Archive for October, 2009
Congress gets in on the action
Anyone who has worked in an office on Capitol Hill knows how much the elected members value the “press.” The small staffs inevitably include some combination of Communications Director, Press Secretary, and lowly, underpaid Press Assistant. Thus it hardly comes as a surprise that members of Congress are waking up to the fact that the demise of local newspapers will have a major impact on their ability to educate their constituents about their numerous achievements.
Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), chairwoman of the Joint Economic Committee, recently held a hearing entitled “The Future of Newspapers: The Impact on the Economy and Democracy” (full disclosure, I was a JEC staffer from August 2007-May 2008).
Lesser known representatives recognize that the local paper is one of the easiest and most efficient methods for reaching their constituents. The New York Times will likely survive but that will only ensure that a handful of high-ranking and powerful politicians will be able to gain meaningful and regular news coverage.
House members may be in the business of promoting their own agendas but they also understand that the “fourth estate” is an essential component of a fully functioning democracy. They rely on the local newspapers to raise issues for them to address and to help keep them in check.
Rep. Maloney also highlighted the fact that the industry’s struggles have contributed to the rising unemployment figures in this nation – a point that often gets overlooked in the more meta-focused discussion on the role of media in our society.
To her credit, Maloney has taken concrete steps to ameliorate the situation by introducing “H.R. 3602, a bill which will enable local newspapers to take advantage of non-profit status as a way to preserve their place in communities nationwide.” (Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) has also introduced a similar bill).
I am personally unwilling to take a stand at this point in the debate on the viability of non-profit models but I can say that I am looking forward to the debate on the subject at the upcoming Yale Law and Media Program’s Conference on Future Business Models (Nov. 13th & 14th).
Noted scholars, such as Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres, have advanced a similar idea – while battling the likes of media entrepreneur extraordinaire Steven Brill.
I believe that it is still too early to tell what will and will not work going forward but at least we are truly beginning to have this debate in earnest. We all agree that the unemployed journalists and struggling media companies need some fresh ideas.
why surveillance matters
Posted by Margot in Privacy, Surveillance, first amendment, lamp on October 13, 2009
As a follow-up to Nabiha’s great post on terrorism and open access:
As Nabiha said, our interest in terrorism-related issues has to do with the barriers the government places to access.
Our interest in surveillance speaks more generally to the democratic conditions necessary for newsgathering. Newsgatherers cannot properly gather news if they know that they’re being watched. And journalists and protestors are often the deliberate targets of surveillance, alongside more conventional “threats”; see Ken Krayeske’s experience, or the experience of anti-war protestors with the TALON database.
what we do and why terrorism matters
Posted by Nabiha in first amendment, lamp, open access on October 12, 2009
Our projects include a lot of national security-oriented topics, including Guantanamo, fusion centers, and the like. One might wonder — hell, we’ve wondered — how this intersects with our core mission to support newsgatherers. In an Information Society Project Ideas Lunch last week, Jack Balkin hit the nail on the head: the current onslaught of secrecy, under the guise of national security, is just the most recent incarnation of the desire to suppress open information. Our projects will fluctuate to respond to the realities of the day. Right now, it just so happens that terrorism is a popular excuse for keeping information under wraps, and as such, inaccessible to the newsgatherers who want to write about it.
On that note, I was thrilled to find this report on the Centre for the Freedom of the Media website. The Speaking of Terror report, drafted for the Council of Europe, outlines anti-terror laws have stifled freedom of expression and media operation in Europe. Anyone know of anything similar written about the United States? I’d love to read it.
Can Judicial Openness Initiatives Disqualify Judges from Access Cases?
Posted by patrick in Newspapers, cases, first amendment, lamp, open access, secret dockets on October 10, 2009
The Supreme Court has refused to indulge a stay sought by the Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocesan Corporation which would have kept 12,000 pages of court records and depositions in a long-running CT clergy abuse case from public view.
The judgment sought to be stayed, Rosado v. Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocesan Corp., raises some fascinating access issues, including an institutional-reform question which I haven’t seen elsewhere. Does a judge’s participation on an open access task force mandate recusal by creating an appearance of impropriety in deciding open access questions?
Here, the Connecticut Supreme Court held that the trial judge’s failure to recuse himself in Rosado, despite his involvement with the Judicial Branch’s Public Access Task Force, did not amount to abuse of discretion:
“A trial judge has no affirmative duty to step down from a case merely on the basis of membership on a task force unless the agenda of the task force is inconsistent with the judge’s duty to judge impartially. Case law confirms that service on a commission concerned with improving the legal system and the administration of justice, without more, is not a basis for disqualification, even if the subject matter generally relates to the area of the law at issue in the case at hand.”
Good call, CT. An adverse ruling on this issue would certainly chill bench-led openness efforts. In this case, the precedent appears extensive and clear, but Justice Sullivan’s spirited dissent demonstrates how the “appearance of impropriety” standard can be stretched to embrace reform initiatives. Several features of the task force’s design were extremely important to the majority ruling, including instructions to consider privacy interests as well as disclosure interests. Take note, other states seeking to institute openness initiatives, lest you design a task force which might jeopardize judges’ ability to hear access cases.
