new technology and censorship . on assange and on the french tweet ban attempt

Reading these two articles  together  was  a great  pointer to the problems that new technologies are raising for the  freedom of  expression.  More food for thoughts . 

I think the fascinating thing about Assange is that the very same act of disclosure, if he were recognized as a journalist, might have brought him the Pulitzer Prize. Assange holds this curious status. The media doesn't quite know how to handle him. They can't decide whether he is a villain or a hero, or some type of villainous hero. And many people are ignoring the content of a lot of what he disclosed.

You and I have talked about this in the past, John, that the material released by WikiLeaks ticked off the US government, primarily because it showed that the government had been routinely lying to the American people. That produced tremendous anger from government officials who are not used to be exposed in this way, including members of Congress. These are people who tightly control what the public knows and what information is allowed out of the government.

Frankly, most governments are used to lying to each other - to a degree that most people would find shocking. Part of diplomacy is the art of strategic lying. These cables show the level of deceit shown by government not only to other governments but to their own citizens, including our own. And so it was a tremendously embarrassing disclosure.

Some of these disclosures were quite startling and far more important than the media suggestion in the coverage. For example, we've talked about the cable showing the Obama Administration threatening Spain if Spain carried out its right under treaty to investigate the American torture program, in light of Obama's refusal to do so.

In one sense, the Pentagon Papers were so powerful because they were focused on the issue of deception with regard to the Vietnam War. Assange is almost hurt by the fact that his disclosures were 100 times broader than the Pentagon Papers.

Ironically, if he had simply taken parts of those disclosures and released them in isolation, he might have had a greater level of support. Instead, he released this comprehensive record of deceit by the US government and other governments. And frankly, I think the mainstream media had difficulty in covering it and describing it and processing it.

Jonathan Turley: Right, they released information embarrassing to the government. But when you look at the media coverage, they clearly are unwilling to treat Assange as a whistleblower, and they are particularly unwilling to treat him as a journalist.

And so this sort of goes to this longstanding question of what constitutes a journalist in the age of blogs and Internet sites?

John Cusack: I guess that's probably the question I was stumbling towards -- what do you believe that difference is, from the constitutional perspective of freedom of speech, or its protection?

Jonathan Turley: Journalists have been adopting a very narrow definition because they have a legitimate concern that, with the ability to create a blog in a matter of minutes, everyone can claim to be a journalist. If everyone is a journalist, then no one will likely have journalistic privileges. Journalists survive on these privileges and those privileges will evaporate if everyone can claim them.

And so if you look at things like the National Press Club, they long have had a definition of a journalist that deals with how much the person gets paid to do journalism, excluding people who are legitimate journalists but are not receiving a full-time, or even a significant part-time, salary. Those definitions are highly artificial today. Most people are now getting their news from the Internet and from blogs.

There's two ways to look at whether someone's a journalist -- their function and their motivation. And usually, we look at both. Well, what was the motivation of Assange? Assange's motivation, it seems to me, was clearly to be a whistleblower and to release this information. But he was also doing an act which is identical to what journalists do.

And yet, if you look at how he's treated in the newspapers, they're not treating him as either whistleblower or journalist; they're treating him somehow as sui generis, something unique. He's an Assange.

 I think it's important to re-frame this discussion here and look at this problem from a broader perspective than just Julian Assange. Because I am not interested in individuals.

I am interested in movements. We need a movement protecting the 1st Amendment and its broadest reach. I don't care about Assange other than he is an individual whose rights are being violated. And that means my rights are being violated. The reason we should care about what happens to Assange in the United States is because what happens to him, happens to the First Amendment."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack/what-is-an-assange_b_2317824.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

This, Farago argues, is fantastic, because - using the same argument employed by censors and tyrants of every age and every culture - new technology makes free speech far too dangerous to permit:

"If only this were still the 18th century! We can't delude ourselves any longer that free speech is the privilege of pure citizens in some perfect Enlightenment salon, where all sides of an argument are heard and the most noble view will naturally rise to the top. Speech now takes place in a digital mixing chamber, in which the most outrageous messages are instantly amplified, with sometimes violent effects . . .

"We keep thinking that the solution to bad speech is more speech. But even in the widest and most robust network, common sense and liberal-democratic moderation are not going to win the day, and it's foolhardy to imagine that, say, homophobic tweets are best mitigated with gay-friendly ones.

"Digital speech is new territory, and it calls for fresh thinking, not the mindless reapplication of centuries-out-of-date principles that equate a smartphone to a Gutenberg press. As Vallaud-Belkacem notes, homophobic violence – 'verbal and otherwise' – is the No 1 cause of suicide among French teenagers. In the face of an epidemic like that, free speech absolutism rings a little hollow, and keeping a hateful hashtag from popping up is not exactly the same as book-burning."

Nowhere in Farago's pro-censorship argument does he address, or even fleetingly consider, the possibility that the ideas that the state will forcibly suppress will be ideas that he likes, rather than ideas that he dislikes. People who want the state to punish the expression of certain ideas are so convinced of their core goodness, the unchallengeable rightness of their views, that they cannot even conceive that the ideas they like will, at some point, end up on the Prohibited List.




The history of human knowledge is nothing more than the realization that yesterday's pieties are actually shameful errors. It is constantly the case that human beings of the prior generation enshrined a belief as objectively, unchallengably true which the current generation came to see as wildly irrational or worse. All of the most cherished human dogmas - deemed so true and undeniable that dissent should be barred by the force of law - have been subsequently debunked, or at least discredited

Nothing has been more destructive or dangerous throughout history - nothing - than the power of the state to suppress and criminalize opinions it dislikes. I regard calls for suppression of ideas as far more menacing than - and at least just as hateful as - bigoted Twitter hashtags and online homophobic jokes.

Ultimately, the only way to determine what is and is not "hate speech" is majority belief - in other words, mob rule. Right now, minister Vallaud-Belkacem and Farago are happy to criminalize "hate speech" because majorities - at least European ones - happen to agree with their views on gay people and women's equality. 

Criminalizing ideas doesn't make them go away any more than sticking your head in the sand makes unpleasant things disappear. If anything, refusing to confront them makes them stronger. But what is certain is that few people have done as much harm in history as those who deem themselves worthy of criminalizing ideas they dislike.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/02/free-speech-twitter-france