A student’s first-person essay in an online newspaper raises issues of free speech at Stern College for Women.

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Yeshiva University Stunned by Tale of a Tryst

RICHMOND, Va. — New cigarette warning labels that show the sewn-up corpse of a smoker or a picture of diseased lungs shouldn’t be prevented from appearing on packs next year while a federal judge determines whether they violate tobacco companies’ free speech rights, the Food and Drug Administration said Friday. Some of the nation’s largest tobacco companies, led by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Lorillard Tobacco Co., sued last month to block the labels, questioning their constitutionality and saying that changing cigarette packaging will cost millions of dollars. Read full article > >

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FDA says judge shouldn’t stop graphic new cigarette warning labels

DENVER — A harassment charge has been dropped in the case of a 35-year-old Colorado man who faced prosecution for displaying his middle finger to a Colorado State Patrol trooper. The State Patrol said in a statement late Friday that it asked that the case be dropped. The American Civil Liberties Union had argued that while the gesture may be have been rude, it amounted to protected free speech. Read full article > >

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Harassment charge dropped against man who gave Colorado state trooper the finger

The food and advertising industries are pushing back against an Obama administration proposal that calls for food makers to voluntarily limit the way they market sugary cereals, salty snacks and other foods to children and teens. From yogurt makers to candy manufacturers, they lined up Tuesday to tell regulators that the first-ever proposed guidelines for marketing to children would not stop the childhood obesity problem but would certainly hurt their businesses and abridge their right to free speech. Read full article > >

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Food makers resist lawmakers’ proposal for guidelines in marketing to children

The Stolen Valor Act is a 2006 law that makes it a federal crime to lie about being a military hero. But some federal courts have said it violates the right to free speech.

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Fighting for the Right to Lie About Military Service

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The U.S. Justice Department believes a South Carolina jail is violating inmates’ free speech rights by barring them from any reading material other than the Bible

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US Justice Department wants to intervene in lawsuit against SC jail’s Bible-only policy

The Supreme Court majority that struck down campaign spending restrictions as assaults on free speech seems ready to do the same with Arizona’s public financing plan.

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Supreme Court skeptical about Arizona’s campaign finance law

If there is any interest group more intellectually dishonest in its approach to free speech than anti-abortion activists, I have yet to encounter it. Their solicitude for their own speech rights is equaled only by their hostility to the speech rights of abortion providers and patients. Two respective laws recently passed by the New York City Council and the South Dakota legislature illustrate these hypocrisies. I’d bet my last contribution to Planned Parenthood that centers in South Dakota, which women are forced to consult, provide inaccurate or deceptive information. To discourage if not effectively prohibit women from obtaining abortions, South Dakota now requires them to endure a three-day waiting period (in a state with only one abortion clinic) and to submit to counseling at an anti-abortion “crisis” center. In addition to unduly burdening abortion rights, the South Dakota law ignores women’s First Amendment rights to decline to attend anti-abortion lectures. If this seems reasonable to you, think about a similar law that would require pregnant women, or women planning pregnancies, to undergo counseling about the risks of childbirth, the economic costs of raising children, and the possibility that they’ll break your heart. And think about the opposition of pro-lifers to a recently enacted New York City law requiring “crisis pregnancy centers” to describe the medical services they offer and disclose whether or not they are licensed medical providers. These disclosure requirements were prompted by evidence that the crisis centers regularly engage in deceptive practices, which you can find partly described here . I’d bet my last contribution to Planned Parenthood that centers in South Dakota, which women are forced to consult, provide similarly inaccurate or deceptive information. But pro-lifers apparently feel constitutionally entitled to their deceptions; and they do have a right to call themselves pregnancy crisis counselors, however misleading the label seems, while preaching against abortion — so long as they refrain from providing pregnant women with objectively inaccurate information. But insisting that New York’s disclosure law “strips” them of their First Amendment rights, crisis centers have hired the American Center for Law and Justice to challenge it. Compare this righteous opposition to requirements that anti-abortion counselors present women with accurate information about their services and licenses, (or lack thereof) to the righteousness with which pro-lifers defend laws requiring abortion providers to present women with lists of horribles possibly attendant upon abortion, (a requirement upheld by the Supreme Court; the Court has also upheld a law barring recipients of federal funds from informing women about abortion options.) In other words, on the pro-life planet, abortion providers lack free speech rights to counsel patients without interference from the state, while anti-abortion activists enjoy very broad speech rights, including the utterly unregulated right to dispense inaccurate medical information and the power to force it upon pregnant women, who have no right to refuse it. As Nat Hentoff has said, “free speech for me, but not for thee.” I hope, under the circumstances, that Hentoff, who opposes abortion rights, won’t think I’m taking his name in vain.

