Posts Tagged ‘Globe and Mail’
Free Byron
Today was the first day of Byron Sonne’s trial.
Byron was arrested on June 22nd, 2010, before the Toronto G20.
On June 29th, Jesse Brown did a SearchEngine interview that would have made me question the story if I’d heard it.
But I don’t live in Toronto, and it wasn’t until much later that I learned about Byron Sonne.
Denise Balkissoon, the writer who wrote the Toronto Life cover story blogged about the publication ban: “EXPLAINER: What we can and can’t say about the Byron Sonne Trial“
Today’s Globe and Mail reported on the first day G20 trial begins for man charged with possessing explosives. The way the headline reads reveals the Globe’s corporate bias (if there was any doubt).
What struck me the most about the Globe article was the reporter’s statement:
Supporters have organized a “Free Byron” movement.”
— Colin Perkel, G20 trial begins for man charged with possessing explosives
In many ways, Byron’s arrest before the Toronto G20 summit even began served to separate his story from all the other stories of G20 protest. The Toronto G20 protests might be considered a “movement,” but I don’t think that the support for Byron Sonne can be thought of in that light.
Byron Sonne’s friends and community have tried to support him the best they can. That’s what friends do if they believe in you, and it’s why humans belong to communities. Byron Sonne’s friends know him as a person, and they believe in him. It says a lot about Byron and his friends that they have stuck by him all through this. Because standing up for someone facing the kind of charges levelled against Byron Sonne takes guts. After all, people are often judged on who their friends are.
His friends and supporters set up a webpage to allow interested people to follow what happens to Byron. They have distributed stickers and buttons and asked interested people to post “Free Byron” badges on their blogs. I haven’t seen anything I could characterize as a “movement,” just people supporting a friend and member of their community.
Sure, there are people like me who care what happens to Byron. When I saw a “Free Bryron” button and asked what it was for, I ended up becoming a Free Byron supporter. I am not Byron’s friend, having never actually met him, although we’ve exchanged a couple of letters, and I watched a few days of one of his hearings.
I’m not a lawyer, nor am I in possession of all the facts. Still, I don’t believe Bryon Sonne is a terrorist, or anything like it. I think Byron is a good person who tried to stand up for what he believed was right.
I think Byron believed the protections in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms would protect him. So far they haven’t much, and that scares me. That’s the main reason why I support Byron Sonne.
But I’m not part of “a movement,” just a citizen who hopes Canada is the country that I think it is, and that justice will prevail.
Byron Sonne has lost his wife, his home, his business, his reputation, his privacy and his liberty.
And I wonder what he has done to deserve this.
Byron Sonne is “still quite a ways away from being free”
Is Canada a free country?
Or is Canada a banana republic?
Today was Byron Sonne’s 331st day in custody. On Monday bail was finally granted, yet Byron had to remain locked up until today, when there was to be a final Bail Hearing where the Crown Attorney would get an opportunity to contest the grounds of Byron’s release.
What has happened to Byron Sonne has exposed injustice in our so called justice system. The reason democratic nations enact laws to protect the rights of citizens is to counter balance the government’s power to crush citizens.
For a nation to be a free country, citizens must be free to both question and criticize.
Without guaranteed civil rights, any citizen can be deprived of liberty. You can wind up in a Gulag. You don’t even have to be protesting anything.
on the 2010 Toronto G20:
“The result was a massive breach of human rights on a scale never before seen in modern Canadian society. “
Among those rounded up in the G20 mass arrests were a many people who were shopping, working, going somewhere else, but uninvolved in the protests. Yet they were rounded up and deprived of the civil rights Canadians expect just the same. Simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Byron has today been released under extremely stringent bail restrictions. The conditions are draconian, and somewhat bizarre. According to the Toronto Star:
“He must also have no contact with anyone accused with G20 conspiracy crimes or anyone associated with a number of anarchist groups or the Toronto Community Mobilization Network. There are no allegations that Sonne has ever associated with those people or groups.”
– Brendan Kennedy, Toronto Star: G20 accused Sonne out on bail; strict limits on Web use, leaving home
That last bit sounds like a smear… the very terms of the release are deliberately inflammatory. By prohibiting Byron Sonne contact with people and organizations there is no evidence he has ever any contact with, an association is implied. This is rather like prohibiting Byron Sonne from contact with Adolph Hitler. Except, if you read the Globe and Mail’s heavily biased account it says there is some evidence of Byron “downloading literature of both the far right (Mein Kampf) and the far left (Das Kapital).” Which seems to forge a stronger evidentiary link to Adolph Hitler, or Karl Marx. Who scares you the most?
It simply seems to be an attempt to make Byron Sonne look bad.
The group named by the Star that Byron must not associate with is the Toronto Community Mobilization Network which appears to be a collection of activists advocating for the civil rights for groups ranging from the disabled to indigenous peoples. This seems at minimum to run contrary to Section Two of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Something that has disturbed me from the outset is that the denial of bail appears to be punitive. Is this a case of Canada’s Crown prosecution ensuring that an innocent man will pay the price of incarceration before trial since the trial is likely to exonerate him? In fact, our federal government has published statistics indicating an increase of the use if the remand process which could well indicate that the process is being deployed as punishment rather than waiting for a judicial finding of guilt, particularly when it is unlikely to happen at all.
