Berkman Center Provides Info on How To Blog Anonymously

While I don't encourage anonymity in digital writing because I'm strongly in favor of accountability, in some places you cannot say what you think about political events because if you do you could go to jail or even worse. So, for those who feel the need to blog anonymously, the Berkman Center has some advice.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/idblog/2009/03/25/how-to-blog-anonymously/

Student 4th Amendment Search Case to be Heard by the Supreme Court April 21

Safford Unified School District v. Redding, Docket No. 08-479

Safford Unified School District v. Redding, Docket No. 08-479

Briefs can be read here:

http://www.abanet.org/publiced/preview/briefs/april09.shtml#071428

Citizen Media Law Project and Cyberlaw Clinic Lead Amicus Effort Promoting Rights of Anonymous Online Speakers in Illinois

"Cambridge, MA - March 25, 2009 - In a case involving important First Amendment rights, the Citizen Media Law Project ("CMLP") joined a number of media and advocacy organizations, including Gannett Co., Inc., Hearst Corporation, Illinois Press Association, Online News Association, Public Citizen, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Tribune Company, in asking an Illinois appellate court to protect the rights of anonymous speakers online by imposing procedural safeguards before requiring that their identities be disclosed."

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/newsroom/CMLP_Maxon-v-Ottawa

YouTube Says China Blocks Site

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123791575627627223.html

From the Wall Street Journal:

According to writers Jessica Vascellaro and Geoffrey Fowler, "Access to GoogleInc.'s YouTube service was blocked by Chinese authorities, as the video-sharing site continues to wrestle with governments offended by some of its content."

Recovery Act - Tribal Crime Data Collection, Analysis and Estimation Project

From grants.gov - and I can't help reading this rhetorically. Considering the various data mining and data recovery RFPs I've seen recently, I don't know if this particular one is a good thing or a bad thing:

"On February 17, 2009, President Obama signed into law the landmark American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the “Recovery Act”). As one of its many elements, the Recovery Act provides the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) with funding for grants to assist state, local, and tribal law enforcement (including support for hiring), to combat violence against women, to fight internet crimes against children, to improve the functioning of the criminal justice system, to assist victims of crime, and to support youth mentoring. DOJ is committed to working with our national, state, local, and tribal partnerships to ensure this funding invests in the American workforce."

http://www07.grants.gov/search/search.do?&mode=VIEW&flag2006=false&oppId=46159

Internet filter list of porn exposed

In Austrailia: "THE Rudd Government's plans for a nationwide internet filter are in jeopardy after its top-secret blacklist of banned web pages was leaked."

The comments attached to this article are spectacular.

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,25214571-15306,00.html

Iran blogger dies in Evin prison

"Reports from Iran say Omid Mirsayafi, a blogger who had been jailed for insulting the country's ruling clerics, has died in Tehran's main prison."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7953738.stm

U.K. to monitor, store all social-network traffic?

"The U.K. government is considering the mass surveillance and retention of all user communications on social-networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10199107-83.html

China’s complicated internet culture

http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/03/03/chinas-complicated-internet-culture/

Berkman Center for Internet & Society Launches Herdict

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NggzBHSXdCo

Quoting from an email received from The Berkman Center:
Today, a special announcement from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. We are pleased to announce the official launch of Herdict Web --

http://www.herdict.org

-- a tool that employs the distributed power of the Internet community to provide insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility.

We invite everyone to explore http://www.herdict.org and participate by reporting websites that they cannot access, testing sites that others have reported, or downloading the browser add-on for reporting sites on the fly.

Herdict is a portmanteau of ‘herd’ and ‘verdict.’ Using Herdict Web, anyone anywhere can report websites as accessible or inaccessible. Herdict Web aggregates reports in real time, permitting participants to see if inaccessibility is a shared problem, giving them a better sense of potential reasons for why a site is inaccessible. Trends can be viewed over time, by site and by country.

The project’s mascot -- a sheep -- demonstrates “the verdict of the herd” in a short video at http://www.herdict.org (or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NggzBHSXdCo).

The brainchild of Professor Jonathan Zittrain (The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It ), Herdict Web builds out from the OpenNet Initiative's research on global Internet filtering. The OpenNet Initiative tests Internet filtering through an academic methodology. Herdict Web takes a different approach, crowdsourcing reports to learn about and display a real-time picture of user experiences around the globe. For more information about the OpenNet Initiative and the book Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, visit http://opennet.net.