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Free Speech Hypocrisies of Pro-Lifers

The US Supreme Court rules an anti-gay church has the right to picket military funerals under the US constitution’s free speech protections.

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US court allows funeral protests

Rep. James Clyburn asserts , without evidence, that the Tucson shooting proves that this country needs to curtail free speech in the name of public safety: ‘Free speech is as free speech does,’ he said. ‘You cannot yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater and call it free speech and some of what I hear, and is being called free speech, is worse than that.’ Clyburn used as an example a comment made by Sharron Angle, an unsuccessful U.S. senatorial candidate in Nevada, who said the frustrated public may consider turning to ‘Second Amendment remedies’ for political disputes unless Congress changed course. Clyburn said the man accused of shooting Giffords did just that. ‘He saw a Second Amendment remedy and that’s what occurred here and there is no way not to make that connection,’ Clyburn said. Despite Clyburn’s position, law enforcement has not yet revealed the suspect’s motives in the shooting.

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A New Threat to Free Speech

Elliot Cohen’s reputation for prescient reporting precedes his new book, “Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project.” In 2007, years before today’s comparatively widespread coverage of the Comcast-NBC merger and other threats to net neutrality, Cohen won the first place Project Censored award for his story about the free speech implications of the 2005 Supreme Court decision cementing the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) position that read more

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First, Your Shoes; Next, Your DNA

Given the frenetic closing days of 2010 in Washington politics — passage of the tax bill; repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; approval of the New Start treaty; defeat of the DREAM Act and the Omnibus Spending Bill — it is not surprising that the December 21 decision by the Federal Communications Commission on network neutrality was barely noticed. Unless you are a communications industry executive or one of the lawyers, lobbyists, or advocacy groups in a long-running debate, this fundamental move to regulate the technologies that increasingly manage our business or personal activities could not have made much of an impact. But it should have. MORE ON Net Neutrality: Steve Wozniak: Steve Wozniak to the FCC: Keep the Internet Free Bruce Gottlieb: Net Neutrality and the Academics Who Love It Alexis Madrigal: Google and Verizon Want to Redefine the Internet The FCC vote of three (Democrats) against two (Republicans) was meant to be the culmination of an already protracted review process that would make all wired and Wi-Fi technologies broadly accessible as they become increasingly dominant in daily life. From the outset, the Obama administration’s stated goal was that all services should be fairly priced and provided in ways that make them available to the maximum extent possible on an equal basis to the public. So in the quieter interregnum of post-Christmas week, I pulled out my net neutrality file, read reports of the FCC decision and the raft of commentaries that appeared in the days around the FCC vote, determined to reach my own judgment on what had happened to this essential aspect of communications policy. The major conclusion of this exercise is that the net neutrality issue is actually far from resolved, despite the FCC action. In fact, by reaching what was essentially a compromise decision, the FCC set the stage for another round of contention, almost certain litigation, and possibly a move for congressional action to override the FCC. In the meantime, what the FCC did was adopt rules that do assure access to material on the Internet — Facebook and YouTube, for example — without restrictions or extra pricing. But when it comes to wireless providers and mobile devices, the major companies such as Verizon and AT&T now have latitude, which they seem destined eventually to use to create tiers of service that are determined by price or other factors that the companies will determine. While the Internet is approaching universal usage, Wi-Fi and mobile technologies are evolving into the fastest growing sectors of communications. What the FCC has done is create a major administrative loophole that enables the providers to determine how those technologies will work — although it does require them to be more transparent in explaining their decisions as they are made. For those of us outside the orbit of the great corporations on one side or the open access/free speech advocates on the other, one recognizable analogy to the debate is the record of cable television. Over the decades, television has progressed from networks and a handful of independents to cable systems with hundreds of stations that gradually have become tiered so that premium programming is now substantially more expensive than the free television that was the standard a generation or two ago. The FCC has determined that the Internet should, in effect, remain open to all on equal conditions. But while not explicitly recognizing that wireless providers will create a class system of services, it has given them opportunity to do so — which, given the record of corporations of all kinds in telecommunications, seems inevitable. Julius Genachowski, the FCC chairman, hailed the outcome of the deliberations, saying : “for the first time, we’ll have enforceable rules of the road to preserve Internet freedom and openness.” President Obama’s statement was equally enthusiastic. He said that the government would “remain vigilant and see to it that innovation is allowed to flourish, that consumers are protected from abuse and that the democratic spirit of the Internet remains intact.” Both those declarations strike me as exaggerated. Having considered the arguments from a variety of viewpoints, I have come down on the side of Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, one of the leading open access advocacy groups, who wrote in a letter to supporters: “For the first time in the history of telecommunications law, the FCC has given its explicit stamp of approval to online discrimination…. For wireless communications, the rule provides virtually no protections at all.” Silver does acknowledge that the FCC actions discourage “unjust and unreasonable” practices. That means that dominant industry players will need to provide data in support of the rationale for their service changes rather than simply imposing them. But given their resources and determination, big corporations are likely to prevail in most instances. The Obama administration’s commitment to net neutrality — the broadest possible access for the public to technology across all platforms — has been significantly weakened in many respects by the FCC decision to split the Internet and wireless regulation. But rest assured that, whatever the FCC has done so far, the issues are not finally resolved. In a scathing editorial last week, the Wall Street Journal said : “The FCC’s brazen power grab is already producing a welcome backlash on Capitol Hill. GOP Representative Marsha Blackburn says she’ll introduce legislation to prohibit the FCC from enforcing net neutrality rules.” The stakes are very high. The technology corporations, the communications industry interests, the open access advocates, Congress, and ultimately the courts will have much more to say on the subject, and they will all be in the fray as the impact of last year’s decision takes hold in the New Year.