You can read the rest of the extremely severe bail conditions in the Toronto Star.
I’m fairly new to social media, but something I have noticed is that some tweets about Byron use the #g20report hashtag. I initially assumed that some organization or group might be keeping track of the facts for the hoped for G20 inquiry.
Then I discovered Byron’s own Twitter feed and discovered that Byron himself seems to have invented that hashtag, using it to indicate the tweets he made documenting the G20 security.
This adds a huge amount of credence to the idea Byron Sonne was working as a citizen journalist.
It is also quite interesting that the @torontogoat is still online. We can read through it and see what Byron tweeted in his own words. Read it through and see what you think.
The Best Source
For information about Byron Sonne case is the FreeByron website, created and maintained by his friends and supporters.
recent articles
Jesse Brown: Byron Sonne gets bail. Finally.
Brendan Kennedy: G20 ‘geek’ Byron Sonne granted bail
Megan O’Toole: Man charged with possessing explosives before G20 granted bail
Toronto Mobilize: Court Support Needed for Byron Sonne
Tim McSorley: Byron Sonne granted bail; Crown to challenge conditions of his release
Denise Balkissoon: How Byron Sonne’s obsession with the G20 security apparatus cost him everything
David Harvey: Byron Sonne, Canada’s Political Prisoner
I got my title for this post from a tweet I found under the #freeByron hashtag
Byron Sonne leaves courthouse
For those with Flash accessibility issues, I am also hosting the OGG version here.
Robert Redford, the Newsmedia and the WikiLeaks’ Cablegate
I fell in love with Robert Redford in The Sting when he was young and I was younger. Redford is one of the cinema’s greatest undervalued comedians; his timing is flawless as showcased in early work like “Barefoot In The Park” or later “Legal Eagles”. He even brought humour to his portrayal of “the Sundance Kid,” for whom his film festival is named.
But Redford has put in some brilliant performances in political films over the years.
He turned in a brilliant performance in a cautionary tale called “The Candidate,” which demonstrates clearly how degraded democracies can become.
But there are two movies I was reminded of when I read about today’s WikiLeaks story.
At the end of the movie “Three Days of the Condor,” the inadvertent hero Redford plays achieves freedom the only possible way:
by releasing the classified information to the media.
Because we know that even though he is a whistle blower, once the world knows he will be safe.
And we know the news media will ensure that the story gets out.
We know that.
Robert Redford also played Bob Woodward in “All The President’s Men,” the film version of the true story of the “Watergate” scandal that brought down the Nixon administration.
There are countless stories of the bravery of reporters who risked, and in many cases lost– their lives in pursuit of a story that was important to them and the public. And it still happens.
But that doesn’t alter the fact that the world has changed a lot in the last few decades. In many cases, the News Media is not doing the job we believe it is. Citizens around the globe have NOT been told about the dangers of ACTA or the importance of Net Neutrality to free speech and democracy.
Part of it is, I am sure, that technological advances, in particular the Internet, has caused great upheavals in the Media business. As ownership has been increasingly centralized, downsizing, “dumbing down” and decimation of staff has left many newsrooms in very reduced and weakened states. The agendas of the corporate masters more often determines what is reported and how.
So we are very fortunate to have WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks was gifted with a heap of really important information. In order to ensure dissemination, they passed them around to five major news outlets located in 5 different countries. Each were aware the others had the story, so they ALL had no CHOICE but to publish, with or without corporate or government approval.
In this way, WikiLeaks guaranteed that the story broke and spread.
UK: The Guardian US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomacy crisis
SPAIN: El Pais The greater infiltration of history reveals the secrets of American foreign policy (Google translation to English)
USA: New York Times: Cables Obtained by WikiLeaks Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels
FRANCE: LeMonde WikiLeaks: Behind the Scenes of American diplomacy (Google translation to English)
der Spiegel: Greatest Data Leak in US Military History
Now that it is out, there is no stopping it.
Al Jazeera: Secret US embassy cables revealed
Perth Now: Australia on WikiLeaks ‘cablegate’
boingboing: Wikileaks secret US Embassy cable site live
Mobile Tribune: 1128-”When the Head is Rotten, It Affects the Whole Body” WikiLeaks Cable Quote from Saudi King Abdullah
This will go on for months. Maybe years.
US ambassador to the UK complains about the loss of *privacy* of those writing the cables – http://bit.ly/eHlQWC #wikileaks
There is a huge amount of information, and it will take time to digest, but at least it has gotten out. That’s a good thing.
Der Spiegel also has an interactive map.
Have you noticed that you can hit the “play” button on the Spiegel map and it shows the cable-bubbles appearing year after year?
– Doug Saunders, European Bureau Chief, The Globe and Mail
The map shows Canadian cables for:
- Vancouver 44
- Calgary 14
- Ottawa 1948
- Montreal 82
- Quebec 52
- Halifax 136
Of course, no Canadian news outlet was selected as a recipient of any of these WikiLeaks cables.
I mean, at least if there was a Canadian media partner, there would be someone to bully/entreat over upcoming Cdn coverage. #wl
–Kady O’Malley, CBC reporter
Canadian Coverage
CBC: WikiLeaks reveals undiplomatic U.S. critiques
Canada’s government funded public broadcaster, the CBC, uses an American “Licensing” scheme which doesn’t allow even purely non-profit fair dealing reuse of their publications by Canadian citizens. So why would WikiLeaks even CONSIDER releasing this story to CBC?
