 |
Planning to overthrow the US Government?
If yes, and you live in South Carolina, you must pay a five-dollar subversive registration fee. (Via BoingBoing, Via The Agitator)
The Banned Librarian has put together a clear concise guide to both current issues surrounding the Patriot Act, and the sections that are scheduled to sunset in December of 2009.
It includes:
HISTORY & BACKGROUND
STAYING CURRENT
Download the pdf HERE
–Mr Kambaksh was found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to death last year for circulating an essay on women’s rights which questioned verses in the Koran.
It later emerged he was convicted by three mullahs, in secret, without access to a lawyer. The sentence was commuted to 20 years on appeal. At that appeal, in October, the key prosecution witness withdrew his testimony, claiming he had been forced to lie on pain of death. The prosecution then appealed to the Supreme Court to reinstate the death sentence. The defence appealed to quash his conviction altogether.–
From the Independent online:
Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy in Afghanistan, has been told he will spend the next 20 years in jail after the country’s highest court ruled against him – without even hearing his defence.
The 23-year-old, brought to worldwide attention after an Independent campaign, was praying that Afghanistan’s top judges would quash his conviction for lack of evidence, or because he was tried in secret and convicted without a defence lawyer. Instead, almost 18 months after he was arrested for allegedly circulating an article about women’s rights, any hope of justice and due process evaporated amid gross irregularities, allegations of corruption and coercion at the Supreme Court. Justices issued their decision in secret, without letting Mr Kambaksh’s lawyer submit so much as a word in his defence.
Transportation Security Administration officials and JetBlue Airways are paying $240,000 to settle (.pdf) a discrimination lawsuit against a District of Columbia man who, as a condition of boarding a domestic flight, was forced to cover his shirt that displayed Arabic writing.
According to a civil rights lawsuit, TSA and JetBlue demanded Raed Jarrar to sit at the back of a 2006 flight from New York to Oakland because his shirt read “We Will Not Be Silent” in English and Arabic.
As Jarrar was waiting to board, TSA officials approached him and said he was required to remove his shirt because passengers were not comfortable with it, according to the lawsuit. The suit claimed one TSA official commented that the Arabic lettering was akin to wearing a T-shirt at a bank stating, “I am a robber.”
The lawsuit claimed Jarrar, 30, invoked the First Amendment but acquiesced after it became clear to him that he would not be allowed to fly if he did not cover his shirt with one given to him by JetBlue officials.
“All people in this country have the right to be free of discrimination and to express their own opinions,” Jarrar wrote on his blog. “With this outcome, I am hopeful that TSA and airlines officials will think twice before practicing illegal discrimination and that other travelers will be spared the treatment I endured.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 1, 2008
ST. PAUL, MN
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was unlawfully arrested in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota at approximately 5 p.m. local time. Police violently manhandled Goodman, yanking her arm, as they arrested her. Video of her arrest can be seen here. Goodman was arrested while attempting to free two Democracy Now! producers who were being unlawfuly detained. They are Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. Kouddous and Salazar were arrested while they carried out their journalistic duties in covering street demonstrations at the RepublicanNational Convention. Goodman’s crime appears to have been defending her colleagues and the freedom of the press.Ramsey County Sherrif Bob Fletcher told Democracy Now! that Kouddous and Salazar were being arrested on suspicion of rioting. They are currently being held at the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul. Democracy Now! is calling on all journalists and concerned citizens to call the office of Mayor Chris Coleman and the Ramsey County Jail and demand the immediate release of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar. These calls can be directed to: Chris Rider from Mayor Coleman’s office at 651-266-8535 and the Ramsey County Jail at 651-266-9350 (press extension 0).Democracy Now! stands by Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar and condemns this action by Twin Cities law enforcement as a clear violation of the freedom of the press and the First Amenmdent rights of these journalists. During the demonstration in which they were arrested law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and excessive force. Several dozen others were also arrested during this action.Amy Goodman is one of the most well-known and well-respected journalists in the United States. She has received journalism’s top honors for her reporting and has a distinguished reputation of bravery and courage. The arrest of Goodman, Kouddous and Salazar is a transparent attempt tointimidate journalists from the nation’s leading independent news outlet.Democracy Now! is a nationally-syndicated public TV and radio program that airs on over 700 radio and TV stations across the US and the globe.
Contact:
Dennis Moynihan
Mike Burke
Some of you may know that I am at a conference in Quebec- IFLA ,to present a paper with Melisssa Morrone from BPL. I had heard tell of this but was forwarded this article tonight, I’ll post it in full. Needless to say this is outrageous and sad and frankly, embarassing.