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What Happened to Net Neutrality?

The human being is an animal of protocol. Our behaviors – whether consciously or not – obey codes. Until just recently, protocol was an instrument of hegemonic power. The more one mastered the rules and their construction, the more one controlled the population. The writing and policing of protocols were the privilege of the dominant elites. read more

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Wikileaks: Who Rules by the Code, Will Fall by the Code

Craigslist gave in to long-applied pressure this past September when it shut down its Adult Services section across the United States. Attorneys general from 17 states gathered to write a public-facing letter that argued the classified ad website was facilitating both child trafficking and prostitution. Craigslist supporters declared the move a blow to free speech. How will those people react when they learn that Craigslist has shut down Adult Services on all 700 of its sites around the world? But now the exclusion of that category has expanded to account for all 700 sites in 70 countries  where users upload to Craigslist, a according to Wired’s Ryan Singel , who noticed “ the unannounced disappearance of the section from the international versions of the site.”  In some countries, such as Thailand, my native land, where I’m visiting for the holidays, therapeutic services may very well now be the go-to place for finding that extra something something. I clicked on a “5 Star Massage” which led to a link that looks suspiciously escort-like, with silhouettes of nude girls. Oh, and this small banner ad was probably a giveaway, too: “Undress her! Some are genuine escorts in Seattle!”  Also over in Craigslist Paris , “Young Thai boy for a sensual massage” also fell under the therapeutic services category. Read the full story at MSNBC .

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Craigslist Shuts Down Adult Services Sections Around the World

Over the past 10 days, there has been endless palaver over the significance of Wikileaked cables showing diplomats and public officials to be somewhat less than “these like saints appearing.” But the real “leak” in the WikiLeaks affair is that it has forced the U.S. Government to drop its mask and reveal itself as a vindictive ogre that brings all its force to bear on hunting down a single man as a sacrificial prelude to extinguishing fearless, free speech, informed debate and open government. read more

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Wiki Witch Hunt Reveals True Face of Government