Clearly, just like in “Three Days of the Condor,” WikiLeaks wants to spread the story as far and wide and as fast as possible. So that it can’t be stopped.
Globe & Mail: Released WikiLeaks documents shed light on diplomatic dispatches
The Globe likes to call itself “Canada’s National Newspaper,” but like that other television broadcaster, the Globe is owned by Bell Canada Enterprises. I assume that this corporate connection would be the reason why the Globe has been first so quiet and about the fact Canadian Internet rates are shortly to go through the roof due to Usage Based Billing. It is only recently that it’s been possible to find UBB on their website at all. Now that they are, the bias is thick enough to cut with a knife.
As a blogger I prefer not to link to Globe articles because in the past they’ve broken links by placing articled behind a paywall.
So I can’t imagine the Globe standing up to government pressure to suppress the WikiLeaks story.
Having a Canadian Government in the process of pushing through Bill C-32 in the face of Universal opposition to appease the American Government, it’s easy to imagine our government buckling at the first sign of American disapproval.
So WikiLeaks released the Cables to 5 dispersed news outlets as a strategy to ensure that the story will break. Because that is the reason for the very existance of WikiLeaks: to get the story out. Even if it means the end of WikiLeaks.
Which is, of course, why WikiLeaks is so incredibly dangerous to governments who want to act without oversight or scrutiny. And why Wikileaks is the destination of choice for whistleblowers with politically sensitive leaks go. Because WikiLeaks is in it to get the story out. Period.
Last Hurrah?
Even so, WikiLeaks has been down every time I’ve attempted to visit their site today.
I saw an unsubstantiated report that they were suffering a DDoS attack. And it isn’t hard to imagine where such an attack may have originated.
Of course, their servers may simply have gone down under the onslaught of un-official media outlets (like me).
Of course there have been tales of military personnel wishing for the demise of WikiLeaks. If they didn’t like WikiLeaks before this…
This story is out. It can’t be put back in the bottle. And that’s good.
If WikiLeaks is targeted, or taken down, what I worry about is the next story.
we are ALL in this together
Fortunately, I’m not alone in my concerns.
When Iceland’s Modern Media Initiative gets referendum approval, they are aiming to be good to go by 2012.
ICELAND TO BECOME INTERNATIONAL TRANSPARENCY HAVEN
“I am proud to advise the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative’s proposal to create a global safe haven for investigative journalism. I believe this proposal is a strong way of encouraging integrity and responsive government around the world, including in Iceland. In my work investigating corruption I have seen how important it is to have have robust mechanisms to get information out to the public. Iceland, with its fresh perspectives and courageous, independent people seems to be the perfect place to initiate such an effort towards global transparency and justice.”
—Eva Joly MEP – Icelandic Modern Media Initiative
That will be good for us all. Lets keep our fingers crossed that WikiLeaks can last that long.
Just In: WikiLeaks is Live!
Now you can peruse the Secret US Embassy Cables yourself.
Get ‘em while they’re hot.
Image Credits:
Robert Redford photo by Public Citizen published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Thanks @nomalab, @satipera and Glyn Moody and Jérémie Zimmermann
Second Reading for Bill C-32
Yesterday’s Globe and Mail assures us that,
Although all three opposition parties have criticized aspects of the bill, they are expected to pass it in principle so that it can move to the legislative committee that would discuss amendments. At this stage, however, amendments could only address existing language; new issues could not be added.”
–Globe and Mail: Ottawa pushes ahead with copyright bill amid opposition
The most incredible thing is that NOBODY supports Bill C-32. Passing legislation “in principle” that is strongly opposed in all quarters seems foolish indeed.
Bill C-32 will NOT “update” Canada’s copyright law, it will actually work to regress it, by legislating control of the recording, movie and publishing industries back into total domination by corporations.
The “creative community” is not best served by any copyright collectives and unions that advocate legislation which returns artists to the indentured servitude of the last century.
“1¢ per download → Artist 68¢ per download → Record Company
…
“Is it any wonder musicians are choosing to go Independent? “
The Internet makes it possible for artists to distribute their own creative works without having to sign away their souls (and copyright) to distributors (aka record companies) who continue to exploit them unfairly.
The copying levy actually works against the truly Independent recording artists (who comprised 30% of the Canadian Recording Industry at last count) who do not in fact share in the proceeds, but rather have to pay the levy themselves on the CDs they sell containing their own original material.
Last year the Canadian Government hosted a Canadian Copyright Consultation which resulted in an unprecedented amount of response from Canadians. The overwhelming majority of this direct citizen input emphatically opposed any kind of “Canadian DMCA.” Yet Bill C-32 completely ignored what Canadians want, instead this so-called “Copyright Modernization Act,” enshrines “digital locks” against the best interests of both citizens and creators.
In a democracy, laws should be made to reflect society’s mores, not dictate them.
