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"The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true. Let us protect the neutrality of the net." — Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web
UN NAMES 10 MOST UNDER-REPORTED STORIES FOR 2006 Every year, the United Nations publishes a list of the 10 most serious stories most overlooked by global press. Developing nations, whose situations are often misunderstood or dismissed by news media, as too complicated, intractable, or of marginal relevance, take the spotlight this year. [Full Story] PRESS FREEDOM IS EVERYONE'S FREEDOM The freedom of the press is the freedom of the American people. Not its guarantor, not a metaphorical representation of freedom as an idea, not even merely a mainstay of a free system. A free and independent press is American liberty at work, building and defending itself against the slide toward secret or arbitrary exercise of power, as conceived within or beyond the legal process. [Full Story] CHINA PLANS "SMOKELESS WAR" AGAINST PRESS, DISSIDENTS China's president Hu Jintao has reportedly called for an intensive crackdown on media liberties. While China's government has sought to project an image of a more market-oriented, open system, it continues to forbid basic press freedoms and still persecutes journalists at an alarming rate. [Full Story]
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PLAN COULD BRING END TO OPEN INTERNET, PROVIDE ISP WITH ABILITY TO MANIPULATE INFO. AVAILABLE TO ITS PAYING CUSTOMERS 9 January 2008 AT&T is proposing the implementation of new filtering technologies "at the network level" that would essentially interrupt in a definitive way the public's freedom to access online content. The concept known as 'net neutrality' refers to consumers and netizens' ability to freely gain access to any site, paid or unpaid, without major telecommunications companies programming access as they do with cable television. [Full Story] AT&T CENSORS PEARL JAM LYRICS IN WEBCAST, APOLOGIZES When Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder asked Pres. Bush to "leave this world alone" in song, online viewers watching Lollapalooza via AT&T's 'Blue Room' webcast were not able to hear it. The company cut the political lyrics from the webcast in what band-members, fans and net-neutrality advocates have called blatant censorship. AT&T blamed an outside contractor and apologized for the 'mistake'. [Full Story] NET NEUTRALITY: A NECESSARY PRINCIPLE FOR MAINTAINING GLOBAL DEMOCRATIC STANDARDS The concept of 'net neutrality' refers to the current state of affairs in the free democracies of the world, where those who control the physical infrastructure of the Internet are not allowed to police its content or to charge for provider-user access. It is a vital ingredient in the make-up of the Internet, because it guarantees the freedom of information that makes the web so useful to free society and so valuable to those who do well what works in that open environment. But the US House of Representatives last year voted to end net neutrality with the COPE Act (Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement). The language of COPE would permit major telecommunications companies to control what content their subscribers would be allowed to see. It would allow them to charge content-providers for 'visibility', or for speed of bandwidth, favoring not the most interesting material or the most thorough of reporters, but rather the wealthiest corporations in the media game. [Full Story] BILL MOYERS RELAYS THE GOOD NEWS OF NET NEUTRALITY 'VICTORIES' Journalist Bill Moyers explains how Net Neutrality is really about stipulating for all media regulations an 'Equality of Access provision' like that imposed on AT&T after "Free Press and SavetheInternet.com orchestrated 800 organizations, a million and a half petitions... a top-shelf communications campaign. Who would have imagined that sitting together in the same democratic broadband pew would be the Christian Coalition, Gun-owners of America, Common Cause and MoveOn.org?" [Go to video] NET NEUTRALITY ACT: SEN. DORGAN EXPLAINS LEGISLATION TO PRESERVE THE OPEN INTERNET3 August 2007 S.215, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, sponsored by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) seeks to ensure the openness of the internet is protected against attempts by major telecommunications providers to segregate internet content and to charge for visibility. Sen. Dorgan explains how such business strategies would have a chilling effect on free expression and innovation. [Go to video] DEATH OF THE