Bloggers can be nailed for views

NEW DELHI: A 19-year-old blogger's case could forever change the ground rules of blogging. Bloggers may no longer express their uninhibited views on everything under the sun, for the Supreme Court said they may face libel and even prosecution for the blog content.

For the full story, see The Time of India: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Bloggers-can-be-nailed-for-views/articleshow/4178823.cms

Iranian Bloggers Jailed

Not only those in Iran, but those in other countries (including the US, I believe), have been jailed for blogging.

Global Voices Online has published a story on this issue. A researcher studying jailed bloggers across the globe estimates between 20 and 30 Iranians have been jailed because of their blogging activities.

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/12/18/iran-a-long-and-painful-story-of-jailed-bloggers/

Federal Appeals Court Examines Two MySpace Student Speech Cases

http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2008/federal-appeals-court-examines-two-myspace-student-speech-cases

Followed by the Citizen Media Law Project

Implementation of the Small Grants Program for Afghan Women's Civil Society Organizations

This is a grant that addresses an issue I discussed in my dissertation. The issue is whether or not a law has agency when inserted in a culture that has pre-existing practices already accomplishing the same ends that the law supposes to constitute -- does law make people do things?, is the real question.

The rest of this blog post is a quote from the grant:
http://www07.grants.gov/search/search.do?&mode=VIEW&flag2006=false&oppId=43401

Now living under a Constitution that codifies equal rights for women, Afghan women have an official framework to support their personal and professional development. With the exception of constitutionally mandated quotas for women’s representation in Parliament, however, all indicators of women’s status reveal that enforcement of constitutional rights lags far behind enactment. A combination of poverty and deprivation, ill health, illiteracy, discriminatory customary laws, harmful traditional practices, and physical and emotional abuse conspire to keep women at the bottom of society. To ensure they receive sufficient attention, women’s civil society organizations (CSOs) are needed to advocate on behalf of women and help mobilize resources, deliver essential services, and implement useful development activities. However, women’s CSOs cannot effectively undertake these tasks until they acquire a wide range of new skills—from assessing needs, designing responsive interventions, and implementing programs to managing operations, finances and people, building alliances and networks, planning strategically, and monitoring and evaluating performance—in addition to building capacity in the technical sectors in which they wish to work. The three-year $26.7 million “Afghan Women’s Empowerment through a Sub-grant Umbrella Mechanism” (AWE-SUM) program is designed to strengthen the capacity of women-led/focused CSOs to contribute to the social, economic, and political development of Afghan women through the provision of financial and technical assistance to support women-specific activities in the following areas: 1. Implementing activities that improve the status, safety and well being, human and legal rights, and livelihoods of Afghan women and girls; 2. Delivering services that directly address the social, political, and economic needs of Afghan women and girls; 3. Undertaking efforts to increase the participation of Afghan women in development as implementers, change agents and beneficiaries; and 4. Creating or strengthening mechanisms and channels by which Afghan women can access information, network, and take advantage of personal and professional development opportunities. Applicants will propose approaches to implementing the following Activity Components and indicate how those approaches will help accomplish the Activity Objectives: 1. Awarding sub-grants for technical and organizational capacity building of eligible organizations, including equipment, and for the activities of such organizations; 2. Assessing organizational and technical capacity needs of eligible organizations and developing responsive interventions; 3. Overseeing sub-grant implementation to ensure that in addition to successful implementation of activities, CSO institutional strengthening and technical capacity building within recipient organizations is achieved; and 4. To support the above components, developing and implementing a comprehensive communications plan and strategy to generate widespread interest in the sub-grant program among women’s CSOs and to develop and manage an information campaign about the program to inform other stakeholders. The following link will take prospective applicants who are interested in this high visibility program to the full solicitation. Click on #1, “Download Application Instructions.” http://apply07.grants.gov/apply/UpdateOffer?id=88

Freedom of the (Blog-) Press

In a recent post on American University’s Center for Social Justice Website, Micael Bogar poses these questions in the context of examining freedom of the press in areas where there is resistance:

“Now more than ever, opportunities for dialogue and public participation are springing up through media outlets. With more powerful technologies come stronger connections. As Internet becomes more affordable and available, will digital media play a peacemaking or inflammatory role across lines that are seldom crossed? What will be the turning point?”