Additional articles I’ve written about Bill C-32:
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Creative Freedom
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C-32 Endangers My Rights
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Copyright Modernization Act: Bill C-32
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Must Read
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Astroturf: promoting Bill C-32
-
digEcon backstory
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Professor Geist exposes Bill C-32
-
“Writers Groups” presume too much
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copyrightconsultation.ca
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Just under the wire: My Copycon Submission
-
Canada don’t need no stinkin’ DMCA (or DCMA)
Authoratative Resources:
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Howard Knopf and his Excess Copyright blog, most particularly:
Excess Copyright: Exit Strategy for Digital Locks Dilemma of Canada’s Bill C-32 -
Russell McOrmond and his Digital Copyright blog, most particularly:
Digital Copyright Canada: Bill C-32 Frequently Asked Questions -
Wayne Borean’s Through the Looking Glass on copyright
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Cory Doctorow’s Submission to the CopyCon
-
And of course Michael Geist
Twitter and the Minister of Industry
On Friday the Globe and Mail Newspaper broke a story about an independent network of rural Canadians citizens who have formed The Peace River Internet Society, essentially setting themselves up as their own ISP, providing themselves and their community local high speed service since none of the corporate ISPs are willing to. The profits are plowed back into the operation to pay for the really hard to reach customers.
It has applied to use a higher-quality piece of wireless spectrum, one that will allow it to offer faster connections that won’t be affected by interference from run-of-the-mill wireless devices like garage door openers, as its current service does.
The all Canadian group of all Canadian residents was turned down after jumping through a variety of Ministry of Industry hoops for not being Canadian.
I have two questions.
#1. Who makes up the rules?
How could these criteria possibly exist in the first place?
#2. How could a decision like this possibly be made?
Why couldn’t the people who dealt with this application see the absurdity of this decision?
Once the Globe broke the story, and people began “Tweeting” about it on Twitter, Tony Clement, the Minister of Industry himself Tweeted:
On one hand, that’s great. Citizen accessibility. The Minister of Industry has ordered a review. That’s dandy… except now there are another couple of questions.
#3. Is Tony Clement talking about a review of this particular case?
If so, the same bad system will still be in place the next time it happens. In that case, will the Globe run a similar story the next time it happens?
Or is he looking planning to review the whole shooting match?
#4. Why do Canadians have to get their plight featured in a major newspaper story and then disseminated on the internet before the government listens?
The man with power to define "Canadian"
Shouldn’t there be some accessible review process?
The Globe story makes an additional point of pointing a finger at WindMobile, the Egyptian financed cell phone service provider for not being Canadian enough.
Yet the Canadian Government Minister of Industry, the man with the power to define an ISP as Canadian is “tweeting” his intentions on the proprietary American Twitter service. Shouldn’t the Canadian Minister of Industry be supporting the Canadian Digital Economy?
Sadly, Tony Clement doesn’t even HAVE an account on the equivalent (but open source) Canadian Identi.ca
digEcon scandals
[I'm breaking some of my digEcon issues down into a three part series across my blogs. The first part is published in the wind where I usually look at copyright issues as a content consumer and a writer. This second part here in Oh! Canada and the final part in StopUBB. When all three are complete I'll add link arrows.]
One thing we all seem to love about the Internet is the opportunities we have to “Like” things. A simple mouse click bestows or withdraws our approval on comments or news stories on the Internet. It gives us the power to be heard.
Voting in the Digital Economy Consultation
The Canadian Government recognized our liking for “Liking” and gave us the means to do so on the Digital Economy Consultation website. The top three ideas appeared on the home page, right under Industry Minister Tony Clement’s video opening. Every time I logged in to the DigEcon site the same three ideas were on the front page. If you wanted to participate in the consultation you had to be registered and logged in to vote for an idea.
I’m not entirely sure how these ideas got there although I think they originated in the online discussion forums.
digEcon Voting Scandal?
One idea did really well, one which sought to Reinstate our Census Long Form aka Questionnaire 2B based on the understanding that in a digital world information is vitally important, especially for Government’s long term digital economy planning. A great many visitors to the digEcon site agreed with this idea and it quickly rose through the ranks.
Apparently the Government didn’t like this.
So the Government relocated it.
‘Reinstate our Census Long Form’ was pulled and tucked in an out of the way corner. Even after being pulled, at the end of the day it still held second place, having received +389 votes.
I learned about this from
- Russell McOrmond’s Digital Copyright Canada: Why no formal submission to Digital Economy consultation?
- Jennifer Ditchburn, Globe and Mail: Web links to census discussion vanish
- Data Libre #1: Conspiracy about the Census & the Consultation?
- Datalibre #2: Industry Canada says the census is not part of the Digital Economy
- eaves.ca: We want to consult, until you say something we don’t like
- eaves.ca : Minister Clement, privacy and (un)balanced views
But “officially” it didn’t count. As far as the Government was concerned, only the three ideas on the home page were the “winners”.
To Compete You Must Compute with +463 votes
A discourse on the importance of Supercomputers, it also appears to be an advertisement for Compute Canada
The idea to provide Open Access to Canada’s Public Sector Information and Data called for the creation of “a data.gc.ca for Canada’s public sector information” garnered +338 votes.
Finally in third position a proposal for improved access to publicly-funded data
with +197 votes.
The Census idea was removed July 9th, a day after Compete/Compute arrived onsite.
The Census idea was unfairly treated, but in all fairness you could still vote for it– if you could find it.
The Government claims the subject matter was outside the guideline, which clearly was not the case. Even if it had been true, it should have been taken down much sooner. It sat on the front page for a very long time to get that many votes.