The next steps, as the New York Times reports, will be unsealing hearings in the Connecticut Superior Court. We will follow those with interest.
PATRIOT Act renewal bill has passed Senate Judiciary Committee
The PATRIOT Act renewal bill has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee without key civil liberties reforms attached.
Missed opportunities for reform include: requiring the government to show a connection to a suspected terrorist or spy in seeking Americans’ records through National Security Letters (NSLs); letting the “lone wolf” wiretapping authority expire; stopping the government from using the FISA Amendments Act to collect Americans’ phone calls and internet communications in bulk.
EFF advocates attaching the JUSTICE Act to the renewal bill when it’s debated by the full Senate.
General shout-out to the Sunlight Foundation
Posted by Margot in first amendment, lamp, open access on October 8, 2009
The Sunlight Foundation is committed to exactly the kind of transparency principles that journalism traditionally serves. Their projects include: compiling a list of people seeking tax breaks on imports from Congress; building a completely indexed and cross-referenced depository of federal documents; running the numbers on sources of Congressional wealth; opening bills to online, public review.
“The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency.”
Tweet-Crime?
We’re starting to see more domestic coverage of l’affaire Elliot Madison, the self-described political anarchist who has been charged with using Twitter to apprise protesters of police movements at the recent G20 Summit.
Our own Laura DeNardis weighed in via this Reuters story, highlighting the double standard between Twitter activism in Iran and Pittsburgh.
Is there a newsgathering angle here as well? Madison’s alleged tweet-crime raises First Amendment issues, certainly, and we will be particularly interested to see if it opens the “what is a journalist” Pandora’s box.
EFF has Madison’s motion seeking the return of his confiscated property. We’ll be following this with interest…
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, on newsgathering
Posted by Margot in Blogosphere, business models, first amendment, lamp on October 8, 2009
I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, yesterday. I took the opportunity to ask him about Wikipedia’s relationship to legacy journalism, and his thoughts about the decrease in newsgathering, and what systems might take its place.
Because of its system of cross-references to “reliable” outside sources, Wikipedia depends on the continuation of newsgathering journalism or its equivalent.
Wales affirmed that Wikipedia has no intention of replacing newsgathering. He posits, however, a reimagination of the role of newspapers, splitting what he sees as the current “hybrid system of journalism” into parts. Some of these parts may be better (or at least more cheaply) handled by non-legacy media. Wales believes that opeds, for example, could be dropped out of newspapers and left to the blogs, since the papers (according to him) serve only a distributive function. Wales also cites sports journalism as something that could be taken over by citizen writers, due to the publicly accessible nature of the events, and the high nonmonetary incentives for writer-fans. (It’s of course debatable whether the editorial and accreditation functions of newspapers could be adequately replicated in the blogosphere…)
However, Wales emphasizes the need for certain kinds of traditional journalism to continue: the day-to-day gruntwork of political reporting, for example. The question is not just one of motivation or resources– Wales also sees a need for objectivity, rather than cause-motivated reporting.
This reflects a general consensus that even at the basis of the newest of new media, there’s still a real need for objective newsgathering– whether by newspapers or by reliable freelancers in all sorts of media forms. These are the resources that form the basis for informed political discussion– resources that a democracy can’t afford to lose.
DHS Databases & Speech
Posted by Adri in first amendment on October 7, 2009
Comparative Case Studies of Radical Rhetoric, according to the government’s own description, “is a research effort funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Directorate of Science and Technology (S&T), Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences Division (HFD). The goal of the research project is to determine whether various characteristics of the rhetoric expressed by groups are related to the groups’ likelihood of engaging in violent extremist activity. Researchers will collect personally identifiable information during this research effort.”
Let’s repeat that. This is an analysis of pure rhetoric, performed upon expression that is connected to personally identifiable information, in order to arrive at predictive conclusions about people who express that kind of rhetoric. Needless to say, the program raises some troublesome First Amendment worries.
The program analyzes papers, speeches, and publications of various groups. On a new media note, it will also analyze content on the political party Hizb ut-Tahrir’s website.
The DHS’s Privacy Impact Assessment of the program can be found here.
Intelligence Fusion Centers
We are very interested in Fusion Centers.
For now, let’s just leave it at that.
Some current information: there evidently are 72 state-based intelligence fusion centers, and Janet Napolitano just announced that DHS is creating a new office to support them.
Things this office will do, according to Matthew Harwood at Security Management, include the following:
“It will survey state, local, and tribal law enforcement to get feedback on what information these “first preventers” need to do their job. The office will also develop a mechanism to gather, analyze, and share both national, regional, and local threat information up and down the intelligence network. Third, the office will coordinate with fusion centers to continuously ensure they get the appropriate personnel and resources from DHS. Fourth, the JFC-PMO will provide training and exercises to build solid relationships between fusion center personnel and promote a sense of common mission. Finally, the office will train fusion center personnel to respect the civil liberties of American citizens.”
That last mission sounds great, doesn’t it?