He looks at five media projects that have tried to answer these questions. Those projects are 1) the Institute for Reporter’s Freedom and Safety, 2) the Caucasus Center of Peacemaking Initiatives, 3) Internews, 4) the South Caucasus blogosphere and lastly everyone’s favorite 4) Facebook.

On the topic of blogs, Bogar writes:

“Bloggers in the South Caucasus are multiplying overnight. As Internet access becomes more common and the first post-Soviet generation grow older, blogs in this region flourish. Bloggers such as Onnik Krikorian from Armenia, Anna Dolidze from Georgia and Emin Huseynzade from Azerbaijan all blog in English, and provide inspiration to many South Caucasian citizens searching for alternative sources of media.

Evgeny Morozov, a journalist from the former Soviet Union, wrote an article titled Citizen War Reporter: The Caucasus Test back in August that addressed issues citizen journalists within this region face.

It would be sublimely naive—and condescending —to expect South Ossetians or Georgians to respond to intense shellfire by taking a crash-course in podcasting, even if they did have electricity and an internet connection. Tskhinvali and Gori were never going to be hubs of user-generated content from a war-zone.

However, once again, the question must be asked: How is blogging public media? Yes, citizens can log on and blog on to their hearts content, but what will that matter if nothing comes of it? With blogging becoming such a popular tool for self-expression, it will be interesting to see if the ripe moment emerges when Georgians, Azerbaijanis and Armenians really do have a reason to unite together. It is my guess the blogosphere will be the place in which it happens.”

My reaction at the present moment is hopeful that the blogosphere is a place where people from different countries will “unite together.” On the other hand, considering the increasing amount of international treaties, organizations, and agreements that try to regulate the global flow of information, including intellectual property, it sometimes seems an impossibility that any kind of harmonious union will occur. Yet again, I have read some work by Rosemary Coombe http://www.yorku.ca/rcoombe/ and Tatiana Flessas http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/law/staff/tatiana-flessas.htm asserting that at least in part due to digital technologies, indigenous peoples worldwide have been able to unite towards some common goals, of for example, reclaiming cultural artifacts like funery objects.

Bogar’s full story, “Where Hostile Governments Meet Public Media,” is located here: http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/blogs/future_of_public_media/where_hostile_governments_meet_public_media/

You Know Those Releases Parents Sign for Their Kids? Well They are Probably not Enforceable

This is something mom never told you. I remember over 20 years ago, in law school, in another state (Colorado), learning how those releases of liability you sometimes sign are not enforceable for various reasons.

The Michigan Court of Appeals just held, in an opinion that will be published (as in formally published in a court reporter book -- opinions which aren't published are actually "published" but only informally. Unpublished opinions are not supposed to be precedential however they are used all the time to make arguments), that a release parents signed on behalf of their child was not necessarily binding. It involved a kid jumping off a slide and breaking his leg, after properly using the slide 5 times. This was for a child's 5th birthday party. The facility stated it would have supervision and that the facilities were safe. Yet they had parents sign a release. The trial court had held against the parent and dismissed the case. But the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed and remanded back to the trial court.

OK, now I have to find a way to connect this to the theme of my blog. It's this. Who gets to author the child? Who can bind the child? In this case, the Michigan Court said basically that a parent has no authority simply by virtue of the parental relation to waive the child's claims. This is really interesting and I always have kept it in the back of my mind when I sign all those many, many releases I sign for school and sporting events. The releases might not be enforceable. The case also raises issues of violating the Michigan Consumer Protection Act because the party provider misrepresented what it was selling, possibly. The Michigan Consumer Protection Act is really useful. I almost think I should teach it in FYW because I know my students tell tales all the time of how they were ripped off and I'm always seeing violations of the MCPA.

One of my students wasn't hired for a day care job because she wore hearing aids. Clearly this was a violation of the Elliot Larsen Civil Rights Act.
http://www.michigan.gov/documents/act_453_elliott_larsen_8772_7.pdf

My point is, as stated in my dissertation, the law has questionable agency. Some of the consumer protection laws, and laws that protect civil rights, I really think the average citizen would benefit from being pretty familiar with them. And if you're someone who drafts releases or contracts, well, there's some ethical as well as legal issues to think about.

The liability case is here: http://www.michbar.org/opinions/appeals/2008/081208/40179.pdf