INTERNET: WHY NET NEUTRALITY IS VITAL TO THE INFORMATION SOCIETY Lays out the rudimentary principles of NET NEUTRALITY, the concept which has governed the open, global internet until now, wherein no network managers can control what content you are able to view over the internet; that standard is now threatened by major phone and cable providers (ISPs) and by legislation passed by the House in 2006. [Go to video] 'COPE' ACT FAVORS TELECOM STEERING OF WEB TRAFFIC The US House of Representatives passes Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement Act (COPE) in 2006. Legislation, if it were to become law, would allow internet service providers to control what content their customers would be allowed to view online, which websites they could use, potentially what type of information they would be allowed to send or to publish. It has been seen by many as the beginning of the end of the Internet... [Go to video] RUPERT MURDOCH WINS BID TO BUY DOW JONES Controversial media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, through his company Newscorp, has reportedly persuaded the Bancroft family, which holds a controlling interest in the financial company Dow Jones, to sell the firm for $5.6 billion, giving him control of the Wall Street Journal newspaper. Until now, there had been opposition from within the Bancroft family, based on concerns Murdoch would distort the editorial culture and diminish the Journal's reputation for journalistic independence. [Full Story] GOOGLE LAUNCHES SPECIAL HEALTH ADVISORY GROUP, TO HELP USERS TARGET NEEDED HEALTH INFO Google has launched a new special advisory group for health issues. The aim is to improve its overall search technology so that the end-user's experience is not a confusion of mis-matched or possibly dangerous flawed information regarding health issues. The hope is that Google's ability to provide relevent content will be honed and new search refining techniques will be discovered through the effort to ensure that health-related information is more relevant, more reliable, and more easily accessible. [Full Story]
RUSSIAN STATE-OWNED MEDIA LAUNCH SMEAR CAMPAIGN AGAINST LITVINENKO After Russia launched an official criminal investigation into the radiation poisoning of ex-spy Alexandr Litvinenko, it also announced it would no longer be permitting foreign agents to interview suspects on Russian soil, and there would be no extradition to Britain for Russian suspects. Now, state-run media are reportedly feeding stories into the international media to make accusations against Litvinenko and against the credibility of those who would support him. [Full Story] 'OBJECTIVELY VERIFIABLE TRUTH NOW SUSPECT' The foundation of a free society is a press with the freedom to criticize instruments of power and influence and to reveal wrongdoing as it actually takes place. War is not a sufficient reason to institute a system of broad censorship criteria or to rein in the news media, as if they posed a direct threat to the wellbeing of the nation. But increasingly, it appears that American news media are intolerant of facts as such, waiting for members of the government themselves to come forward with complaints. [Full Story] ABC TO AIR 'DOCU-DRAMA' USING FABRICATIONS AS EVIDENCE ABC plans to air a "docu-drama" entitled Path to 9/11, a 6-hour TV movie detailing in fictional re-enactment events its writers allege occurred in the US counterterrorism community in the years before the attacks of 11 September 2001. It clearly assigns blame to members of the Clinton administration for thwarting efforts to kill Bin Laden, and many now say the film directly misrepresents the truth, fabricating scenes, words and events either for dramatic or for political effect. [Full Story] FEAR ENDANGERS BY DECEIVING The fear and uneasiness that provokes human beings to conflict is never what it seems to be; that is its nature and its method: to take hold by way of complex deceptions. Fear wages a coup d'esprit by deceiving the mind into thinking it promises clarity and intellectual comfort, peace of mind, justice and the healing of wounds, that it may actually generate the only feasible path to physical or political safety. [Full Story] THE NET WIDENS: WHAT ELSE ARE THEY MONITORING? Historian and expert NSA researcher Matthew Aid has told Salon.com that he believes it will be revealed in time that Internet service providers and cellphone companies also cooperated with the NSA spying and data mining programs. He offered no proof, but cited past examples of NSA overreaching and the key fact that the article exposing the collaboration of 3 major telecoms failed to explore the complicity or innocence of cable, cellular and Internet companies. [Full Story]
