There are many measures designed to make it easier to do business online but it's a different, more social conservative approach when it comes to social networks.

Legislation would be introduced to protect the public from abuse and offensive material online, while everyone would have the right to wipe material that was posted when they were under 18. Internet companies would also be asked to help promote counter-extremism narrativespotentially echoing the government's Prevent programme. There would be new rules requiring companies to make it ever harder for people to access pornography and violent images, with all content creators forced to justify their policies to the government.

The manifesto doesn't seem to acknowledge a difference between speech and activity, Buzzfeed adds:

"It should be as unacceptable to bully online as it is in the playground, as difficult to groom a young child on the internet as it is in a community, as hard for children to access violent and degrading pornography online as it is in the high street, and as difficult to commit a crime digitally as it is physically."

New laws will be introduced to implement these rules, forcing internet companies such as Facebook to abide by the rulings of a regulator or face sanctions: "We will introduce a sanctions regime to ensure compliance, giving regulators the ability to fine or prosecute those companies that fail in their legal duties, and to order the removal of content where it clearly breaches UK law."

The United Kingdom already has some very heavy content-based censorship of pornography that presumes to police what sorts of sexual fantasies are acceptable among its populace. Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown has written repeatedly about the British government's nannying tendencies in trying suppress pornography.

In a manner similar to this censorship push, May and the British government sold the Investigatory Powers Actalso known as the Snooper's Charterto the public as a mechanism to fight terrorism. But the massive legislation, now in place as law, actually demands that internet companies store users' online data to investigate all sorts of activities that have nothing to do with terrorism at all.

The European Union is also hammering out regulations that would require social media companies to censor their services. But the E.U. plan is currently much more limited than what the ruling party in the U.K. is demanding. The European Union wants to force companies only to delete videos that contain hate speech or incitements to violence.

So be warned: This isn't even a slippery-slope risk that a government that claims the authority to censor terrorist communications might broaden that scope to other areas. May and her government already want those broader powers. They're just using the fear of terrorism to sell the idea.

More:
Theresa May's Call for Internet Censorship Isn't Limited to Fighting Terrorism - Reason (blog)

Evanston Now

Viewpoint: Censorship at the library | Evanston Now Evanston Now On Friday June 2, the Evanston Public Library held a hearing that may lead to the firing of librarian Lesley Williams this week. Her alleged crime? Posting a ... and more »

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Viewpoint: Censorship at the library | Evanston Now - Evanston Now

A leading activist in Florida denounced the campaign to boycott an international LGBTQ film festival that took place in Tel Aviv last week, calling on theLGBTQ and progressive ally communities to take a stand against censoring, and against anti-semitism, in an op-ed published Saturday in The Miami Herald.

James Moon, a board member of both the LGBTQ group A Wider Bridge and South Floridas Outshine Film Festival, and said that he felt at home during his first visit to Israel and sees no difference between the American and Israeli LGBTQ communities.

While his trip centered aroundTLVFest, which was held June 1, he also toured across Israel andthe West Bank, meeting with political, artistic and advocacy leaders.

However, he said that proponents of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign who denounced TLVFest aspinkwashing cast an ugly pall over the event. The term means that any person or organization that promotes or even acknowledges the progress of LGBTQ rights in Israel is really a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda, Moon wrote. He dismissed thecharacterization as a slanderous allegation.

BDS and those that hate Israel are playing a zero-sum game where any achievement by Israel or any community or person in or from Israel cannot be tolerated or recognized, he explained. A recent example of this was the banning of the film Wonder Woman in Lebanon because it starred Israeli actress Gal Gadot.

It is morally unacceptable to block internationalLGBTQ-themed films from Israeli audiences because you cannot advocate for LGBTQ rights without supporting Israeli LGBTQ rights, Moon wrote.And you cannot advocate for progressive values and not stand against bald bigotry when confronted with it.

Moon concluded by asking the LGBTQ community to support TLVFest because, if you do not stand now, your festival may be the next target of the BDS movement.

There is currently a crowdfunding campaignto raise $10,000 in support of TLVFest.

[Photo: A Wider Bridge / YouTube ]

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LGBT Activist: Progressives Must Oppose BDS Censorship, Support Tel Aviv Film Festival - TheTower.org

At the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, anti-racist protests spilled over once again into threats of violence. Every year at Evergreen, minority students play virtue-signal hooky to highlight racial inequities. They call it the Day of Absence. When this years Day of Absence turned into the Day-That-Evergreen-Students-Demand-That-All-Whites-Leave-Campus, Professor Bret Weinstein disobeyedshades of Thoreau!and calmly explained the difference between Evergreens past clarion calls to anti-racist righteousness and this years diktat to discrimination: The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.

Heres the rub: Weinstein has deluded himself if he thinks the Day of Absence was ever about crippling oppression. Todays student demands are about power exercised through threatened and actualized violence.

Its everything to do with Evergreen students fascistic beliefs and threatsso severe that the Olympia chief of police told Professor Weinstein it was unsafe for him to go to the colleges campusand nothing to do with equality or equity.

You might be wondering where the Mayor of Olympia is in all this, or why the damn police arent getting in gear. Because left-leaning professional politicians, increasingly isolated on the coasts, choose to abstain from the free speech fracas unless theyre dragged in. The party being banded to a coastal sliver means theyre hardened by the demands of a homogeneous progressivist base.

