MSNBC just sent out their news alert on this opinion under this headline: “Supreme Court blocks Web child porn law from taking effect.” As has been the case from day one of this matter, COPA gets labeled inaccurately as a “child porn law,” when in fact it has essentially nothing to do with child pornography, something that is already seriously outlawed. COPA is about censoring the Internet — ostensibly it aims to protect children from porn, but in reality its provisions are so broad and riddled with holes that, while it could be used to harass legitimate Web sites fostering grownup debate on controversial issues (like Salon), it would be entirely useless in actually keeping real porn away from kids.
Supremes’ COPA decision
I don’t have details yet, but Ann Beeson of the ACLU, who has represented Salon and many other plaintiffs in the long-running litigation over the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), just sent out the following: “We just learned that the Supreme Court struck down COPA. Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority in a 6-3 opinion in our favor.” I wrote about the Supreme Court arguments in March here. More info when I get a copy of the opinion.
Andrew Leonard on Social Software
Even if you’ve been following the social-software boom for the last couple of years, you will probably find some eye-opening insights in “You Are Who You Know,” Andrew Leonard’s great two-part feature on the subject in Salon this week (part one, part two). If Friendster and its spawn remain a mystery to you, the series will be even more essential to you. When Andrew took up the editor’s hat here, Salon (largely) lost a great reporter and writer. Good to have him back in such fine form.
More info on Patriot Act challenge
The full text of the amicus brief by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Salon and other organizations — filed as part of the ACLU’s challenge to the USA Patriot Act — is now available. (See my original posting on this for more.)
The ACLU also has a lot more information online about the proceeding. Here’s the ACLU’s news release.
PATRIOT Act: The last refuge of scoundrels
One of the more remarkable news stories to break in the past month, a time of many remarkable stories, told of the strange saga of the ACLU’s challenge to the PATRIOT act. It turned out that, under a provision of the PATRIOT Act itself, the ACLU had been barred even from telling anyone about its challenge to the PATRIOT Act, and had to fight the Bush administration just to be able to announce its suit.
This bit of Kafkaesque logic may seem positively un-American. But it makes sense within the increasingly divorced-from-reality, driven-by-images, shoot-the-messenger world of the Bush administration. Here, a secretary of defense get really steamed not about the fact of torture in a U.S.-run prison (hey, shit happens!) but about losing control of the flow of images about that torture. Here, in the wake of the worst geopolitical strategic mistakes committed by a U.S. leader since Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam escalation, a president decides that his first priority must be — a P.R. offensive!
(Sorry for the digression: it’s hard to stay on track when the news provides so many sidings into bitter absurdity.)
Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus curiae brief in the ACLU’s case, and Salon — on behalf, in particular, of The WELL, which is a Salon subsidiary — is proud to be among the signers. They also include the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the U.S. Internet Industry Association, and the Online Policy Group.
What’s at issue here, chiefly, is a provision of the PATRIOT Act that (to quote from the EFF brief) “authorizes the FBI to compel the production of subscriber and communications records in the possession of a broad range of Internet-related communications service providers, potentially covering billions of records from tens of thousands of entities. These demands, known as National Security Letters (NSLs), are issued without judicial oversight of any kind, yet allow the FBI to obrain a vast amount of constitutionally protected information.” The brief — a “friend of the court” filing in which parties who feel they have interests at stake in a proceeding offer legal arguments that complement those of the plaintiffs — argues that the Act is not only constitutionally overbroad but also “not cabined by any intelligible standard”: in other words, there’s no way to make sense of it in terms of the realities of the Internet today.
The WELL has a long history of helping define the shape of Internet users’ rights and responsibilities. As the Bush administration continues to push beyond the edges of reasonable legal means in its conduct of the “war on terror,” we’ll keep doing what we can to fight back and protect the privacy of our users, customers and community members.
(I will post a link to the brief as soon as it’s online.)
War Rooming
If you haven’t been reading Salon’s War Room blog, here’s an example of what you’ve been missing. Geraldine Sealey notes Tom DeLay’s complaint that Nancy Pelosi, in criticizing President Bush, was endangering American lives, and offers a catalog of recent harsh criticisms of Bush from the likes of Andrew Sullivan, Mark Helprin, Bill Kristol, George Will and a handful of Republican Senators. All “dangerous” statements, according to DeLay.
Beyond the Green Zone
Jeff Jarvis echoes Howard Kurtz’s observation that most U.S. reporters in Iraq aren’t daring to venture outside the Green Zone. Given the chaos there and the danger of being taken hostage or worse, it’s hard to second-guess the decisions these journalists are making. But there’s no question we won’t get the full picture from Iraq this way.
Jarvis suggests we read Iraqi bloggers (and provides a set of links to them). That’s certainly good advice.
But it’s also worth pointing out that Salon’s coverage from Iraq was not “embedded” during the invasion and is not embedded in the Green Zone today. Our correspondent Phillip Robertson has been courageously, and independently, traveling the country, offering eyewitness accounts from the siege of Najaf and Kufa, escaping a thankfully brief detainment by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Al-Mehdi Army, and providing another angle on the Abu Ghraib abuses.
Phillip is a fine writer and a great observer. If you want to read reporting that’s not hunkered down behind the barricades, here it is.
“Metadata for the warfighter”
Yes, that was the actual title of a session at the Defense Department conference on software development I attended last month in Utah. It’s taken me some time, but here’s a column outlining some of what I found there — including how “XML and Web services are crucial for protecting America.”
Fiona Morgan’s articles
Fiona Morgan used to work here at Salon on our news team; now she’s doing good work at the Durham Independent: Check out this piece on the conservative smear campaign against the group September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, or Fiona’s earlier opus on the copyright wars.
Counterterrorist
I don’t make a habit of linking heavily to Salon pieces in my blog, since I figure most of you are also Salon regulars — but I do want to make sure you have a look at Joe Conason’s interview with Richard Clarke, our cover story for today. Clarke, the former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, is in the eye of the storm right now for his revelations about the Bush administration’s behavior in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Here’s a taste of the interview.
Clarke on the Bush administration’s mob ethos:
“The Bush White House assumes that everyone who works for them is part of a personal loyalty network, rather than part of the government. And that their first loyalty is to Bush rather than to the people. When you cross that line or violate that trust, they get very upset.”
Clarke’s response to Dick Cheney’s charge that the Clinton administration had “no great success in dealing with terrorists”:
“It’s possible that the vice president has spent so little time studying the terrorist phenomenon that he doesn’t know about the successes in the 1990s. There were many. The Clinton administration stopped Iraqi terrorism against the United States, through military intervention. It stopped Iranian terrorism against the United States, through covert action. It stopped the al-Qaida attempt to have a dominant influence in Bosnia. It stopped the terrorist attacks at the millennium. It stopped many other terrorist attacks, including on the U.S. embassy in Albania. And it began a lethal covert action program against al-Qaida; it also launched military strikes against al-Qaida. Maybe the vice president was so busy running Halliburton at the time that he didn’t notice.”
Read the rest. Clarke has good, strong answers to every one of the personal attacks the Bush team has thrown his way.