The sad thing is that it has been well proven that this type of “voting” system can be easily “gamed”. The fact that it was done so heavy handedly is bad. I have to wonder about the appropriateness of Compute Canada’s vote getting campaign. Clearly the only concern is getting votes. I would hope that the Canadian government isn’t planning policy based on such flimsy data.
From the Compute Canada Website:
Compute Canada's website campaign
Does Canada really want our future decided on the basis of an advertising campaign?
As amazing and important as supercomputers may be, in the real world there are very few Canadian Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) that would actually need supercomputer access. Certainly there are a few specialized cases where it would be ideal, but I suspect that most SMEs don’t use the PCs and equipment that they have now to the fullest. Everything changes so quickly, just keeping up is both cost and labor intensive. It would be a lot of fun to play around with a Supercomputer, but as a writer all I actually need to write novels is my ancient laptop.
digEcon Canadian Content Scandal?
I didn’t have time to be active in the forums, but something about the Digital Economy Consultation website disturbed me a little at the time. The more I’ve thought about it the more irritated I’ve become. 
The site gave you the option to share your submission, and probably your forum ideas as well via email, Twitter or FaceBook.
And of course there were problems with the Twitter partnership, most likely because of Twitter’s extremely proprietary nature. Although it is the kind of thing that frequently happens with proprietary software and digital locks…
digitaleconomy.gc.ca
So often ordinary users aren’t aware that the technical difficulties they are experiencing are DRM side effects.
What bothered me is that the Government of Canada has chosen to include both Twitter and FaceBook here on an official Canadian Government website. This is effectively an advertisement and a government endorsement of these two American corporations.
I am well aware that Canadians use these services, as I myself do.
That’s not my problem. I am wondering where the Canadian Content was. Hmmmmm… isn’t that one of the things that our current Heritage Minister James Moore is in charge of watching over?
In particular, I’m wondering why the Canadian Government chose not to give equal time to Identi.ca?
My Identi.ca account
Why wasn’t Identi.ca included along with Twitter and FaceBook? Identi.ca is a Canadian Micro-blogging service. Like Twitter, only better in a lot of ways. I do almost ALL my “Tweeting” as “Dents” on Identi.ca
Like a lot of people, I have Identi.ca and Twitter connected for the best of both worlds.
My Twitter account
Identi.ca runs on open source Status.Net software. Which isn’t at all surprising since both are part of the same Canadian company from Montréal. People and corporations all over the world are creating their own Status.Net sites. A corporation can easily run Status.Net software on their own LAN. It can be contained as an internal system or interconnect with other systems (without FaceBook type privacy issues) because it isn’t proprietary software. I know individuals who run their own Status.net domain they then connect to Identi.ca
I am not saying we can’t use American services like Twitter or Facebook. I’m writing this blog post on a blog on the American WordPress site.
But Status.Net is a Canadian digital economy success story.
I would have thought it elementary that the prime directive of the Canadian Government’s Digital Economy strategy would be
promotion of the Canadian businesses who are out there building Canada’s Digital Economy.
At the very least I would expected our Government to give equal time to Canadian Digital Enterprises.
Back to digEcon backstory (Bill C-32)
Forward to stacking the digEcon deck
Image Credits
“Thumbs Up” by David Benbennick, Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Share-alike 3.0 License
Image Credit “Thumbs Down” by Joe Goldberg under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generc
p2p and Free Speech
The US District Court of California has issued a permanent injunction against the BitTorrent search engine isoHunt, forcing it to shut down in the United States…
…The MPAA issued a complaint against isoHunt and its sister site TorrentBox, claiming that owner Gary Fung operated file-sharing services and profited from copyright infringement.”
filters
The California Court ruling is that if ISOhunt doesn’t begin filtering and blocking all content matching a list of banned keywords it will have to stop operating in the US.
Canadian businessman Gary Fung has expressed his lack of faith in filters. I can certainly understand that.
email filters
My experience with computer filtering is with email and spam. When spam first became a problem, some ISPs instituted blacklist filtering.
Its a simple concept really, where the “blacklist” is the list of everything that is blocked.
My guess is the word blacklist comes from the McCarthy “witch hunt” from the 1950′s, when allegations of Communism resulted in Americans being put on a blacklist depriving them of the ability to work. Although communists were hunted out in other fields, Senator McCarthy most famously hunted them in the movie business.
You didn’t actually have to be a communist to be singled out, allegations were treated as fact, so almost anyone could be made to appear to be a communist, or a communist sympathizer. Sometimes just by knowing someone who is suspected of being a communist could result in your designation as a communist, the only evidence being guilt by association. At that time, although much of the movie Industry abhorred the undemocratic nature of the McCarthy hearings, most people quaked in fear of the government power being exercised against their freedoms. One of my favorite Hollywood movies was Spartacus, written by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo under a pseudonym. (Trumbo won two Oscars pseudonymously… an interesting example of how well trying to suppress freedoms actually works). The decision to release the epic film using his real name is widely credited with breaking Hollywood’s blacklist.
