Tag Archives: free speech
Anonymous hackers’ Twitter account suspended, reinstated
NBC News
Dec. 19, 2012
By Suzanne Choney
For the second time in a month, one of the Twitter accounts used by the hacking group known as Anonymous was suspended. But this time the account, @YourAnonNews, with more than three-quarter of a million followers, was reinstated.
“You can’t suspend an idea,” @YourAnonNews tweeted Wednesday.
Indeed, you can’t, but the Twitter account was suspended briefly Wednesday; Twitter told NBC News it doesn’t comment on “individual accounts for privacy and security reasons.” The @YourAnonNews account is one of the hacking collective’s most followed on the short messaging blog.
Shock Video: Cop Protects First Amendment
Infowars
Nov. 27, 2012
By Paul Joseph Watson
A shocking video has emerged of a police officer who abides by the oath he swore to uphold the constitution by defending the free speech rights of activists who were targeted by airport officials during the opt out and film campaign.
The clip shows activists Ashley Jessica and Jason Bermas handing out flyers warning travelers about the dangers of x-ray body scanners at Albany International Airport in New York.
Almost as soon as the activists begin to hand out the flyers, they are confronted by an aggressive airport official later named as Douglas I. Myers, the airport’s Director of Public Affairs.
Turkey has jailed more journalists than Iran, Eritrea or China: watchdog
Reuters
Oct. 22, 2012
By Daren Butler
ISTANBUL — Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government has waged one of the world’s biggest crackdowns on press freedom in recent years, jailing more journalists than Iran, China or Eritrea, a leading media watchdog said on Monday.
The damning report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) added to a chorus of criticism from the European Union and rights groups of the EU-candidate country’s mass detention of reporters, most of whom are kept in detention while their cases are dealt with.
Around two-thirds were journalists writing about the largely Kurdish southeast, where the government is fighting a separatist rebellion.
The U.S.-based watchdog criticised Erdogan’s public disparagement of journalists, the use of pressure tactics to encourage self-censorship, and the launching of thousands of criminal cases against reporters on charges such as “denigrating Turkishness”.
Pussy Riot band members sent to remote prison camps
Guardian
Oct. 22, 2012
By Miriam Elder
Two members of the anti-Kremlin punk band Pussy Riot have been sent to remote prison camps to serve their sentences, the group has said.
Maria Alyokhina, 24, will serve the rest of her two-year term at a women’s prison camp in Perm, a Siberian region notorious for hosting some of the Soviet Union’s harshest camps. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, has been sent to Mordovia, a region that also hosts a high number of prisons.
“These are the harshest camps of all the possible choices,” the band said via its Twitter account on Monday.
Anonymous vows revenge after WikiLeaks launches ‘filthy’ paywall
Raw Story
Oct. 12, 2012
By Stephen C. Webster
Nameless hackers with the online protest movement “Anonymous” have turned on longtime ally WikiLeaks for deploying a paywall on its website that blocks access to the site’s trove of formerly secret files unless users donate or tell their friends about WikiLeaks via social media.
Calling the tactic “filthy and rotten,” a post to the “AnonPaste” website Thursday night said that WikiLeaks has gone too far for the hacker community to abide, so they’re taking matters into their own hands and plotting revenge.
“To this day, not ONE single WikiLeaks staff are charged or incarcerated,” the Anonymous post explains. “However, Anonymous has 14 indicted (facing 15 years) for online protests defending WikiLeaks – and one (Jeremy Hammond) in prison and facing 20 years for allegedly supplying the Stratfor GI Files. Not to mention the heroic Bradley Manning who now rots in Ft. Leavenworth Prison facing life.”
WikiLeaks and Free Speech
New York Times
Aug. 20, 2012
By MICHAEL MOORE and OLIVER STONE
WE have spent our careers as filmmakers making the case that the news media in the United States often fail to inform Americans about the uglier actions of our own government. We therefore have been deeply grateful for the accomplishments of WikiLeaks, and applaud Ecuador’s decision to grant diplomatic asylum to its founder, Julian Assange, who is now living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.
Ecuador has acted in accordance with important principles of international human rights. Indeed, nothing could demonstrate the appropriateness of Ecuador’s action more than the British government’s threat to violate a sacrosanct principle of diplomatic relations and invade the embassy to arrest Mr. Assange.
Since WikiLeaks’ founding, it has revealed the “Collateral Murder” footage that shows the seemingly indiscriminate killing of Baghdad civilians by a United States Apache attack helicopter; further fine-grained detail about the true face of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; United States collusion with Yemen’s dictatorship to conceal our responsibility for bombing strikes there; the Obama administration’s pressure on other nations not to prosecute Bush-era officials for torture; and much more.
Russian punk band’s plight galvanizes artists, rights groups, leaders
Los Angeles Times
Aug. 17, 2012
By Carol J. Williams
The prison sentencing Friday of members of the band Pussy Riot by a Russian court has united a diverse list of pop stars, human rights advocates and political leaders from around the world who view the imprisonment of the band as a shocking example of Kremlin repression.
Paul McCartney, Madonna, Sting, Bjork and up-and-coming punksters were joined by the U.S. government, the European Union, Human Rights Watch and a civil society foundation headed by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov in expressing concern for the fate of freedom of speech in Russia.
The two-year prison sentences handed down by a Russian court after a widely denounced trial galvanized the disparate voices and appeals for clemency for the band members, whose February “punk prayer” for Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s downfall was met with what is viewed as a concerted effort to stifle dissent in post-Soviet Russia.