“Twenty-seven librarians ran into difficulty trying to get visas for an international conference in Quebec City and 13 of them were refused, the president of the International Federation of Library Associations said yesterday.
“We had very few refused when we had our conference in Boston in 2001,” said president Claudia Lux. “This is really very strange and I can’t understand it at all. This is a very high number.”
Those refused included Dr. Fariborz Khosrav, the deputy director of the National Library of Iran, five Colombians, two each from Egypt and Nepal and one each from Nigeria, Pakistan and South Africa. The 13th person’s name was unknown, she said.
The status of another was still undermined. They included six Iranians, two Nigerians and one each from Kenya, Mauritius and Turkey.
Victoria Okojie, president of the Nigerian Library Association, received an email from Citizenship and Immigration Canada yesterday inviting her to reapply, with no guarantees. The conference ends next Thursday but Okojie said she would give it another shot.
She was refused, said CIC spokesperson Danielle Norris, because she failed to supply banking statements, proof of income or evidence of strong family and financial ties to Nigeria.The decision, said Norris, is entirely based on providing exactly what the website asks for.
With 3,500 participants at the conference, 13 outright rejections means “they did very well,” she said.”
Yesterday I heard Brewster Kahle on NPR’s On The Media talking about the National Security Letter that was served to his organization The Internet Archive by the FBI back in November. When they were served he was then automatically gagged from discussing the NSL with anyone other than his lawyers. “The NSL program, expanded when Congress passed the… Patriot Act shortly after… Sept. 11, 2001… allows the FBI and other U.S. government agencies to issue administrative subpoenas to U.S. businesses for customer and other personal information.” When Kahle refused to comply with the order- which asked for personal information about a user of the IA, their address and activity logs, he, the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the FBI on constitutional grounds (in Kahle’s words “Push back”).
Long story short, the FBI withdrew the NSL (as they have each time they have been challenged..3 out of some 200,000 between 2003 and 2006) the gag order was lifted, and freedom prevailed.
In the On The Media piece (transcript up later today), Bob Garfield asks a question along the lines of ‘Do you think they didn’t realize that they were serving a NSL to a library?’ Who wouldn’t consider the collection of everything ever online EVER, a library? Um, our government, that’s who.
The OpenNet initiative has just finished a study, newly released in a book detailing a large scale study on access around the world to the free web. They examine global internet filtering country by country and rate it from ‘no evidence of filtering’ to ‘pervasive filtering’. Turns out at least 40 states around the world participate in some form of filtering, and that the filtering is in relation to “politics, but also relating to sexuality, culture, or religion–(subjects) that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens” Lawrence Lessig, in his review of the book says “No one had a clear sense of the nature of Internet censorship until now. This extraordinary work maps the unfreedom of the Net. Unfortunately, that state is becoming the norm.”
Book available from MIT Press. Citation: Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Jonathan Zittrain, eds., Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, (Cambridge: MIT Press) 2008
Link, Via BoingBoing
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported today that a bill in Arizona has passed that would ban students in public schools from meeting on campus if they are organized based on race or ethnicity. Even more troubling is the section of the bill that “bar(s) public elementary and secondary schools from teaching anything counter to Western civilization.“(italics mine) Western Civilization? Can I get a definition of that please?
Republican Rep. John Kavanagh, said: “This bill basically says, ‘You’re here. Adopt American values.’ If you want a different culture, then fine, go back to that culture.”
For more, read this totally not biased article at The Arizona Republic titled “Plan Targets Anti-Western Lessons” for gems like this: “Pearce, a Mesa Republican, said his target isn’t diversity instruction, but schools that use taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate students in what he characterized as anti-American or seditious thinking. The measure is at least partially a response to a controversy surrounding an ethnic-studies program in the Tucson Unified School District, which critics have said is unpatriotic and teaches revolution.”
If you contribute to or own a blog, in which the word ‘blog’ is contained in the title (for example http://googleblog.blogspot.com/) the US Air Force is blocking you. The AF has “cut off access to all external websites that contain the term “blog” in the URL. The official argument is that blogs aren’t legitimate media outlets and therefore, shouldn’t be read at work.” Ouch! So those of us using WP are somehow in the clear (and more legitimate? I don’t think so..) but all those blogspot writers are NSFW. “At least one senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so “utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream.”
Via Digital Inspiration-full story at Wired