The way a blacklist filter works with email is that the filter decides that since spam is coming from some of the email accounts from an ISP it will no longer accept any of the email being sent from that ISP. I first found out about this several years ago when some of my friends mysteriously stopped receiving my email. Of course my initial assumption was that I had maybe typed the email address wrong or made some other mistake. But as it turned out, their ISP had simply blacklisted all email from my ISP. This was in the early days of high speed Internet, and at the time, my ISP was Rogers Cable. Naturally, since Rogers had a very large chunk of the market, it stands to reason it would also have a proportionately greater number of clients sending spam. But my email was blocked, as was every Rogers email, even though I had sent no spam ever. And my friends did not know that email people were sending them was not getting through. Because my ISP, Rogers, was so big, the other ISP had to back down. There is even a website where you can check to see if your domain name is being blacklisted.
Blacklisting of this kind is particularly insidious when it is invisible. They say you can’t prove a negative; and if the ISP is simply blocking your email before you get it, you aren’t even aware that what you get is being censored. The fact that the sender is not notified makes it appear that the email dropped into a black hole. Some people are willing to take the risk that important email they might want could be blocked in exchange for the protection against spam. These are the kind of trade offs that people make, often without really thinking it through, that result in the erosion of freedoms. To my way of thinking, the worst part of this problem is that most people are unaware it is happening at all. You may know that your ISP is saving you from spam, but chances are you don’t realize that this means that your ISP does this by censoring your incoming email, using a mechanical process that can just as easily stop real email.
This is a Net Neutrality issue as well. Once you give anyone the power to censor what you are allowed to see, that power can be corrupted. The entity deciding what you are allowed to know can choose to favor its own agenda. Freedom of speech is a result.
We expect email to be able to go everywhere. We assume that email we send actually gets where we send it.
If we are limited to only being able to send email to other people with the same ISP it would be a very different system than the one we’ve come to expect. I know that this kind of blacklist still goes on, since email I send to my Florida friend gets blocked. Not because I’m with Rogers (not!), but because my email is now being sent through my personal website account domain name. This makes me think her ISP blocks domain names it doesn’t know. This was really annoying because we’d been corresponding for years, as well it was a long time before we realized that the email wasn’t getting through since her ISP didn’t bounce blocked email. So instead of being able to communicate using my real email address, my traceable and trackable email address, I can only send her email through my somewhat anonymous disposable Yahoo account. Like hotmail (now live), anyone can get any number of these accounts. I got mine when my real email account was down once, and I use it if I’m asked to leave an email address in a situation that may result in excessive amounts of spam. I consider it my disposable email address because if it ever gets really terribly inundated with spam, I can just walk away.
Filters are not always bad. After all I have a very good spam filter on my real email account. But the reason it works well is that I have had to train it by identifying spam piece by piece. That’s a lot of work. Which is one reason people are willing to allow others to decide what is spam for them.
But even though it is well trained indeed it still makes mistakes. If my sister sends me an email that mentions what she paid for her new car, my spam filter will probably block it since most of the spam I get is associated with money. So the filter would quarantine it, which means until I go check I won’t realize that I’m missing an email. But I can still use my ability to reason to decide to unspam it. That’s the thing; first, a filter is only as good as the parameters of the search.
People who have blogs hosted on WordPress have an awesome spam comment filter called Akismet (which you can also download and use free if yours is a personal blog. [note: Akismet is free as in beer, since you don't have to pay any money for it, but it is not free as in speech, since it is not an open source product]) >This< blog has so far received 7,473 spam comments in nine months, compared with a total of 254 real comments. In all that time, I accidentally deleted one real comment (by clicking on the wrong bit) and Akismet has only blocked a couple, which actually turned out to be really good ones. If Akismet just trashed them without allowing me oversight, I’d have lost out on some excellent information.
p2p = peer to peer
Although I’ve been learning about the Internet at breakneck speeds, and I’ve learned about the importance of torrents for efficient online data transfer, I haven’t had time to learn how to actually download anything myself. I haven’t even had time to be able to volunteer as a Project Gutenberg proof reader either, since I believe my skills are better employed in blogging at present.
So in researching this article, today was the first time I’ve been to the isoHunt site. Looking around the site it hit me: isoHunt is a bitTorrent search engine.
With all that’s said about Internet “piracy” and the sites that make it possible, I never really connected the dots before. I’ve seen flea market stalls selling major motion pictures in slimline DVD cases with cheaply printed cover art which are clearly bootleg DVDs. So I always just assumed that the law was going after sites like isoHunt because they were committing piracy by storing bootleg movies on their server or something. Even though I learned about the mechanics of bitTorrent for a StopUBB article I just assumed that people would be putting the media they are sharing on the isoHunt servers. But that’s not how it works at all.
Any copyright infringement that might be happening is taking place on the peer computers, not isoHunt.
isoHunt is a Search Engine
like Google or altavista AOL yahoo or bing.
isoHunt is a specialty search engine. They allow you to find the right torrents you need to download a large file. I explain how BitTorrent works in the StopUBB blog, but looking at the isoHunt site is a real eye opener. One of the reasons that I think p2p is so important is that it makes good use of bandwidth for downloading large files (which will be really important for Canadians after Usage Based Billing is introduced).