NSA BUILDING DATABASE OF ALL PHONE CALLS MADE IN U.S. The National Security Agency, which has been the center of a major legal controversy over its eavesdropping on law-abiding American citizens without judicial approval, has now been revealed to be collecting phone records of tens of millions of people. The effort is reportedly part of a strategy to amass a record of all phone traffic in the US, no matter its purpose. [Full Story] CLIMATE OF SECRECY PUTS DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES IN BACK SEAT An insistence on near absolute secrecy threatens to undermine two vital elements of the security of the United States: 1) the democratic process itself, without which there can be no system to secure; 2) the intellectual dissent which is necessary to enforce truly reasoned thinking in planning of operations and information analysis. [Full Story] GOVERNMENT POLICY UNLAWFULLY CRIMINALIZES COMMENT ON SCIENTIFIC FACT The global environment is, of course, a global issue, one that touches every life on the planet, and the science about it should be open and available to all. Past government policy and existing federal law mean that such scientific evidence should be readily available to the public. But now, it appears that several agencies are laboring to silence scientists who are researching climate trends and alterations. [Full Story] AT&T SUED FOR VIOLATING LAW IN NSA DOMESTIC SPY PROGRAM AT&T was once the nation's telecommunications monopoly, and abuses there led to the break-up of the Bell monopoly and the regulation of telecoms, with the intent of encouraging competition and achieving the goal of forcing providers to serve the customers first. Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit alleging that the telecommunications giant has violated federal law by assisting the government in spying on innocent Americans without any court authorization. [Full Story] OUR COLLECTIVE STUDY OF THE UNIVERSE People want to believe what their friends, neighbors, teachers, political representatives tell them. They will express skepticism, and they will be brash and indignant about public scandals or about dubious claims, but ultimately, they err on the side of credulity. The human being in society, is able to suspend disbelief and participate in sometimes elaborate fantasies, in the interests of sustaining the feeling of belonging to the ongoing project to understand the universe we inhabit... [Full Essay] OFFICIAL SECRECY POWER UNDERMINES FREE ENTERPRISE In American society, it's worth asking whether secrecy in the hands of the powerful is compatible with representative democracy. There is no secrecy power in the US Constitution, and no law enacted by Congress provides such power. In the case of the Crater Coupler, the government's assertion of a right to conceal all activities related to a covert operation, under official secrecy claims, actively allowed a major company to usurp the intellectual property rights of an inventor, by stripping that individual and his partners of the constitutional right to seek redress in court. [Full Story] CBS NEWS REPORT DISTORTS POLL RESULTS, SAYS BUSH "LIKELY NOT" OBLIGED TO FOLLOW LAW In a report from the White House regarding the president's response to criticism from the public, from Congress and from legal and national security experts that his warrantless wiretaps are illegal, CBS White House correspondent John Roberts falsely cites a recent poll to claim Bush has broad support from the public for warrantless wiretaps. [Full Story] GOOGLE TO COLLABORATE IN CENSORING INFORMATION DELIVERED TO CHINESE USERS The premier internet search engine Google has launched a new Chinese service, under the domain Google.cn, which it will voluntarily censor in keeping with the mandates of Chinese authorities. The announcement came earlier this week, as the Davos trade talks opened and on the same day as China's government announced it was ordering the closing of a weekly newspaper known for publishing articles on topics the Chinese Communist party's propaganda office had banned or which included criticism of government policy. [Full Story] US BROADCASTERS BRUSH DARFUR ASIDE, FAVOR JACKSON TRIAL A new study shows major US broadcasters have brushed genocide in Darfur aside, while giving widespread coverage to the trial of popstar Michael Jackson. Glolablinfo.org writes that "U.S. broadcast media are failing to provide even minimal coverage of the ongoing crisis". [Full Story]
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