A little south of the Evergreen fray, in Oregon, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler announced that he would not issue any permits for alt-right events scheduled to take place in the weeks following the Portland stabbing carried out by Joseph Christian.

To support his position, Wheeler used the same canard about there being a hate speech exception to the First Amendment that Howard Dean peddled in justifying Ann Coulter being barred from Berkeley. Lets call it the Wheeler-Dean Theory of the First Amendment. Heres the proposition: A) Right-wing political positions are hateful and disfavored by progressives; B) that which is hateful is not protected by the Constitution; therefore, C) the spoken political positions of the Right are unconstitutional.

Howard Dean, completely ignorant of the history he thinks supports his position, is fond of citing the WWII-era case Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the source of the fighting words doctrine (which doesnt apply to hate speech).

Deans discursus conveniently omitted how vile the Chaplinsky case really was. Chaplinsky was a Jehovahs Witness being accosted by a town mob. He was arrested for opposing the war and calling a police officerbrace yourselfa damn fascist.

Citing Chaplinsky proves nothing other than that Mayor Wheeler and Howard Dean both unthinkingly draw from the well of authoritarianism. Its a bad case.

Inconvenient truths like the true story of Chaplinsky are obscured by a supine media who obsess over the apparition of white-race-hatred. Notice that white supremacy is the catch-all term used to justify the most outrageous behaviors, including Evergreen College students using physical intimidation to confine administrators. The willingness of Evergreen College president George Bridges to give in to their every babyish demand doesnt help much either.

The concern for white supremacist activity overwhelming society is, of course, absurd. Joseph Christian, for instance, is more crazed hobo than calculating hater; he was swigging from a bladder of purple-drank sangria before he attacked, he hadnt had a permanent address in years, he once robbed a convenience store because the guy there d[id]nt sell any winning lottery tickets.

Calling Christian a white supremacist is a misdirect, a red herring, a tactic used to raise the stakes so that restrictions applying to only one side of the political spectrum can be justified.

Will more violence come in our cultural Cold Civil War? If it does, it wont be frivolous. It also wont be the doing of the criminally insane like Joseph Christian. If violence comes, it will be a return to the insecurity of the 1970s, when 1,470 terror attacks resulted in the deaths of 184 people. It will be terror and political violence.

The sum-total of terrors tollmortality, fearwill rattle us. And if there is a John Brown moment, a Wall Street Bombing moment, or anything of the kind, the Cold Civil War is going to heat right up. The bloodshed will come on the heels of censorship. The Battle of Berkeley is so much evidence.

Free speech is, as Dr. Jordan Peterson puts it, the mechanism by which we keep our society functioning. The apparatus to which Peterson refers is a safety release valve, a kill switch on combat.

People need to feel like they have an outlet; they need to know they can jettison the frustration (and even the poison) that accumulates in their mind. But today, the institutions of civil societywhats left of it, anywayhave formed an anti-speech coalition: students against speech, politicians against speech, intellectuals against speech, journalists against speech, and on and on.

Youll remember that The Washington Post assumed a new taglineDemocracy Dies in Darknesswhich like most contemporary clichs is not true at all and means nothing. As a matter of fact, democracy dies in the blazing solar heat of the public forum, where the wrong ideas swelter in the hot box, awaiting a heatstroke-induced death, while the emboldened authoritarians of the left wait in the cool shade.

This will cause incalculable damage. And lots more violence.

See the rest here:
Evergreen, Portland, And The Censorship-Violence Nexus - The Daily Caller

As we reel from the third terror attack in Britain in as many months, politicians are scrambling to come up with strategies to make the public feel safer. Amid rows over police cuts, the old debate about online safety has inevitably been revived. Theresa May said, in her speech on Sunday, that internet giants were providing a safe space for extremists online. We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements that regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning, she said.

Yesterday, culture secretary Karen Bradley found time in a series of cringeworthy interviews where she refused to be drawn on police numbers to reiterate the same censorious point. She urged companies like Google and Facebook to tackle extremist content. We know it can be done and we know the internet companies want to do it, she told the BBC.

But all of the big internet firms and social-media networks already regulate their content. Google said it was already planning an international forum to accelerate and strengthen our existing work in this area. In any case, as some commentators have pointed out, any state or international regulation of online content would do little to tackle the problem of terrorism.

The Open Rights Group, a campaign group for online free speech and privacy, said increased regulation could risk pushing terrorists vile networks into darker corners of the web. Dr Shiraz Maher from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at Kings College London said terrorist groups and their supporters have already moved to more clandestine methods. This is the reality of the situation. However scary it is to know that you can Google a guide on bomb-making, forcing internet companies to remove and regulate such content would simply push it on to the Dark Web or similar, where it becomes harder for security services to investigate sources and followers. There are also no guarantees that being forced to use more clandestine sites would deter would-be terrorists. As Professor Peter Neumann, an ICSR director, tweeted: Blaming social-media platforms is politically convenient but intellectually lazy.

Home secretary Amber Rudd has also taken the opportunity to insist once again that tech firms provide a back door into their end-to-end encryption. She first suggested this in March, after it was discovered that the Westminster attacker, Khalid Masood, had sent a WhatsApp message minutes before carrying out his murderous act. WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, so that only the sender and recipient can read their messages. As tech firms are quick to point out, any back door into encrypted messages, which allows the state to hack into a terrorists phone, means the same hacking is possible on anyones phone. Thus encryption becomes pointless.

Read more:
You can't fight terrorism with online censorship - Spiked