If I didn’t already have an awesome Ubuntu limited edition picture CD I got at the Kwartzlab Ubuntu release party a few weeks back, I might need to download the new distribution of the Ubuntu operating system on the isoHunt site. As I understand it, torrents work faster the more people are working together. And right now, today, the isoHunt site will direct you to 2293 seeds of the new version. That means more than two thousand people, strangers to one another, are working together through this p2p network to share this with anyone who wants a copy.
downloading is legal
Like a great deal of material available for downloading online via p2p networks around the world, the Ubuntu operating system is legally offered for free. The corporate lobby groups that are working very hard to make it seem that p2p and torrents are synonymous with illegal downloading but that’s not true. Yet the other day the Globe and Mail article: Illegal downloading: How do you explain it to the kids? was most disturbing because although the article title refers to “illegal downloading”, the article itself assumes that all downloading is illegal.
Which just isn’t true. There’s plenty of perfectly legal material available to download out there. Besides Linux operating systems like Ubuntu (if you switch to this or one of the many other home versions of Linux like Fedora or Mint you’ll never have to pay Microsoft another cent), there is a steadily growing pool of music released by Independent artists like Allison Crowe have released under Creative Commons licenses, as Nina Paley has done with her incredible animated movie Sita Sings the Blues and Cory Doctorow routinely does with his books, like bestseller Little Brother. There is also a growing catalogue of public domain digital books available free from Project Gutenberg.
search terms
The Internet is very big. There is a great deal of content out there. Search engines help us find what we’re looking for on the Internet. Because there is so very very much out there. Each search engine works a little differently. But the crucial tool that every search engine needs are search terms.
When I learned how to make my web page I made sure to include “keywords” so that web pages would be able to find it. When posting blog articles on my WordPress blogs I make sure to fill in “categories” and “tags” which do the same thing.
Keywords are important. Without them, no one would be able to find anything on the Internet. It’s important to choose the right search words, and even then, if the words you put in the search bar are too vague it will give you too many possibilities.
filtering = censorship
If isoHunt is forced to use a pre-ordained filter search terms, like, say the titles of movies, their ability to do business will be compromised. Because their engine will will not be allowed to function properly.
On the website, isoHunt makes the point that
any requirement to keyword filter is a violation of freedom of speech and amounts to no less than censorship. There is much non-infringing uses of BitTorrent technology and we hope you will be able to continue to use isoHunt for these uses, free of constraints by large holes in the english dictionary because your search triggered a keyword in a title of one of the million movies that have been produced.”
— isoHunt website: isoHunt Lite test roll out and on rumored keyword filtering
Years ago I learned that you can’t copyright a title, so its possible that many different songs have the same title. Or books. Or movies. I remember digging through the cheap DVD bin at the Great Canadian Superstore and finding the title of a movie I’d been keeping my eye out for for years. This was a great Bill Forsyth film (about an ice cream truck war) called Comfort and Joy, Except that it wasn’t. It was another movie called Comfort and Joy.
An IMDB search for the title “The Three Musketeers” brings up 32 exact title matches. The oldest version of this film would be the black and white silent movie version of the The Three Musketeers made in France in 1903. This film is quite probably in the public domain. The underlying work, the excellent novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas is itself in the public domain. This is an excellent reason for film makers to make films of it. In the first place it’s a famous classic story, but even more important, they don’t have to purchase the rights to it.
But if Disney includes the movie title “The Three Musketeers” for the search terms blacklist, not only will it stop isoHunt from finding the 1993 Disney version but all of the other 31 versions as well.
This is a classic story. What if I decided to create my own feature film of Three Musketeers? As an independent film maker i wouldn’t have to buy the rights. Instead of the lions share of the film budget paying for film prints and physical transportation costs, my entire budget can go on the screen. I could probably pull it together quite easily as a low budget effort. It’s amazing what you can do with low or no budget. For the past hundred years or so the largest barrier to releasing a feature film has been distribution. But the current digital technology in combination with the Internet makes it possible to release a feature film to the world for almost nothing.
But if isoHunt has to include the title “The Three Musketeers” in their search term blacklist, my movie will NEVER be found by an isoHunt search. In this scenario, this blacklist will hinder my ability to distribute my movie. As the Electronic Freedom Foundation outlines in their excellent article Unintended Consequences: Twelve Years under the DMCA this California court ruling would directly hinder my legitimate competition. Although “The Three Musketeers” is part of the public domain internationally, with this kind of suppression, one powerful film company has the power to suppress competition.
The only thing that could possibly be worse would be for the blacklist to block the words of the title individually. This would block isoHunt’s ability to search out anything at all about Musketeers, or any other digital content with either “Three” or “The” in the title.
the real question
Why is isoHunt is being punished for copyright infringement? As a search engine they aren’t actually providing content that infringes copyright, they are only directing people to where the content they are searching for can be found.
I’m not an IP lawyer, but that sounds awfully extreme to me. Particularly since you can use any search engine to find the things that isoHunt is not going to be allowed to search for. It sounds rather like a serious breach of the free market to me. They won’t likely be as efficient, but all the other search engines will be able to find the exact same content that isoHunt is being prevented from finding. The only way a legal action like this could possibly be fair in a free market way would be if all the search engines had to block the same list of search terms.
Hey wait… I guess that’s what A.C.T.A. is for. Hmmm. I guess it will level the media playing field by eliminating all competition.
Which is well and truly scary from a freedom of speech point of view.
Although I’m not a lawyer, looking at the actual isoHunt Permanent Injunction, it seems that isoHunt has not been charged with copyright infringement but with “intent to induce infringement”. Because isoHunt is not actually infringing anyone’s copyright. At all. Period. If they were, they would be toast.
