Deeplinks Blog posts about Free Speech
From a cell in a South Carolina prison, seven inmates filmed a rap video on a cell phone and uploaded it to a popular hip-hop website. The track, “On Fire,” caught fire online—but the viral clip also caught the attention of prison administrators. As Buzzfeed reported using records obtained by EFF under South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act, the inmates received obscene punishments for expressing themselves: a combined total of nearly 20 years in solitary confinement for accessing social media, using a contraband cell phone, and engaging in gang-related speech.
In response to feedback from activist groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Facebook announced Tuesday that it would change some aspects of its real names policy. As it currently stands, the policy requires users to register what Facebook calls their “authentic identity,”—or how friends and family know them—in order to use the social network. The policy also allows users to report other users registered under alias names and gives Facebook the ability to suspend any accounts where the identity of a user is found to be “fraudulent.” This abuse system has been used to silence a broad range of users, from drag queens to Vietnamese pro-democracy activists.
In an unusually direct attack on online privacy and free speech, the ruling regime of Kazakhstan appears to have mandated the country's telecommunications operators to intercept citizens' Internet traffic using a government-issued certificate starting on January 1, 2016. The press release announcing the new measure was published last week by Kazakhtelecom JSC, the nation's largest telecommunications company, but appears to have been taken down days later—the link above comes courtesy of the Internet Archive, which never forgets. It is unclear whether the retracted press release indicates that Kazakhstan's ruling regime has abandoned the plan in response to widespread criticism, or is simply planning to carry it out at some later date, once attention has died down.
Yesterday, in Backpage.com v. Dart a unanimous panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in a lively opinion ordered Thomas Dart, the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, to end his “campaign of suffocation” against the website and stop violating its First Amendment rights.
The court of appeals rejected Sheriff Dart’s contention that he was merely expressing his personal distaste for Backpage and not using his position as a government official to coerce Visa and MasterCard into discontinuing business with the website. Rather, the court of appeals held that Sheriff Dart’s actions amounted to an unconstitutional prior restraint on Backpage’s speech.
The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Bill (PECB) has received harsh criticism inside and outside of Pakistan since its radical re-drafting in April of this year. A coalition of Pakistan’s leading online rights groups and businesses warned the current version, written with no input from legal experts or technologists, would “adversely impact the IT industry…. and [the] constitutional rights and safeguards guaranteed to citizens”. Human Rights Watch went further, saying it constitutes “clear and present danger to human rights”. But it took one of Pakistan’s leading legal experts on computer crime jurisprudence, Zahid Jamil, to call the bill “by far the worst piece of cybercrime legislation in the world.”
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