News & Opinion

Censorship: Twitter ban fares poorly in Turkey

Turkey’s prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, failed in an effort to shut down Twitter through a court order requiring regulators to restrict access to Twitter. Citizens were able to circumvent the blockage by various means suggested by an array of sources including Twitter and Turkish news websites. Turkey’s president called the Twitter ban “groundless, pointless, cowardly.” (The Guardian, March 21, 2014, by Constanze Letsch) Erdogan claimed that Twitter was violating the law that required the company

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Free speech: Illinois eavesdropping law declared unconstitutional

The Illinois Supreme Court held that a state eavesdropping law negated free speech and due process in throwing out the statute. The court wrote that the law criminalized the recordings of conversations that were obviously public including street arguments, political debates on college campuses and fans yelling at athletic events. (Reuters, March 21, 2014, by Eric M. Johnson) A plaintiff in one of the cases before the court spent almost two years in jail for

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California Legislature’s feel-good resolution on openness

The state Senate voted unanimously last week to honor “Sunshine Week” by declaring its “long tradition in support of open government and access to government records,” but in an editorial the San Francisco Chronicle observes that words aren’t always accompanied by action. The paper cites two current examples in which the Legislature turned its back on transparency. Democrats and Republicans were both culpable. Full story

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Shift in Internet governance raises censorshp concerns

The United States has given up control of the Internet’s domain system after international pressure prompted by revelations of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs. A Commerce Department spokesperson said the U.S. control was only supposed to be temporary. (NextGov, March 17, 2014, by Brendan Sasso, National Journal) The Commerce Department denied that they were giving up control of the Internet to authoritarian governments like Russia and China who could put pressure on the

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EPA under attack for lack of transparency

The Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) is challenging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to supply information on environmental disasters to reporters . Most recently, the EPA refused to grant an interview with a Charleston, West Virginia reporter over the January 9 chemical spill in Elk River that fouled the drinking water of over 300,000 people. (Society for Environmental Journalists, March 18, 2014, by Beth Parke and Joseph Davis) The SEJ considers the Elk

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