But United States DMCA law will allow them to toast isoHunt anyway, for the crime of telling the people who ask where they might find copyright infringing content. isoHunt is not making anyone infringe copyright.
Does this then mean that a newspaper that reports a particular city street is rife with drug dealers or prostitutes is then considered responsible for drug dealing or prostitution because telling people where it is “induces” drug dealing or prostitution? Under a law like the DMCA that seems frighteningly possible.
Especially if the newspaper’s editorial policy advocated the legalization of marijuana, say. There is a Canadian political party advocating the legalization of marijuana. Would that be illegal too?
will this court ruling stop any copyright infringement?
isoHunt does not infringe copyright, it is a search engine, like Google or altavista AOL yahoo or bing. If I had a search engine website, this ruling would make me very nervous.
If the goal is to prevent people from finding copyright infringing software it won’t work. It may stop isoHunt from fulfilling their search function, but it won’t stop anyone from making the same search on Google or altavista AOL yahoo or bing.
Rendering the use of words illegal is a suppression of free speech. The Permanent Injunction is designed to stop isoHunt’s use of words as search terms. So as well as suppressing free speech, this ruling impedes market competition.
If the intention is actually to stop copyright infringement since isoHunt apparently leads users directly to copyright infringing content, why aren’t the forces of law and order following these same links and actually stopping the infringement.
But then, that isn’t really the point. The point of all of these laws is not really to stop the type of copyright infringement they call “piracy”, because personal use copying, including sharing a movies via a p2p network appears to be one of the factors driving the movie industry’s increased revenues. They wouldn’t want to stop that. No. The point is to stop the growing competition from Independent media creators, by stopping the possibility of their distribution.
The United States spent much of the last century trumpeting the importance of free speech to the world. Now that much of the rest of the world has bought into the idea, what is truly sad thing is that the United States government is pandering to special interest groups making laws to suppress free speech.
The idea of Net Neutrality is that the Internet is neutral. The Internet should not be subject to the control of governments or corporations. If the Net is NOT neutral, rights like free speech are at risk. Laws like the DMCA stack the deck against Net Neutrality.
The problem is that the Pandora’s box is open, and free speech is just too big an idea to fit back inside.
Photo Credits:
“Gavel” photo by Jonathunder on Wikipedia, but I found the image uploaded on Flickr by Thomas Roche…
If I wasn’t so busy with all this political stuff I’d love to take the time to browse through the rest of his photographs… I cut my teeth on Doc Savage! … and having just read through Roche’s “Double Indemnity” piece, one of these days I’ll be back to read the rest of his blog…
They’re Baaaack… Canada and the Constitution
Prime Minister Stephen Harper
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s premature prorogation is over. What did it accomplish? Lots of stress free face time at the Olympics? The public has forgotten all about prorogation, government waste, complicity in war crimes… Have we? I know I haven’t.
Amir Attaran, a Law Professor at the University of Ottawa emphatically states “The first thing is that the government should hand over the documents.”
University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran. Photo: Tony Fouhse
Attaran says that “National Security’ is not a legally allowable reason to deny Parliament to access the requested documents.
Parliament is guaranteed access to uncensored documents under the Canadian Constitution.
The government’s ploy to call in a retired judge to make a ruling is a ploy, because being retired he has no authority. In fact, since the Government is paying the judge, he is an employee.
This has ceased to being about Afghan Detainees and whether they are tortured. What is at stake here is extremely high constitutional principle, about whether we are a democracy in which Parliament is supreme, or whether we are inching towards something that is slightly dangerously tyrannical. In which a sitting government can say “parliament, Tough Luck, your priviledges, your constitutional powers don’t matter.”
– Attaran http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDJ1TCXyRY8&feature=youtube_gdata
The power to call for persons, papers and records is absolute
It is very clear. The government must comply with the law.
The Rights to Institute Inquiries, to Require the Attendance of Witnesses and to Order the Production of Documents
The power to send for persons, papers and records has been delegated by the House of Commons to its committees in the Standing Orders. It is well established that Parliament has the right to order any and all documents to be laid before it which it believes are necessary for its information. … The power to call for persons, papers and records is absolute, but it is seldom exercised without consideration of the public interest. The House of Commons recognizes that it should not require the production of documents in all cases; considerations of public policy, including national security, foreign relations, and so forth, enter into the decision as to when it is appropriate to order the production of such documents.[327]
–House of Commons Procedure and Practice – Second Edition, 2009
[note: the emphasis is mine.]
The Globe and Mail reports: Canadian spies interrogated Afghan prisoners, insiders reveal
Some people think that this is necessary because Canada is at war. Canadian lives are being saved. Does Canada have a reason to be at war besides the fact that President Bush told us to go to war? None that I’ve ever heard.
Canada is supposed to be a sovereign nation, and we should not BE at war without the clear backing of the populace.
Canadian soldiers are dying why?
Because they were stupid enough to join our military?
Not so long ago the Canadian military was respected around the world for peacekeeping. Not any more. Now, because of Canadian participation in an unjust war Canadian complicity in torture may be at issue. Is this how you want Canada to behave? I don’t.
Terrible and unconscionable as that is, what is worse is the fact that our government is placing itself above the law in not making the necessary documents available to parliament.
